Monthly Archives: March 2020

Tough Question In A Corrupt Nation

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This article from Common Dreams asks Elizabeth Warren a tough question: Who To Endorse?

First off; its a shame shame she didn’t do better, but then decency and altruism and a clean soul doesn’t always win –usually quite the opposite?

More to my point Merica is becoming more corrupt by the day; big money has corrupted/rigged the political system six way from Sunday. One of those ways has been to dumb down the electorate and use scary words like socialism and unionists; propaganda the wealthy have bombarded simple minded Mericans for ages. In the 60’s I grew up hating those dirty, godless commies before I had the slightest clue of what a commie was!

If it were possible to inform The GOP’s MAGA base, regarding the error of their ways and vote in Bernie Sanders it would be a no-brainer for Liz but “The Base” is unlikely to to be swayed.

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people
are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence”

Charles Bukowsk

The base was/is easy pickings for those who pull the strings. and I sometimes wonder what they would do if they couldn’t manipulate “Their Base”? Hmm fodder for those silly, dirty,commie conspirator theorists?

Anyway, Liz cannot see the future but she isn’t stupid; she’ll do what she thinks is right

From Common Dreams:

commondreams.org

A Profound and Historic Question for Elizabeth Warren: Which Side Are You On?

Common Dreams
3-4 minutes

The night before Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren spoke to several thousand people in a quadrangle at East Los Angeles College. Much of her talk recounted the heroic actions of oppressed Latina workers who led the Justice for Janitors organization. Standing in the crowd, I was impressed with Warren’s eloquence as she praised solidarity and labor unions as essential for improving the lives of working people.

Now, days later, with corporate Democrat Joe Biden enjoying sudden momentum and mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg joining forces with him, an urgent question hovers over Warren. It’s a time-honored union inquiry: “Which side are you on?”

How Warren answers that question might determine the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the process, she will profoundly etch into history the reality of her political character.

“The urgency of Warren’s decision can hardly be overstated.”

Facing the fact that her campaign reached a dead end, Warren basically has two choices: While Bernie Sanders and Biden go toe to toe, she can maintain neutrality and avoid the ire of the Democratic Party’s corporate establishment. Or she can form a united front with Sanders, taking a principled stand on behalf of progressive ideals.

For much of the past year, in many hundreds of speeches and interviews, Warren has denounced the huge leverage of big money in politics. And she has challenged some key aspects of corporate power. But now we’re going to find out more about how deep such commitments go for her.

“After Warren’s bleak performance in the Super Tuesday primaries, her associates, as well as those of Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden, say she is now looking for the best way to step aside,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday—and “there is no certainty she will endorse Sanders or anyone else.”

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A laudable path now awaits Warren. After winning just a few dozen delegates, she should join forces with Sanders—who has won more than 500 delegates and is the only candidate in a position to defeat Biden for the nomination.

The urgency of Warren’s decision can hardly be overstated. Sanders and Biden are fiercely competing for votes in a half-dozen states with March 10 primaries including Michigan (with 125 delegates), Washington (89 delegates) and Missouri (68 delegates). A week later, primaries in four states—Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio—will determine the allocation of 577 delegates.

In the midst of these pivotal election battles, Warren should provide a vehement endorsement of Sanders and swiftly begin to campaign for him. Choosing, instead, to stand on the sidelines would be a tragic betrayal of progressive principles.

“Here’s the thing,” Warren said in a speech to a convention of the California Democratic Party nine months ago. “When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations come first . . . they’re telling you something very important—they are telling you that they will not fight for you.”

We’ll soon find out whether Elizabeth Warren will fight for us.

          

Concerted Fascist Effort

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I have written about the possibility that RWA’s (right wing authoritarians) could easily poor all their time, money and effort into securing their position as fascist oligarchs in a nightmarish new world order.

This article suggests that Democrats in the Excited States could phuck-up and shoot their party in the foot. Or they could do it deliberately?
See my post The Boys From Brazil

commondreams.org

‘You’ll See Rebellion’: Sanders Supporters Denounce Open Threats by Superdelegates to Steal Nomination

Common Dreams
5-7 minutes

Published on

Thursday, February 27, 2020

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Nearly 100 Democratic superdelegates told the New York Times in interviews this week that if Sen. Bernie Sanders does not arrive at the party’s 2020 convention in July with a majority of pledged delegates, they are willing to thwart the will of the plurality of primary voters—and potentially risk damaging Democrats’ chances of defeating President Donald Trump—in order to stop Sanders from winning the nomination.

“If Bernie gets a plurality and nobody else is even close and the superdelegates weigh in and say, ‘We know better than the voters,’ I think that will be a big problem.”
—Rep. Pramila Jayapal

“In a reflection of the establishment’s wariness about Mr. Sanders,” the Times reported Thursday morning, “only nine of the 93 superdelegates interviewed said that Mr. Sanders should become the nominee purely on the basis of arriving at the convention with a plurality, if he was short of a majority.”

The superdelegates, many of whom are current elected officials, are “willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance,” the Times reported.

“If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee,” Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman, said of Sanders, who has won the popular vote in the first three states of the Democratic primary race.

Osita Nwanevu, political columnist for The New Republic, suggested the Times headline could be written another way:

Under the current convention rules, if Sanders does not arrive in Milwaukee with at least 1,991 pledged delegates (just over 50 percent of the total), the convention will go to a second round in which superdelegates and all 3,979 pledged delegates will be free to vote for any candidate they choose.

As Common Dreams reported, Sanders was the only Democratic presidential hopeful on the debate stage in Las Vegas last week to say the candidate with the most votes at the convention should become the party’s nominee.

“The will of the people should prevail,” said Sanders. “The person who has the most votes should become the nominee.”

“If that’s what our party leaders are going to do, you’ll see rebellion not just in the presidential race, but in down-ballot races as well.”
—Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party

Progressives warn that nominating a candidate other than Sanders if the senator wins a plurality of delegates would have nightmarish consequences for the Democratic Party come November.

“If Bernie gets a plurality and nobody else is even close and the superdelegates weigh in and say, ‘We know better than the voters,’ I think that will be a big problem,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who endorsed Sanders for president.

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Jane Kleeb, chairwoman of the Nebraska Democratic Party who endorsed Sanders in 2016, told the Times that party leaders “shouldn’t be second-guessing voters.”

“If that’s what our party leaders are going to do,” warned Kleeb, “you’ll see rebellion not just in the presidential race, but in down-ballot races as well.”

According to the Times, Democratic superdelegates are casting about for a “savior candidate” who is not currently in the 2020 race, floating an array of names including former First Lady Michelle Obama, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said Wednesday that she would be comfortable with Sanders at the top of the ticket.

“At some point you could imagine saying, ‘Let’s go get [Virginia Sen.] Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,'” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) told the Times. “Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.”

The Times reporting comes just two days before the South Carolina Democratic primary, a contest the party establishment views as a key opportunity to slow Sanders’ momentum heading into Super Tuesday, when 1,357 delegates are up for grabs.

New York Magazine‘s Eric Levitz tweeted that the superdelegates’ on-the-record commitment to thwarting Sanders at the convention “enables Bernie to credibly tell voters after Super Tuesday, ‘You can either deliver me a majority, or vote for someone else and ensure our party has a huge ugly fight this summer.'”

“Given his approval rating,” Levitz added, “I think that’s a winning argument.”

In a column for The Guardian on Tuesday, Current Affairs editor and outspoken Sanders supporter Nathan Robinson argued that a brokered convention would be a “disaster” for the Democratic Party.

“Millions of Sanders supporters would be enraged at having the nomination snatched from them and might defect to a third party,” wrote Robinson. “Even those who did support a nominee they considered illegitimate would do so only grudgingly.”

“The Democrats might be able to stop Sanders, but in doing so they would destroy their party’s own electoral prospects,” Robinson added. “It would be a completely reckless and irrational maneuver, and every sensible Democrat should oppose it.”

 

Socialist Bogeyman

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I getting tired and old, lazy and sore and as I’ve mentioned before; I struggle with English and my organizational skills are atrocious. So I’m going to rely on articles I’ve gleaned from web news sources like Common Dreams, Democracy Now, etc. These are sources that have no association with Big Money, Big Pharma, The Koch Brother, or Fox News

If I can I’ll add my two cents in squiggly brackets like these { } or a distinct color (if I can)  Oh, I can so lets go with color

Okay, here goes: Robert Right and I get along well so, I’ll refer to him as Bob. In this article Bob has left out the fact that Trump voters are not the sharpest pencils and seem to be easily coned –as if they are in shock and they may well be due to the train wreck that is their beloved Merica.

They, as well as their less traumatized or less dazed kin on the left have good reason to be concerned. But when the orange buffoon tells his base that he loves them, even though or because they’re uneducated and hugs the flag and offers more whoppers that Berger King and chits on a gold throne and gropes women, and surrounds himself with robotics like Kushner and a whole host of ne’er-do-wells including a religious fanatic VP –in hope’s of duping religious voters into thinking he’s a god fearin’ feller like just like us? Nooooo! He is not! He is a con-man and he’ll do what ever he can to string you along for as long as necessary… as long as it takes for him and his cronies to strangle your constitution and once that happens he wont have to rely on deception… Once he has all the power he wont need to pander to Christians, or the poorly educated or the middle class, etc.

Snooze time

commondreams.org

It’s Not Bernie But the So-Called “Moderates” That the Democratic Establishment Should Be Freaking Out About

byRobert Reich
8-9 minutes

Published on

Friday, February 28, 2020

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The day after Bernie Sanders’s big win in Nevada, Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment: “I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.”

Lockart, like the rest of the Democratic establishment, is viewing American politics through obsolete lenses of left versus right, with Bernie on the extreme left and Trump on the far right. “Moderates” like Bloomberg and Buttigieg supposedly occupy the center, appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.

This may have been the correct frame for politics decades ago when America still had a growing middle class, but it’s obsolete today. As wealth and power have moved to the top and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans feel politically dis-empowered and economically insecure. Today’s main divide isn’t right versus left. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.

Some background. In the fall of 2015 I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina, researching the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs and their views about the economy. I was most interested in their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, most said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement, and that their children weren’t doing any better than they did. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession. By the time I spoke with them, most were employed but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; white, black, and Latino; union households and non-union. Their only common characteristic was they were middle class and below.

With the 2016 primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, party leaders favored Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. But the people I spoke with repeatedly mentioned Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”

In the following year, Sanders – a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary – came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump, a 69-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party, and lied compulsively about almost everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t because of Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. Clinton and Bush had all the advantages –funders, political advisors, name recognition – but neither could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system.

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A direct line connected four decades of stagnant wages, the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party and the “Occupy” movement, and the emergence of Sanders and Trump in 2016. The people I spoke with no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. National polls told much the same story. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt most people could get ahead through hard work dropped by 13 points between 2000 and 2015. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans thought government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent did.

Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in places that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing, and get tough on trade and immigration. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he roared. “In five, ten years from now, you’re going to have a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in eighteen years, that are angry.” He blasted politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

Trump’s pose as an anti-establishment populist was one of the biggest cons in American political history. Since elected he’s given the denizens of C-suites and the Street everything they’ve wanted and hasn’t markedly improved the lives of his working-class supporters, even if his politically-incorrect, damn-the-torpedo’s politics continues to make them feel as if he’s taking on the system.

The frustrations today are larger than they were four years ago. Even though corporate profits and executive pay have soared, the typical worker’s pay has barely risen, jobs are less secure, and health care less affordable.

The best way for Democrats to defeat Trump’s fake anti-establishment populism is with the real thing, coupled with an agenda of systemic reform. This is what Bernie Sanders offers. For the same reason, he has the best chance of generating energy and enthusiasm to flip at least three senate seats to the Democratic Party (the minimum needed to recapture the Senate, using the vice president as tie-breaker).

He’ll need a coalition of young voters, people of color, and the working class. He seems on his way. So far in the primaries he leads among white voters, has a massive edge among Latinos, dominates with both women and men, and has done best among both college and non-college graduates. And he’s narrowing Biden’s edge with older voters and African Americans. [Add line about South Carolina from today’s primary.]

The “socialism” moniker doesn’t seem to have bruised him, although it hasn’t been tested outside a Democratic primary or caucus. Perhaps voters won’t care, just as they many don’t care about Trump’s chronic lies.

Worries about a McGovern-like blowout in 2020 appear far-fetched. In 1972 the American middle class was expanding, not contracting. Besides, every national and swing state poll now shows Sanders tied with or beating Trump. A Quinnipiac Poll last week shows Sanders beating Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A CBS News/YouGov poll has Sanders beating Trump nationally. A Texas Lyceum poll has Sanders doing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points.

Instead of the Democratic establishment worrying that Sanders is unelectable, maybe it should worry that a so-called “moderate” Democrat might be nominated instead.