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by RocketMan » Tue Jan 07, 2020 5:36 am
by JackRiddler » Thu Jan 09, 2020 4:32 pm
by RocketMan » Tue Jan 14, 2020 2:33 pm
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Something’s happening with Bernie Sanders that looked unlikely to many a few months ago: Progressive leaders and organizations are lining up behind him, not Elizabeth Warren, in the lead-up to voting.
Two groups run by young people — the Sunrise Movement, which seeks to combat climate change, and Dream Defenders, which advocates for people of color — endorsed him last week. He’s also won the backing of People’s Action and the Center for Popular Democracy, which together claim more than 1.5 million members, as well as three lawmakers in the so-called “Squad” and liberal-minded labor unions.
The consolidation of left-wing support is a remarkable turnaround for Sanders. In September, the Working Families Party became the first major national progressive group to endorse a candidate when it picked Warren — despite siding with Sanders in 2016. Warren was surging at the time, and looked poised to overtake Sanders as the leader of the progressive movement and a frontrunner for the nomination.
But now it’s Sanders with the wind at his back. The endorsements, on display here Sunday when Rep. Rashida Tlaib and the Sunrise Movement joined him for a rally attended by more than 900 people, are giving him a jolt of momentum weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses and supplying him with fresh volunteers in key areas.
by liminalOyster » Tue Jan 14, 2020 4:17 pm
by JackRiddler » Tue Jan 14, 2020 6:47 pm
by 8bitagent » Wed Jan 15, 2020 5:47 am
liminalOyster » Tue Jan 14, 2020 3:17 pm wrote:I am not a huge Warren fan, but I have typically seen her in a very positive light. This new event, however, is perhaps the most cynically bereft thing I've seen in ages. I have no doubt that Bernie and she would've had a frank conversation exploring what role many forms of intersectionality could play on a Trump re-election. I also have no doubt that Warren is not stupid and is desperate and using a wilful misrepresentation of what he said in a conscious, cynical attempt to activate an extremely charged specter from 2016. FWIW, Bernie has talked about the importance and viability of gender equity in presidents and political figures since the fucking 1970s. I really, really hope that the debate tonight affords opportunity for a real air-clearing on this.
by JackRiddler » Wed Jan 15, 2020 6:48 pm
23 Theses and Daring Predictions (I'll Soon Regret?)
Don't Miss January's Last Major Post! Excelsior!
(Warning: Gets Progressively Darker)
My intent is that this will be my last longer post on the US-American election, or anything else, until votes actually begin. Your reasoned comments are welcome, but I will try to resist responding. Please don't lure me into a fight. I need to get busy with other stuff. (Also, please note: the only endorsement in the following is for Sen. Bernard Sanders.)
1. Warren no longer has a chance of winning. She blew it when she started equivocating and triangulating in response to the first predictable blowback against her campaign's attempts to mirror the Sanders policy program. (I still like it when she talks up the wealth tax.)
2. The rapid decline in Warren's polling numbers is presumably the reason for her campaign's sudden, transparent panic-move of pivoting to a personal attack on Sanders. If the point was to rescue her presidential prospects, she would have been better advised to try a policy rollout. She threw one in, about canceling student debt, but it went unnoticed thanks to the spectacle of a fight: the corporate media staple. This situation is of her own making. She chose to generate it by "leaking" purported (and totally unbelievable) details of a one-on-one confidential meeting in 2018.
3. Based on internal campaign polling trends, there is a strong chance that by the time of New Hampshire, Warren will get fewer votes than Tulsi Gabbard. Warren will drop out after CA-MA.
4. If you are reading this, you probably have a problem with anyone even mentioning Gabbard. Too bad. I'm not in her camp, although I sent her money so that she would meet the donor requirement to get on the debate stage and start murdering right-wing warmongers. Which she did, to my satisfaction. I hope she will have a chance to continue her spree.
5. There are good reasons for Gabbard's appeal with a minority, who will remain solid. You can figure out most of it by watching the excellent and informative town hall on Iran she held yesterday in New Hampshire, with Dennis Kucinich, Stephen Kinzer and Lawrence Lessig. (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-W9b-_K_Xo)
6. Mere hours after that intelligent, in-depth discussion, the main candidates lined up for their measure of punishment from their stern and abusive schoolmasters at CNN, who got to control everything about the farcical proceedings.
7. The first half-hour of this "debate" consisted of Wolf Blitzer demanding that each of the cringe-lings pledge loyalty to War Party creed about the imaginary threat Iran poses to America. He gave them each a minute to assure the world they were willing to pull the trigger on mass murder and mayhem prior to seeking Congressional approval and no matter who objects. The next part played out the stupid fight-theater that Warren had started. Most of the rest was devoted to direct attacks on Sanders for advocating the same species of scientifically impossible health-care system that Canada, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Korea, Sweden, et al. have enjoyed for about a million years each. Since it costs them an average of about 1/2 of what Americans already pay for health care, and gets better results, it is unaffordable and will "bankrupt the country," as the CNN chiron assured while Sanders spoke.
8. Time for big picture! Unless one candidate wraps it up quickly, nomination contests almost always turn into two-person races. That is the logic of the primary system, in which voters will gravitate toward or against front-runners. Three is a crowd. The most likely opposition will be Sanders against Biden, (Full disclosure: I have predicted Biden's sudden, rapid implosion in past posts, insha'allah. Lately his handlers seem to have put him on the right pills, so it turns out I may not be infallible.)
9. I expect Yang and Gabbard will stay in, assuming they can consistently pull in 5% vote shares, so as to make their respective points. Leaving aside the more outrageous and invented smears against Gabbard, I see valid reasons to dislike either of them as candidates. But unlike most of the others, who are empty, smiling, self-serving suits pandering to the least America has to offer, both Gabbard and Yang know who they are and why they are standing there.
10. Of course the two billionaires can stick around as long as they like, buying copious airtime on CNN & Co. and also marking "breakthrough" shares of 5% in the corporate media polling.
11. CNN's all-out, cartoonish aggression against Sanders last night was in effect funded by ad buys from Bloomberg, military contractors, and above all the pharma and health insurance corporations. Compare it to their relative deference to the sort-of-leftish Steyer, who happens to also be one of their ad clients.
12. Denial is powerful even among the smartest, so Warren may not have fully realized her predicament yet. But soon enough it will be obvious all she has left to play for, if she wants it, is VP -- to Biden, not Sanders. (I doubt it will be good enough; Biden will choose Klobuchar.) Or a cabinet post. Truth to tell, in the Levis Administration I'd also consider her, for Treasury. I mean, sure, Stephanie Kelton might be my first choice, but even I have my measure of political pragmatism. As I said, I like that wealth tax talk. Assuming she does not walk it back, as she tends to do.
13. Warren's decision to attack Sanders, using rancid bullshit off the David Brock 2016 smear menu, is clear, undeniable, irreversible. She has cast her lot. In a brokered convention, she would be using her mostly unearned reputation as a progressive, and whatever number of delegates she secures, to leverage the appearance of a leftish slant for a right-wing candidate.
14. If that happens, very few are going to believe it or care, outside the narrow bubble of the True Blues. A deceptive corporate media amplification will follow.
15. Unfortunately I must give Trump 3:1 odds to crush Biden. Joe Malarkey will find it rough to distinguish himself from Trump, given his own life career of macho right-wing posturing and the legalized corruption of his lobbyist-grifter son. It's incredible that many honest Democrats (I know a few) seriously believe this is their strongest candidate. I attribute it to fear, and the conservative instinct it encourages.
16. In a debate between Biden and Trump, the odds of actual fisticuffs (or attempted fisticuffs, anyway) will be greater than zero. This plays to Trump's advantage. A choice of Biden or Trump would not mobilize new voter blocs (as Sanders aims to do, and as Trump partly did). It will be a tedium; billions spent and all of it geared to swaying some microscopic demographic of designated "purple" voters, people so unimaginably clueless that they still don't know their own preference. (Yeah, I said it.)
17. I also give Trump 3:2 to edge out Sanders, despite Sanders' many advantages as a candidate over Biden, including the intent and ability to mobilize new voting blocs to break the rigid essentialism of "Red and Blue." Oh, and that part wherein Sanders talks about actual things that matter and are urgent, like the need to address the real troubles and injustices suffered by the human beings in the US and elsewhere, end the endless wars, get a hold of the ecological catastrophe prior to the collapse of civilization, prevent nuclear war, etc. (I know, I know, very utopian stuff.)
18. Trump is unlikely to agree to debate Sanders. The GOP regime's strategy will wear the guise of a total war against a foreign invasion: the Judeo-Bolsheviks and their SJW-antifa armies are coming to take all of our stuff, desecrate our churches, bankrupt everyone, and replace all the white people with Muslims and Mexicans. The GOP regime will lie and cheat in every conceivable way to rig, fake and steal the election. As we have seen, the "liberal" corporate media will cover for them with false equivalence and lax or non-existent reporting, historical ignorance, and all kinds of watery bullshit. They will characterize accusations of election rigging as "conspiracy theory" and serve up distracting tales of imaginary Russian interference.
19. While I think the extremist caricatures that will be deployed against him can be jiujitsued to advantage, Sanders will also suffer endless sabotage attempts from the set of powerful minority interests he antagonizes: the corporate media, the political establishment of the duopoly parties, Wall Street, the billionaire class, the War Party, the giant right-wing noise machines of the Mercers and Murdochs and Kochs, the Christianists, the real anti-Semites (the kind who actually hate Jews, as opposed to the ones who will be discovered among critics of Israel on the left), and the foreign pro-war lobbies of NATO, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, Ukraine, Turkey, UAE, et al. This unanimity of powerful interests can also drive a counter-action that mobilizes a larger base for Sanders, but it is much harder to flip.
20. There are three eventualities that could change the currently lousy prospects for beating Trump. As one of these would require the Democratic establishment to acknowledge why they have lost so consistently to characters like Trump, and to care enough about winning to stop losing by presenting a clearly-defined non-bullshit alternative that they actually mean, we can put it aside as a truly utopian fantasy.
21. The other two eventualities involve vast human disasters. First, the next capitalist crash, expected in 2021-22, could explode any time, including this year. In that case, anyone could defeat Trump. The American-Western institutions capable of economic-financial management (Wall Street, the corporations, the Federal Reserve, the City of London) will strive to avoid that. But the world is never fully and always under their control, and anyway, none of them ever do anything that they think loses money for them or their class. Capitalism is a religion that demands its high priests approve and watch murder, pillage, and cities burning, rather than risk losing 1% of expected ROI. That is how it defines virtue. It is why, in fact, so much of the world is on fire, literally and figuratively. In the face of this supreme commandment, even a proven tax-cutter's odds at reelection are secondary. If they think it's time for a crash, the playas will react to protect their own assets and revenues first, thus setting it off, and FU to the rest of you.
22. Note that confessing my fantasies about when I'd like to see the inevitable crash come does not mean I support increased unemployment, poverty, suffering, etc. If you have a problem with it, you need to stop complaining about Cassandra (who was always right, ha!) and figure out Capitalism, which has always produced financial crashes and extended depressions as inevitable products of its normal process of accumulation and reproduction (or its "business cycle," as the Chicago-preferred euphemism goes) with roughly predictable timing.
23. Second, the War Party could succeed in their long-cherished desire to initiate full-scale hostilities against Iran or elsewhere. This world-threatening, monumentally criminal aggression will cause dismay among most Americans, even those who reflexively support it. It might make a small difference for a Biden, although he would run into the same problems of looking ludicrous if he attempts to distinguish his record of murderous and disastrous imperialism from Trump's. More likely he will fall into line with the imperative for "defense" against the designated enemy, as he always has, and question only the management of the savagery.
24. I like prime numbers so I'm still calling this "23 Theses," damn it.
25. It also depends on the timing and just how ambitious the domestic-authoritarian moves accompanying the war roll-out will be. A war in October, although it would amount to obvious election rigging, is the kind of shit that usually works in the short term to get the Americans rallying around their precious "national unity," in which up is down, white is black, attack is defense, and having a brain is treason.
26. Given the awesome development of the surveillance-and-control state (its technology, legal framework, reach and ideology) over the last 20+ years, and given the openly proclaimed extreme authoritarian predilections of the Trump and his faction and allies, a New War announcement is also likely to be accompanied by various forms of lockdown and lock-step, including increased use of force against domestic dissidence.
27. That could allow a lot of election rigging, obviously, not to mention Census sabotage. Even more than what the GOP does routinely with the state-level vote suppression it mastered in 2016, and repeated in 2018 in Georgia and Florida.
28. If that happens, maybe you won't be able to read this, or anything like it. We're already close to that with various Internet and real-world censorship and repression measures being tested and tried. (In the latest, Instagram is removing posts seen as honoring Qasem Suleimani, and saying they must do so in order to comply with US sanctions against Iran!) These have been long envisioned by conventionally right-wing statists, but are inconsistently hailed by many liberals -- generally, the kind who call the centralized corporate media "mainstream," but think "social media" and "populism" are the main causes of Trump, Brexit, etc. (Though currently in the UK, the Assange case is more than the canary in the coalmine: it's the icebreaker for rounding up dozens or hundreds of reporters during a designated emergency.)
29. All that being said, Sanders has a strong chance of winning on an antiwar platform, hopefully even without new war moves against Iran, Venezuela, or the various other targets of the Trump regime and the (largely bipartisan) War Party. With good reason, and despite five years of corporate media testing out every attack against him, he is the most popular politician: overwhelmingly with the young; with the poor and working class majority of this country; with people of color and women; with the independent and the uncategorizable; with people who have had enough of this shit-system and do not prefer white supremacy and civil war as the alternatives. In the electoral sphere, he presents the best hope, I have argued.
30. Final PS: Why haven't I mentioned the impeachment, you ask? We can talk about that again in a few weeks.
If you are reading this far, you must be under my spell. Follow this link and donate $27, or $2700 if you prefer: https://berniesanders.com/?nosplash=true%2F
If the latter, however, you are rich, so make sure to give an equal amount to the Poor People's Campaign or Oakland Moms 4 Housing.
Also, get out there and push! PUSH!
by liminalOyster » Wed Jan 15, 2020 8:31 pm
by Grizzly » Thu Jan 16, 2020 12:31 am
by liminalOyster » Tue Jan 21, 2020 7:18 pm
HRC wrote:He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.... it's not only him, it's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.
by RocketMan » Wed Jan 22, 2020 1:51 am
liminalOyster » Wed Jan 22, 2020 2:18 am wrote:HRC wrote:He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.... it's not only him, it's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.
The story is everywhere, so pick your source.
Will only add that it works nicely as "Nobodies like him. Nobodies want to work with him."
by Grizzly » Wed Jan 22, 2020 3:01 am
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[/url]by RocketMan » Wed Jan 22, 2020 10:22 am
![\<]](./images/smilies/confused0044.gif "confused")
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has improved his standing in the national Democratic race for president, joining former Vice President Joe Biden in a two-person top tier above the rest of the field, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
The poll marks the first time Biden has not held a solo lead in CNN's national polling on the race.
Overall, 27% of registered voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents back Sanders, while 24% favor Biden. The margin between the two is within the poll's margin of sampling error, meaning there is no clear leader in this poll. Both, however, are significantly ahead of the rest of the field, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 14% and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 11%. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg lands at 5% in the poll, while Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and businessman Andrew Yang each hold 4% support. Businessman Tom Steyer has 2%. No other candidate reaches 1% support.
Sanders has gained 7 points since the last CNN poll on the race in December. Since that survey, the Vermont senator has also made gains in early-state polling, including CNN's survey with the Des Moines Register in Iowa, where the first caucuses of the cycle will be held in less than two weeks.
by Grizzly » Wed Jan 22, 2020 12:26 pm
Still scared for Sanders's safety...
by Grizzly » Sat Jan 25, 2020 1:44 am
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