Tuesday, March 31, 2020
All Right
Please enjoy a moment of encouragement from Swedish duo BC Unidos featuring the talents of U.S. Girls and Ledinsky.
Monday, March 23, 2020
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
A 17 Step Path to Victory
I've always thought that Bernie Sanders's main obstacle in this 2020 campaign ordeal was going to be the democratic primary. Provided he could get through the primary victorious, he would defeat Trump. Joe Biden it now seems has the opposite problem. The general election will be a Biden massacre. It does look more and more, however, like the democratic establishment will pull off a primary victory for him. 1 out of 2 ain't bad, you may say. Well it's looking that way, but the primary is not yet over. There is still a way that Bernie Sanders could get over this hurdle:
1. The contrast between the competent, consistent, honest, real, vital and energetic visionary who is Bernie and the degenerating before our eyes, always less-than, conventionally bad Biden, the difference between their principles and the aims of their campaigns, is made patently clear to the American people in their one-on-one debate this weekend. The earth moves toward Bernie.
2. Barring that, Biden implodes on schedule in a way that even party establishment types have to admit is unforgiveable.
3. Barring that, the drip-drip-drip of Biden horribleness finally seeps through the floor of his momentum.
4. Everybody of voting age in the country reads this, or watches the video.
5. People watch this video of a Bernie panel in Detroit from a couple of days ago responding to the coronavirus crisis and get a taste of what they could be having in a Bernie Sanders administration, and finally grok the notion that medicare for all is not only NOT a crackpot radical idea but the only sane and responsible approach a modern society should take toward the health and well-being of its citizens-- and that we must elect the only candidate who is about making it happen (who happens to be Bernie Sanders):
6. The sunlight breaks through the Insurance industry funded cloud on the fact that Medicare for All means a smaller family and individual budget for healthcare, more healthcare choices, no deductions, no premiums, no co-pays, no fighting with insurance companies, no paying out of pocket and filing paperwork to recover a percentage of the cost calibrated to benefit the insurance company not the insured, no employers capriciously switching from the insurance policy you supposedly "love" (and would supposedly choose if public heath care funding were an option) to a company you hate with less coverage for even more of your paycheck, no more padding your healthcare budget with the profits of insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and the medical industrial complex, no more hanging on to jobs you hate or people who are bad for you just to keep the insurance they provide you, no fear of losing healthcare if you lose your job.
7. It finally dawns on people that unless Bernie Sanders is the nominee, he cannot win the general, and if he does not win the general, they and their loved ones and those most in need of it will yet again find the no-brainer of universal healthcare deferred indefinitely until the next champion for poor and working people comes along (in another generation at the prevailing rate for these chances).
8. Ditto for climate change and the green new deal. No biggie, just the planet we live on, the only habitable world we know, is at stake.
9. Repeat for college debt cancellation; free public college for all; increasing minimum wage to a living wage; decriminalizing poverty; paid family and medical leave; meaningful and sane immigration reform that helps people who want to to become Americans rather than punishes them; prison and justice reform; help for First Nations communities; election reform; tax reform; and a host of other priorities for a more just, equitable and prosperous future for all of us and not just for the donors and the wealthy few.
10. Voters, particularly those affiliated with parties, decide en masse to vote in the interest of society, not of the party establishment.
11. Old people wake up to a realization that they need to start thinking about the future beyond themselves. They need to vote for their children and if they did not have children, they need to redeem themselves anyway.
12. Young people vote with actual votes, not with like buttons, fire emojis and memes.
13. Campaigns are retroactively equitably funded by tax dollars, not by private individuals or corporations.
14. Democratic establishment figures are miraculously collectively struck with a revelation that they have sold their souls to the devil and that this perhaps explains their fixation on repeating losing backward facing strategies with loser candidates in election after election. In repentance, they begin doubling down on efforts to fix the electoral mess they've made of the primary thus far and to ensure a fair, open and truly democratic vote for the 31 remaining primaries. (Or are collectively struck mute and catatonic.)
15. People retroactively get their information about candidates from a socialized publicly funded media that has not been coopted by corporate interests.
16. Barring this, people adopt a great deal more skepticism about information, opinions and advice from professional elites.
17. Those who are already skeptical resist cynicism, turn their irritation into anger and their anger into action and refuse to let them get away with this.
~~~~~
I realize that this could have been a much shorter path to victory if I had included something about Elizabeth Warren putting her vaunted principles before her vanity and joining forces with Bernie Sanders or simply endorsing him to bolster the progressive, future facing wing of the party, but I didn't want to be unrealistic.
1. The contrast between the competent, consistent, honest, real, vital and energetic visionary who is Bernie and the degenerating before our eyes, always less-than, conventionally bad Biden, the difference between their principles and the aims of their campaigns, is made patently clear to the American people in their one-on-one debate this weekend. The earth moves toward Bernie.
2. Barring that, Biden implodes on schedule in a way that even party establishment types have to admit is unforgiveable.
3. Barring that, the drip-drip-drip of Biden horribleness finally seeps through the floor of his momentum.
4. Everybody of voting age in the country reads this, or watches the video.
5. People watch this video of a Bernie panel in Detroit from a couple of days ago responding to the coronavirus crisis and get a taste of what they could be having in a Bernie Sanders administration, and finally grok the notion that medicare for all is not only NOT a crackpot radical idea but the only sane and responsible approach a modern society should take toward the health and well-being of its citizens-- and that we must elect the only candidate who is about making it happen (who happens to be Bernie Sanders):
6. The sunlight breaks through the Insurance industry funded cloud on the fact that Medicare for All means a smaller family and individual budget for healthcare, more healthcare choices, no deductions, no premiums, no co-pays, no fighting with insurance companies, no paying out of pocket and filing paperwork to recover a percentage of the cost calibrated to benefit the insurance company not the insured, no employers capriciously switching from the insurance policy you supposedly "love" (and would supposedly choose if public heath care funding were an option) to a company you hate with less coverage for even more of your paycheck, no more padding your healthcare budget with the profits of insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and the medical industrial complex, no more hanging on to jobs you hate or people who are bad for you just to keep the insurance they provide you, no fear of losing healthcare if you lose your job.
7. It finally dawns on people that unless Bernie Sanders is the nominee, he cannot win the general, and if he does not win the general, they and their loved ones and those most in need of it will yet again find the no-brainer of universal healthcare deferred indefinitely until the next champion for poor and working people comes along (in another generation at the prevailing rate for these chances).
8. Ditto for climate change and the green new deal. No biggie, just the planet we live on, the only habitable world we know, is at stake.
9. Repeat for college debt cancellation; free public college for all; increasing minimum wage to a living wage; decriminalizing poverty; paid family and medical leave; meaningful and sane immigration reform that helps people who want to to become Americans rather than punishes them; prison and justice reform; help for First Nations communities; election reform; tax reform; and a host of other priorities for a more just, equitable and prosperous future for all of us and not just for the donors and the wealthy few.
10. Voters, particularly those affiliated with parties, decide en masse to vote in the interest of society, not of the party establishment.
11. Old people wake up to a realization that they need to start thinking about the future beyond themselves. They need to vote for their children and if they did not have children, they need to redeem themselves anyway.
12. Young people vote with actual votes, not with like buttons, fire emojis and memes.
13. Campaigns are retroactively equitably funded by tax dollars, not by private individuals or corporations.
14. Democratic establishment figures are miraculously collectively struck with a revelation that they have sold their souls to the devil and that this perhaps explains their fixation on repeating losing backward facing strategies with loser candidates in election after election. In repentance, they begin doubling down on efforts to fix the electoral mess they've made of the primary thus far and to ensure a fair, open and truly democratic vote for the 31 remaining primaries. (Or are collectively struck mute and catatonic.)
15. People retroactively get their information about candidates from a socialized publicly funded media that has not been coopted by corporate interests.
16. Barring this, people adopt a great deal more skepticism about information, opinions and advice from professional elites.
17. Those who are already skeptical resist cynicism, turn their irritation into anger and their anger into action and refuse to let them get away with this.
~~~~~
I realize that this could have been a much shorter path to victory if I had included something about Elizabeth Warren putting her vaunted principles before her vanity and joining forces with Bernie Sanders or simply endorsing him to bolster the progressive, future facing wing of the party, but I didn't want to be unrealistic.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
There is a flaw in your thinking
If you are a democrat who is ok with the party establishment unifying around subverting the primary process to select a donor-approved candidate to go against Trump, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that the odds are pretty good that when it comes down to it in the voting booth in November if the wind is favorable to it at that instant, I will probably hold my nose and vote for the democrat.
The bad news is that I can't make up the minds of those who will not. It isn't just that I will not have the oomph in me to urge my Bernie brothers and sisters to join me in voting for the candidate the party picked to deprive him of the candidacy (for I presume that the donor-approved candidate will not be Bernie Sanders in this scenario, and as with Hillary Clinton in 2016 I will not have it in me to do anything but cast my lonely grudging vote), it is that even if I suddenly became convinced that voting for blue no matter who was the only moral stance in order to defeat Donald Trump for a second term, I cannot transmit my particular moral stance under these circumstances to those transgressed against Sanders supporters who will be turned off to the democratic machine in perpetuity if establishment dems succeed in subverting the process to deny a Sanders nomination.
You may have my vote, but my vote will not make up for the scores more who are participating in the democratic primary today only for Bernie Sanders who will drop the party in droves like a moist, tepid coronavirus infected potato if Sanders wins the plurality of voters coming into the convention but is thwarted by superdelegates on a second ballot, or if manipulations of the machine are successful*. They will do this not because they are bad people but because the modicum of trust in the process that they permitted themselves in order to participate in hopes of seeing Bernie Sanders' platform to victory this time will once again have been squandered by an elite who thinks they know better than voters what's best for them.
Hear me now: It will not be enough for you and me to sort of agree that Biden, let's say, is arguably not as bad as Trump. We simply do not control the will of those who will be out the door for good before we can even poll them on their feelings on this Would You Rather scenario.
You can throw candidates at primary voters to diffuse Bernie Sanders' support, you can put the delegate selecting process behind closed doors as in Iowa, you can purge democratic voters from the polls in selected precincts as New York democrats did in 2016, you can capriciously close and change polling places in immigrant, latino, black and student communities at the last minute like Texas is doing, you can plaster the airwaves with negative ads, you can float the idea of hand picking someone like Nancy Pelosi (who hasn't even made a single campaign appearance) on a second ballot if Bernie Sanders comes into the convention with a plurality but not a majority, you can suppress or subvert the vote to make it bend to your donors' will, but you cannot then scold and chide the voters you've lost in the primaries to play along in the general. It is not cynical to think that defeating Bernie Sanders was the game that Pete, Beto, Amy**, Joe and Liz have been playing all along, even if it means a second term for Trump. I don't think the donors particularly care, but it's a bit shocking to see stated so plainly in the pages of the New York Times that the democratic establishment just may agree with them.
But to the willing Democratic faithful, the Biden voters in South Carolina for instance who jumped on board at the urging of Congressman Clyburn, who are motivated first and foremost by a desire to see Donald Trump lose and who are perhaps sincerely persuaded that a Bernie Sanders nomination is an obstacle to this goal, I don't think you've thought this all the way through. In your scenario, Bernie Sanders turns off middle American voters like a switch because of his socialism and drives them into the Trump camp handing him a second term. But you are overlooking an essential fact. A lot of those imagined better-dead-than-red turned off voters in Middle America are already in the Trump camp because to them Joe Biden is socialist. Yes, if you succeed in stopping Sanders at the convention you will have the donors on your side. Yes you will have the small and dwindling number of Democratic party faithfuls. Yes, you might even have me. But that will not be enough to achieve your ultimate goal. With a dud candidate like Joe Biden, you may not even win the popular vote this time. On the other hand, if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination, it will not be because some Democratic establishment official directed voters to support him. It will be because Bernie Sanders' message got people up off their overworked asses across the country and crucially in places like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania that the democrats have forgotten about and need in order to beat Trump, out into the streets, into the voting booth to vote for revolutionary change for working Americans, the poor, the disaffected, the despairing and the disenfranchised. You will have back voters who left a party and system that has demonstrably not worked for them for a long time, you will have those who never thought it could work for them, and those who desperately need the kind of change that Bernie Sanders is urging. This is not politics as usual for them, this is an emergency. And you will probably vote for Bernie Sanders too, because when it comes down to it, Medicare for All, the cancellation of student debt, free public college for all, a green new deal, money out of politics and into the hands of working people is probably a small price to pay to stop the absconding of America by Trump and his enablers. And if you give them down ballot candidates to vote for, you will have the house and maybe even the senate as well.
Alienating the impassioned, motivated, hopeful and growing throngs of voters who are only in it for Bernie Sanders is a very bad way to start a campaign. And if you give me Nancy Pelosi or Mike Bloomberg instead of Bernie, I will be with the exiters.***
~~~~~~
* I am premising conditions for an uptick in voter apathy on shenanigans of the party, but let's be real for a moment. If partisans of the democratic party, for whatever reason, actually prefer a standard issue democrat-- and a less than gently used one this time apparently-- over a rejuvenating movement of the future to go up against Trump in November, they are making the same old mistake, demonstrating yet again that this is a party that couldn't pick what hole to wipe on the toilet.
** While I have your attention, I keep hearing this argument that thanks to the voluntary departure from the campaign of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kristin Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar (among others who did not even bother to be memorable at the moment), if Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard smell the coffee and follow suit, the remaining field will be exclusively straight very old white men. I'd just like to remind people that it is insulting to erase the aspirations of Bernie Sanders' overwhelmingly youthful, diverse, rainbow coalition with a dismissal of the only candidate among all the above who is speaking to their dreams as being merely old, white and male. Piss off!
*** And by the way, read this. And listen to this:
The bad news is that I can't make up the minds of those who will not. It isn't just that I will not have the oomph in me to urge my Bernie brothers and sisters to join me in voting for the candidate the party picked to deprive him of the candidacy (for I presume that the donor-approved candidate will not be Bernie Sanders in this scenario, and as with Hillary Clinton in 2016 I will not have it in me to do anything but cast my lonely grudging vote), it is that even if I suddenly became convinced that voting for blue no matter who was the only moral stance in order to defeat Donald Trump for a second term, I cannot transmit my particular moral stance under these circumstances to those transgressed against Sanders supporters who will be turned off to the democratic machine in perpetuity if establishment dems succeed in subverting the process to deny a Sanders nomination.
You may have my vote, but my vote will not make up for the scores more who are participating in the democratic primary today only for Bernie Sanders who will drop the party in droves like a moist, tepid coronavirus infected potato if Sanders wins the plurality of voters coming into the convention but is thwarted by superdelegates on a second ballot, or if manipulations of the machine are successful*. They will do this not because they are bad people but because the modicum of trust in the process that they permitted themselves in order to participate in hopes of seeing Bernie Sanders' platform to victory this time will once again have been squandered by an elite who thinks they know better than voters what's best for them.
Hear me now: It will not be enough for you and me to sort of agree that Biden, let's say, is arguably not as bad as Trump. We simply do not control the will of those who will be out the door for good before we can even poll them on their feelings on this Would You Rather scenario.
You can throw candidates at primary voters to diffuse Bernie Sanders' support, you can put the delegate selecting process behind closed doors as in Iowa, you can purge democratic voters from the polls in selected precincts as New York democrats did in 2016, you can capriciously close and change polling places in immigrant, latino, black and student communities at the last minute like Texas is doing, you can plaster the airwaves with negative ads, you can float the idea of hand picking someone like Nancy Pelosi (who hasn't even made a single campaign appearance) on a second ballot if Bernie Sanders comes into the convention with a plurality but not a majority, you can suppress or subvert the vote to make it bend to your donors' will, but you cannot then scold and chide the voters you've lost in the primaries to play along in the general. It is not cynical to think that defeating Bernie Sanders was the game that Pete, Beto, Amy**, Joe and Liz have been playing all along, even if it means a second term for Trump. I don't think the donors particularly care, but it's a bit shocking to see stated so plainly in the pages of the New York Times that the democratic establishment just may agree with them.
But to the willing Democratic faithful, the Biden voters in South Carolina for instance who jumped on board at the urging of Congressman Clyburn, who are motivated first and foremost by a desire to see Donald Trump lose and who are perhaps sincerely persuaded that a Bernie Sanders nomination is an obstacle to this goal, I don't think you've thought this all the way through. In your scenario, Bernie Sanders turns off middle American voters like a switch because of his socialism and drives them into the Trump camp handing him a second term. But you are overlooking an essential fact. A lot of those imagined better-dead-than-red turned off voters in Middle America are already in the Trump camp because to them Joe Biden is socialist. Yes, if you succeed in stopping Sanders at the convention you will have the donors on your side. Yes you will have the small and dwindling number of Democratic party faithfuls. Yes, you might even have me. But that will not be enough to achieve your ultimate goal. With a dud candidate like Joe Biden, you may not even win the popular vote this time. On the other hand, if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination, it will not be because some Democratic establishment official directed voters to support him. It will be because Bernie Sanders' message got people up off their overworked asses across the country and crucially in places like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania that the democrats have forgotten about and need in order to beat Trump, out into the streets, into the voting booth to vote for revolutionary change for working Americans, the poor, the disaffected, the despairing and the disenfranchised. You will have back voters who left a party and system that has demonstrably not worked for them for a long time, you will have those who never thought it could work for them, and those who desperately need the kind of change that Bernie Sanders is urging. This is not politics as usual for them, this is an emergency. And you will probably vote for Bernie Sanders too, because when it comes down to it, Medicare for All, the cancellation of student debt, free public college for all, a green new deal, money out of politics and into the hands of working people is probably a small price to pay to stop the absconding of America by Trump and his enablers. And if you give them down ballot candidates to vote for, you will have the house and maybe even the senate as well.
Alienating the impassioned, motivated, hopeful and growing throngs of voters who are only in it for Bernie Sanders is a very bad way to start a campaign. And if you give me Nancy Pelosi or Mike Bloomberg instead of Bernie, I will be with the exiters.***
~~~~~~
* I am premising conditions for an uptick in voter apathy on shenanigans of the party, but let's be real for a moment. If partisans of the democratic party, for whatever reason, actually prefer a standard issue democrat-- and a less than gently used one this time apparently-- over a rejuvenating movement of the future to go up against Trump in November, they are making the same old mistake, demonstrating yet again that this is a party that couldn't pick what hole to wipe on the toilet.
** While I have your attention, I keep hearing this argument that thanks to the voluntary departure from the campaign of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kristin Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar (among others who did not even bother to be memorable at the moment), if Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard smell the coffee and follow suit, the remaining field will be exclusively straight very old white men. I'd just like to remind people that it is insulting to erase the aspirations of Bernie Sanders' overwhelmingly youthful, diverse, rainbow coalition with a dismissal of the only candidate among all the above who is speaking to their dreams as being merely old, white and male. Piss off!
*** And by the way, read this. And listen to this:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)