Renewable Revolution

8,241 views•Jan 29, 2020


The Intercept
143K subscribers

Trump, according to operatives in his circle, has expanded his reelection worries from his longtime focus on former Vice President Joe Biden to the new threat of Bernie Sanders.

The New York Times recently reported that some of Trump’s advisers believe that Sanders is a beatable general election candidate and have worked to elevate him. But the same article suggested that Trump himself disagrees and has been working to undermine Sanders with his public comments. The divergent views among Trump and his aides lead to an amusing strategic synchronicity: Trump believes that he is hurting Sanders by attacking him, while the president’s advisers believe that he is helping Sanders with those same attacks — and so Trump attacking Sanders serves the interests (as they understand them) of both Trump and his advisers.

While only one of those prognostications can be correct, Trump’s private fears, as ever, have emerged publicly as well, according to an analysis of Trump’s public comments on the race going back to early 2019. Trump has tweeted more times about Sanders in just the first few weeks of this year than he has since last summer, while he has tweeted slightly less about Biden, even as the former vice president has been central to Trump’s narrative around impeachment. In stump speeches made in January, Trump mentioned Sanders’s name — or, as Trump refers to him, “Crazy Bernie” — eight times as often as Biden. This marks a drastic change from last fall when Biden was a frequent Trump target at campaign rallies, while Sanders was barely mentioned.

Trump has long been nervous about Sanders, as he explained in a private conversation with Lev Parnas, a central character in the impeachment saga, and others in 2018, audio of which has been leaked.

“I think Bernie as vice president would have been tougher,” Trump said, referring to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 selection of Sen. Tim Kaine to be her running mate. “He was the only one I didn’t want her to pick.”

“You know, I got 20 percent of [the] Bernie vote, people don’t realize that, because of trade, because he’s a big trade guy. He basically says we’re getting screwed on trade, and he’s right. I’m worse than he is, but we can do something about it. I don’t know if he could have,” he said, presumably meaning that he is worse for free trade supporters than Sanders would be.

“But had she picked Bernie Sanders, it would have been tougher,” Trump continued. “Now, then you say -- people say no, it would have been easier because then her sort of establishment, normal Democrats would have come to me, so she may have lost a lot of votes too.”

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Category News & Politics

578 views


Black Bear News
2.6K subscribers

Category People & Blogs

Robert Reich robert@inequalitymedia.org via gmail.mcsv.net
11:35 AM (10 hours ago) to me

Dear Anthony,

An impeached president who is up for re-election will this week deliver a State of the Union address to the most divided union in living memory.

But why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?

Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists, keeping almost everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.

But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.

Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.”

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement.

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, the leaders of the Democratic party favored Hillary Clinton and Republican leaders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.

They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.”

Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They prefer to attribute Trump’s rise solely to racism.

Racism did play a part. But to understand why racism had such a strong impact in 2016, especially on the voting of whites without college degrees, it’s important to see what drove it. After all, racism in America dates back long before the founding of the Republic, and even modern American politicians have had few compunctions about using racism to boost their standing.

What gave Trump’s racism – as well as his hateful xenophobia, misogyny and jingoism – particular virulence was his capacity to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class into it. It is hardly the first time in history that a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of distress.


Aided by Fox News and an army of rightwing outlets, Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by Washington that he was their champion. Speaking at a factory in Pennsylvania in June 2016, he decried politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 of the 24 years before Trump’s election, and in that time scored some important victories for working families: the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. I take pride in being part of a Democratic administration during that time.

But Democrats did nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that had rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top and undermined the working class. As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly."


In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. Clinton pushed for Nafta and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the “confidence” of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.

Both stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. They failed to reform labor laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labor protections. Clinton deregulated Wall Street before the crash; Obama allowed the Street to water down attempts to re-regulate it after the crash. Obama protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but allowed millions of underwater homeowners to drown.

Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion opening wider the floodgates to big money in politics.

Although Clinton and Obama faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses, they could have rallied the working class and built a coalition to grab back power from the emerging oligarchy. Yet they chose not to. Why?


My answer is not just hypothetical, because I directly witnessed much of it: it was because Clinton, Obama and many congressional Democrats sought the votes of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes, and turned their backs on the working class. They also drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.

A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and 🦀 Trump in 2016. As Eduardo Porter of the New York Times notes, since 2000 Republican presidential candidates have steadily gained strength in America’s poorer counties while Democrats have lost ground. In 2016, Trump won 58% of the vote in the counties with the poorest 10% of the population. His share was 31% in the richest.

By 2016, Americans understood full well that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal – “I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”   – although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted.

The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. There is no longer a left or right. There’s no longer a moderate “center”. There’s either Trump’s authoritarian populism or democratic – small “d” – populism.

Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement. Trump has harnessed the frustrations of at least 40% of America. Although he’s been a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich, giving them all they’ve wanted in tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, the working class continues to believe he’s on their side.

Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. They must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities and classes, and band together to unrig the system.

Trump is not the cause of our divided nation. He is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place, to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery.

Thanks for reading,

Robert Reich
Inequality Media

7,953 views•Jan 31, 2020


The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow
27.3K subscribers

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Some of the music bumpers featuring Lettuce, http://lettucefunk.com.
Category News & Politics

EXCELLENT comments:

julie mckay
3 days ago
As a 60+ woman, not a bro, I vote every single time & will enthusiastically vote for Bernie. Gloves off
81


Bluebelle51
2 days ago
we're the same age and Bernie is the only democrat I will vote for
if they screw us again, I will never vote for another democrat for the rest of my life
I've waited 50 years for the Dems to get their heads out of their asses and from 2016 forward, I will not offer party loyalty to a party who isn't loyal to the people
18

Sassy Kat
2 days ago
Same.
I'm 50 and was Only Bernie (Wrote Him In) in 2016. I'm still Only Bernie and volunteering for him because the only way to get him in office is We Overwhelm The Vote.
We have to turn out in DROVES and that begins with being part of the Movement and getting the word out to people about Bernie and that they're trying to rig the primary again.
Huge numbers will show the world and Bernie We Stand With Him.
Because if the DNC and The Establishment do this again We Need Bernie To Stay In To The General.
We need to show him we'll support him in every way including financially with everything we can and will vote for him no matter what.
It can't go down like it did in 2016.
This is our ONLY shot. This is The Fight for the 99%.
14

raysaquaze stein
2 days ago
@Sassy Kat Thank you guys for beeing decent boomers, i must admitt i somtimes wish your whole generation would just disapear, but it seems so manny of your generation not only dont give 2 cents about us millenials but activly tryes to undermine us
3

julie mckay
2 days ago
@Sassy Kat yes & the DNC is doing it again. Look at the people Perez appointed.
5

Katie Kane
2 days ago
61 & feel the same. I expected the organised campaign against him. The Corporatocracy is running scared & they have NO morals. All MSM is corporate owned, they have a conflict of interest they're not disclosing. Those they employ know they must tow the line or lose their jobs. It's essentially a non sexual Weinstein move. Power corrupts, absolutely!
6

psychotronik13
1 day ago
I am a Bernie Bro, and we are all going to vote for Bernie and there are many of us!
2

Michael Prozonic
22 hours ago
@Bluebelle51 67m and I am in the same place as you are. Lifelong Democrat but this is my limit
2

Michael Prozonic
22 hours ago
67m and 100% Boomers4Bernie here. Join the revolution of our lifetime and make the world a better place for your kids and grandkids
2

Bluebelle51
21 hours ago
@Michael Prozonic I spent 50 years as a loyal democrat, I decided after 2016 that until the party shows ME some loyalty, they're not getting mine any more
1

Leticia Cortez
3 days ago
How do get fight back? How do we get more involved in the process? Perez & his filth DNC must be abolished.
50

Impeachment Trial: The Big Picture
88,415 views•Jan 28, 2020

Robert Reich
188K subscribers

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich lays out ten things to keep in mind while watching the impeachment trial unfold.

Category News & Politics

Black Bear News
2.61K subscribers

Category People & Blogs

AMY GOODMAN AND JUAN GONZÁLEZ, DEMOCRACY NOW!

Democratic officials cited problems with an app developed by a firm called Shadow to help precincts report results for Monday’s Democratic Iowa caucuses. Reporter Lee Fang of The Intercept discusses the problems surrounding Shadow and its connections to the Democratic establishment. Meanwhile, with 75 percent of Iowa precincts reporting, Bernie Sanders is leading in the popular vote and Pete Buttigieg is leading in the state delegate count.
Watch the Video and Read the Transcript →

FEB 05, 2020 OPINION|TD ORIGINALS

By Lee Camp 👍 

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of the weekly comedy news...


After watching Iowa devolve into chaos like a car crash in slow motion, I regret to inform you that California will be stolen from Bernie Sanders.

It’s happening now, and anyone with a vague understanding of what took place in 2016 should know how the grand theft will go down. But the good news is there’s still a chance to have a legitimate vote in the land of sunshine and broken dreams, which is why the Democratic National Committee probably doesn’t want you to read this column. So if DNC Chair Tom Perez comes around and dumps hot tea in your lap in the next few minutes, you’ll know why. (He has a lot of free time.)

California is one of the biggest prizes, with 495 delegates up for grabs. And it’s even more important this year because its primaries have been moved up to Super Tuesday, March 3. Right now, Bernie Sanders, aka  “Old Man Rational,” has jumped to the top of the California polls. So if you were the ruling elite of California and you wanted to rig your primary against people like Bernie Sanders, what would you do (Short of breaking the legs of anyone who gives change to a homeless man)?

Well, I guess one thing would be to make it really hard for a person to vote if he isn’t a full-on bread-and-butter Joe Biden-loving Democrat who owns a T-shirt featuring Barack Obama riding on a dinosaur. Candidates like Bernie attract a lot of voters who are outside the two corrupt Wall Street parties, i.e. independents. And independents are no small group. In fact 45% of Americans consider themselves Independents, while only 27% call themselves Democrats and 27% Republicans.

So if you’re an independent in California, when you registered to vote, some of you probably checked the box that said “American Independent Party.” There’s only one problem: The American Independent Party is a borderline neo-Nazi group. It’s the name of a party that opposes gay marriage, hates immigrants and apparently hates women, because the last line of its manifesto (of course it has a manifesto) actually states, “In consequence whereof, we call upon all men who value their God-given liberty to join us in pursuit of these political convictions!” (Emphasis added … but you could feel it.)

Can I also add that I strongly believe one can’t just follow racist, sexist crap with the antiquated phrase “in consequence whereof” and think that makes it OK? Rarely do you hear a story like, “The other day someone said to me, ‘In consequence whereof, I consider you a bucket of dicks.” And I responded, ‘Why thank you, my good man. Henceforth and forsooth, go screw yourself.’”

So, do you think a lot of independents in California accidentally sign up for the bigotry party? Yes they do. “A Los Angeles Times investigation has found that a majority of [the American Independent Party’s] members have registered with the party in error. Nearly three out of four people did not realize they had joined the party. …” 

Therefore, Californians should be forewarned that if they want to vote for someone outside the centrists — say, Bernie Sanders — they need to change their party affiliation to either Democrat or No Party Preference. But it gets even worse.

In order to stop the “No Party Preference” people from voting, the state (read: the corporate Democratic machine) does not give them a ballot with the presidential choices on it … which is RIDICULOUS! Do they honestly think millions of people skipped work to stand in line at a polling place playing Pokemon on their phones for three hours in order to vote for the City Council’s assistant treasurer?! No! They showed up to tell Joe Biden to check into a retirement home. And there is indeed a way they can vote in the presidential primary, but it’s complicated.

To sum up — millions of California independents are accidentally signed up for a racist, homophobic party. Millions more are handed a ballot without presidential candidates. In consequence whereof — millions of people will not get to cast a vote in the primary. But, as investigative journalist   Greg Palast has revealed, it gets even worse! He wrote, “… if an NPP voter asks the poll worker, ‘How do I get to vote in the Democratic party primary?’ the poll workers are instructed to say that, ‘NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots.'”

The poll workers are not lying … kinda. NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots, but they can get Democratic crossover ballots, which do include the presidential race. So as Palast explains, “…if you don’t say the magic words, ‘I want a Democratic crossover ballot,’ you are automatically given a ballot without the presidential race.”

You have to say the goddamn golden phrase to get to vote?! Poll workers are nearly instructed to lie to Independents unless the voter has the passcode. It is bananas that it’s this hard to obtain the correct ballot in California! (I’ve had an easier time procuring meth in a Mormon household.)

Because of these intentional hurdles designed to stop Independents from voting, millions of Californians will be handed something called a “provisional ballot.”

Let’s see, how do I explain a 😈 provisional ballot? You know when a little toddler has a ball and they go to throw it, and they c o c k their arm back and then the ball rolls out of their hand behind them, and they end up throwing nothing but air? But they think they threw the ball, so you can see them watching for where the ball is going to land? That’s a provisional ballot. It’s a lot of buildup, but you didn’t do . Because no one will ever count it.

In truth, a certain percentage of provisional ballots are indeed counted, but by the time they are, it’s too late. The results have been reported, and the provisional ballots are really just an afterthought. For this reason, Palast calls them “placebo ballots” — they’re designed to make you think you voted. So don’t accept a provisional ballot. Demand your right to vote in the presidential primary. Demand a crossover ballot.

Election integrity activists in California also recommend people vote early, which can be done right now, in person, at your county Department of Elections. That way you’ll have plenty of time to deal with what they call in the election integrity biz — fuckery.

Ironically , our government fights to make sure as few people as possible vote in our elections. Since the mainstream media has been captured by corporate America, only alternative media now reveals how the 👹💵🎩 wealthy and the powerful game the systems.

So tell your sun-bleached Cali friends to demand a real ballot with the presidential candidates on it. I’m not going tell you or them who to vote for, but in consequence whereof the American Independent (Homophobe) Party is fighting for your rights, such as the right to speak like it’s the mid-1800s. (As long as you’re a white male landowner of military age. Immigrants and women need not apply.)

___

If you think this column is important, please share it. Lee Camp’s new book, “Bullet Points & Punch Lines,” is available at LeeCampBook.com.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show,“Redacted Tonight.”


https://www.truthdig.com/articles/theyre-going-to-try-to-steal-california-from-sanders-again/

Agelbert NOTE: It isn't "ironic" that our government fights to make sure as few people as possible vote in our elections; it is deliberate. I can prove that. If the U.S. Federal Government wanted everyone who is eligible to vote to participate in all elections, they only need to run a computer algorithm, almost identical to the algorithm used in every police department in every single city in the USA, to identifiy, using your Social Security number, whether you could vote and in what voting district your vote could be cast. This simple program could immediately issue said person a (sending a plastic voting card with a pin number to the current address would cost more and is open to 😈 interception by criminals in mainstream political parties - I think the full electronic path through a Government Web Site WITH Bank level encryption is the best PERMANENT solution to ensure 90%, or more, voter turnout) pin number and Government web site to go to where an electronic ballot in the voting district said voter resides would be displayed ONLY during the period of two to three weeks up to and including the date of the election in question. 

DON'T SWALLOW THE BULLSHIT that it's "okay" for the police, the Department of Motor Vehicles, your Doctor, your Dentist, the Social Security Administration, the Selective Service System (and, of course, the CIA and Google) to KNOW whether you are you but, uhm, uh, you "cannot trust" a U.S. Government Web site to prevent voter fraud. If Banks can protect your money, the Federal Government, if it really wanted to, can CERTAINLY protect your vote!

If everyone can get a Social Security Card in the USA, and be tracked from cradle to grave, it is CHILD'S PLAY to issue a VOTING CARD (electronic or not) WITH A PIN NUMBER valid for use ONLY by the person who's Social Security number is associated with it.

You DO NOT NEED PLACES TO VOTE. People without a computer can vote in the public libraries during the two to three week period for the vote to take place in each and every election, from dog catcher to POTUS.

Voting is a pain in the ass BY UNDEMOCRATIC DESIGN.