Monday, January 06, 2020

Could It Be Bernie?



If Bernie wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, he will be the nominee. And it will be a watershed moment for US politics. I do think he stands a chance to win in November. His thoughts are no longer considered fringe.

Bernie Sanders will emerge like a Ronald Reagan for the left and left of center. He will realign US politics for a generation. The Republican Party could spend a generation being defensive about the climate crisis.

I think the turning point for Bernie 2020 was when AOC basically became his running mate. That changed things. AOC 2028?

Bernie has moral clarity, and his time perhaps has come.

It is interesting that America wants to become more like China, and China wants to become more like America. That is a reference to the Hong Kong protests. That middle ground exists in Finland.

Where does it say in Marxist thought that the president of a country can not be directly elected by the people? Where does it say that free speech is a problem? The Chinese Communist Party needs to look at the data out in the streets of Hong Kong.



Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need

Bernie, Cybersecurity, Pete, TV, Warren
Trump: Morally Lost And Confused?
Impeachment Maneuvers Expose America
"Extreme Inequality Is Like Economic Pollution"
Finland: Capitalist Paradise?
History In Fast Forward Motion Right Now



President: Bernie Sanders
Vice President: Elizabeth Warren
Shadow Vice President: AOC
Attorney General: Kamala Devi Harris
Secretary Of Urban Affairs (and 2028 AOC running mate): Pete Buttigieg
Secretary Of Labor: Andrew Yang
UN Ambassador: Tulsi Gabbard

Inequality And Climate Change Are Existential: A Blueprint For Survival
Towards A World Government
AOC 2028  





One Year in Washington Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reshaped her party’s agenda, resuscitated Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and hardly has a friend in town. ...... The corridors of Capitol Hill are a marbled monotony, with Oxford heels clacking around corners indistinguishable from one another, white walls, oaken doors, and a steady rhythm of rectangular congressional nameplates. ........ Except for one. At the very end of a hallway in Cannon Office Building is an explosion of affirmation cribbed onto thousands of Post-it notes, a neon-green-and-pastel-pink flower bursting outward. Go there at the right time, Hill aides say, and you can see groups of people, usually women, often young, weeping at the sight of it........ “I love you from Maine! Keep on with your fierce, informed queen of a self!,” wrote Mikala from Bangor on a pink Post-it. “AOC! Seeing you is seeing me! I live in Michigan, but you are my representative. Adelante!,” says one on white signed (with a heart) from Kristen on August 1. “Dear AOC. Continue to scare old white men,” adds another.......

She was recently ranked the fourth-most-tweeted-about politician in the world, beating out every Democrat running for president.

It’s not that there is already a children’s book about her, The ABCs of AOC. It’s that there is already a comic-book series about her, a young-adult biography of her, a wall calendar of her, a book of her quotes, a collection of essays about her, and even, this holiday season, a Christmas sweater with her face on it........ Ocasio-Cortez’s staff didn’t know what to do with the Post-its when they first started appearing after she was inaugurated in January 2019. It seemed possible they broke a House rule — and if not an official violation, it was a practice that, at the least, would mark her as different from the rest of the incoming class. Staff took the first batch and framed them in her office, but the notes kept coming. If anyone writes something negative or nasty, one of the myriad devotees who make the pilgrimage takes the errant note down before it can spoil the mood........ Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the first politician to become a cultural sensation, but she may be the first to do so at the very beginning of her career, when she is occupying the lowest rung of political power........... Congressman Joe Crowley’s polling had him up by more than 30 points. The weekend before the election, when typically campaigns go all-out with volunteers and visibility, Ocasio-Cortez skipped town — not something somebody who hopes to win an election does. She went to the border, where news was just emerging that the Trump administration was locking up migrant children and separating them from their parents. The visuals of the candidate, dressed in all white, pleading with border guards through a fence to remember their humanity, were striking. Two mornings later, Ocasio-Cortez woke up anonymous for the last morning in her life. ...... “I can’t go outside anymore. I miss being able to go out to dinner. I miss anonymity. I have to send my boyfriend out to get groceries. There has been a shift in chores.” ........ The Congressional Black Caucus, in particular, was put off by her association with Justice Democrats, the young campaign operatives — co-founded by Ocasio-Cortez’s then chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti — who powered her win and have made it their mission to replace the Democratic Party’s moderates with a younger and more liberal group of lawmakers. Black lawmakers believed (not entirely incorrectly) that this meant the group was coming for some of them. In the press, CBC members accused Justice Democrats of being privileged gentrifiers with little respect for what it had taken them to gain political power. ...... She said that her colleagues consider her an unseen force in every primary this cycle, when in fact she has made endorsements in just two races. Meanwhile, it is the moderates who have put up more challengers to liberal incumbents than the other way around. “As a consequence of my victory, many people are inspired to run for office, and in a body where 70 percent of the seats are safe red or safe blue, that de facto means a lot more primaries. A lot of members think I’m like a Koch brother.” ....... House leadership sees the past summer as having been a turning point and believes that Ocasio-Cortez is now sufficiently chastened. She’s showed up for the job she was elected to do — coming prepared to committee meetings and hearings (like when she cornered Mark Zuckerberg on running misleading ads on Facebook), sponsoring 15 pieces of legislation (most notably the Green New Deal), and missing only two of 701 roll-call votes. ........ I spoke with dozens of House and New York City governmental officials, some of whom disagree with her politics and have reason to dislike her personally, and they all said that she shows up to meetings unusually attentive, taking notes and asking detailed questions and writing personal follow-up emails. That even in House caucus meetings, as members call one another “Congressman this” or “Congresswoman that” but casually call her “Alexandria,” she gets to know her ideological enemies’ home lives and interests...... I think people are surprised at how not-strident she comes off.” ...... The Green New Deal, for all its vagueness — it was a resolution and a statement of principles and not a piece of legislation — set up a new tentpole in the debate. More than a hundred Democrats signed on as co-sponsors, including a handful of moderates whom House progressives have been trying to push left for years, as did every major contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, including Joe Biden...... a statewide run, probably for the Senate, is likelier. That would mean challenging Chuck Schumer in 2022 or Kirsten Gillibrand in 2024........ She and her advisers are aware of her almost unprecedented situation: a wildly popular woman of color with the confidence of Pete Buttigieg, if not his demographic advantages. If she ran for president, they say, she would run to win ...... 80 percent of young people think the federal government should address climate change, that over 70 percent say the wealthy should pay higher taxes, and that some of the highest percentages ever recorded call their politics far left or liberal ...... Post-millennials are majority nonwhite in 13 states and in nearly 40 percent of the nation’s largest metro areas; they are close to majority nonwhite nationwide....... And Ocasio-Cortez is all of these things: Latina, liberal, “authentic,” fluent in social media and popular culture. Outspoken lefties have come and gone before, but often they were like Bernie or, before him, Ralph Nader: rumpled, grouchy, hectoring. For leftists, politics used to be something to avoid, a corrupting drag on the purity of activism. Ocasio-Cortez has changed that. ...... Ocasio-Cortez is still in regular contact with leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, and she has quiet dinners with the volunteers who worked on her campaign, the people who called her Alex until they were told, after the election, that it would be better if they stuck to Alexandria — dinners in which they promise to not Instagram anything with her. So far, no one has.......

a political supernova

..... her effort to abolish ICE is central in a district where half the population was born in another country. ...... “Here’s this guy in a then-Republican state, a quite conservative state, and he wins by a handful of votes to become mayor of Burlington. And by the time he becomes senator, Vermont is crazy-blue. And a lot of that has to do with his time there. And I said, ‘So how’d you do this?’ And he said that he and different grassroots movements in Vermont spent decades doing political education. And they took on the long-term project of turning a red state blue.” ..... I think if a state like Tennessee or West Virginia can go from blue to red in our lifetime, I think it can go back,” she told me



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Trump's Suleimani Move: Politically Bad







When both the US Congress and the Iraqi parliament tells you to back off, you gotta listen. Large masses are out in the streets. People are doing two plus two and seeing four. They absolutely don't want what by any measure would be an unthinkable war. And they are right.

Trump threatening Iraq with sanctions worse than the one on Iran shows he is desperate. He obviously did not think this through. And we are not even seeing the worse of the unintended consequences.

The reason I oppose and have opposed escalation is, every escalation is one step closer to an unthinkable war.












Qassem Suleimani: Dialogue Beats Escalation (2)
Arundhati Roy On India
Qassem Suleimani: Dialogue Beats Escalation


The People Around Trump Are Totally Unqualified to Stop the Iran Crisis There might still be a peaceful way out of the crisis with Iran—the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and the United Nations, as well as such quite hawkish prominent Americans as retired Gen. David Petraeus and former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, are urging diplomatic overtures from both sides—but President Donald Trump isn’t likely to go that route for two reasons. First, he isn’t keen on diplomacy. Second, even if he suddenly were, no one around him is very fit for the task. .....

What would a diplomatic solution look like? First, and perhaps above all, it would involve a reembracing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal, including a gradual lifting of economic sanctions, perhaps in exchange for Iran’s cessation of attacks on U.S. targets in the region.

..... his defense secretary, retired Gen. Jim Mattis, who particularly loathed the Iranian regime, called its verification provisions as airtight as those of any treaty he’d ever read. Trump’s hatred for the deal was entirely egotistical: Congress required the president to attest, every few months, that Iran was abiding by the deal, and though Iran continued to abide, Trump could not bear to keep endorsing Barack Obama’s signal diplomatic achievement. It really is that simple. ....... We do not know what the Iranians are plotting as retaliation to Trump’s assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Neither do we know what Trump and his aides are plotting as a response to Iran’s next move. If part of that response really is an attack on Iranian “cultural targets,” as Trump warns, then we will have no active allies anywhere in the world. (We have few enough now.) ...... Many observers are saying that, surely, the Iranians won’t dare launch an attack on American interests—or, surely, Trump wouldn’t really hit cultural targets. But many unlikely things have happened in recent times, so many—some of them so outrageous—that it’s hard to gauge probabilities any longer.

Pentagon Officials Reportedly “Stunned” by Trump’s Decision to Kill Soleimani Pentagon officials usually include a far-out option when they present possibilities to the president in order to make the others seem less extreme. The other options presented to Trump in Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort, included strikes against Iranian ships or missile facilities or militias backed by Iran that are operating in Iraq. “The Pentagon also tacked on the choice of targeting General Suleimani, mainly to make other options seem reasonable”...... . “My staff was briefed by a number of people representing a variety of agencies in the United States government and they came away with no feeling that there was evidence of an imminent attack,” Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico said.

The Impeachment Stalemate Is Working Fine for Democrats Mitch McConnell indicated that he had no plans of acceding to Democratic leaders’ demands that a Senate trial include witnesses and document production, as past impeachment trials did ..... McConnell said on the floor of the Senate. He also suggested that he was fine with an indefinite stalemate....... “Has there ever been an instance of such broad-scale defiance of a congressional request for information in the history of the Republic? Has there ever been anything like this?” Griffith asked DOJ attorney Hashim Mooppan. “An instruction has been given from the president of the United States not to cooperate in any form or fashion with an inquiry. Has that ever happened before?”

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