Don't quit.

"Also as predicted, the center-left punditry began without hesitation to declare that Sanders must exit the race, despite the fact that only 1,486 of 3,979 pledged delegates had been allocated, leaving 2,493 up for grabs. Biden has only acquired one-third of the magic win number, and Sanders is still nipping at his heels. The writing is not on the wall yet, but plenty of Sanders critics are eager to read it aloud anyway.

"Don’t humor them. Nearly every one of the pundits interpreting last night’s results as incontrovertible proof that Sanders is non-viable has been trying to discourage his supporters all along — even in instances of victory, for example when they bent over backward to discount his popular-vote win in Iowa and downplayed his triumph in New Hampshire.

"There’s no use sugarcoating it: Bernie’s path to victory is narrow. But with a one-on-one debate coming up, which has the mentally foggy and politically risky Biden quaking in his boots, we lose nothing by pursuing that narrow path with total determination.

"Who ever said it would be easy? Committed socialists have always taken for granted that our task will be difficult. We don’t panic and bail when the going gets tough. Most struggles end in defeat, though if waged intelligently they build our forces and set us up for future victories. Meanwhile, each struggle won secures real material gains for the working class, but also invites a vicious organized backlash that threatens to put us back at square one or worse. Socialists press on despite the adversity, because we believe it’s the only way to secure true equality and democracy.

"Too many react to the present situation with self-pity when, after five decades of political marginalization, awe is more appropriate. Anyone preoccupied by the injustice of the fact that a democratic socialist isn’t the inevitable winner of the 2020 Democratic Party primary contest has already grown accustomed to an aberration in the recent history of the Left. In reality, it’s amazing that Bernie Sanders has a chance at all, much less a good one."

Morbid despair won’t get us anywhere — win or lose, we should fight to the end for Bernie’s campaign: Bernie Supporters, No Surrender by Megan Day (Jacobin)

If only.

Joe Biden ≠ Donald Trump

My argument is that Joe Biden, a horrible choice for the party of FDR and LBJ, is being foisted on us by the same corporatist shills who have presided over the nation's forty-year decline.

Once again we are forced into choosing the lesser of two evils when we could have had the choice between good and evil. If the coronavirus provokes a recession the plutocrats' scam may work this time and, while that's good for the kleptocrats, it is not good for the country and the vast number of its citizens.

In answer to people who continue to claim otherwise, I've never compared Joe Biden to Donald Trump. Not once. But measure him against other members of his own party -- Teddy Kennedy would provide a good basis for comparison -- and against the traditional values that motivate Democratic voters and you will recognize that his career has been a lifelong betrayal of those ideals.

We are being sold a pig in a poke; circumstances may force us to buy it, but we betray ourselves by pretending to like it

"These are all actual quotes. No, nothing has been embellished or exaggerated. And yes, some things were too outrageous to include.”

“Make the customer think he’s getting laid when he’s getting fucked.” -- The first entry in “Portable Bloomberg,” a booklet compiled by a former employee of Michael Bloomberg.

The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit & Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg is not your guy.

"In total, 1,806 people were arrested during the [Republican] convention. Some were legal observers and members of the press. Some were mere bystanders who unwittingly encountered protesters while walking in the city and got swept up in indiscriminate mass arrests. 'I was just walking by –– I had a receipt from a store that I had bought something from on that street' V'epa Majamutar told Democracy Now some 12 hours after her arrest. 'All of a sudden the street basically just gets cordoned off and we cannot move. So before I was arrested I was just standing still because that's all we could really do. And then they just started putting handcuffs on people. They gave us no warning.'"

At the 2004 Republican National Convention, Michael Bloomberg presided over dubious arrests: What Bloomberg Did to Peaceful Protesters by Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic)

What is Medicare for All

It's the little things that can really ruin your day

That time Bloomberg said a $10 minimum wage proposal was creeping state communism.

This is from 2012:

Mike Bloomberg in a hard hat.                               (photo: Dana Rubenstein)

"On Wednesday night, City Council speaker Christine Quinn announced that negotiations were finally complete on a living wage bill that would require some recipients of large economic development subsidies to pay their employees at least $10 an hour.

"Quinn calls it 'the most impactful living-wage law in the United States,' but experts say it will actually impact about 500 workers a year.

"Even so, today, Bloomberg compared the legislation to communism and said he would veto the bill and if the veto is overridden, his administration will file a lawsuit.

"'It's interesting if you think about it,' said the mayor. 'The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn't work out so well.'"

"'It would be great if all jobs in the city paid a lot of money and had great benefits for the workers. Not good for the employers. But if you force that you will just drive businesses out of the city.'"

The rest of the story: 'Living wage' reminds Bloomberg of Soviet communism; he says he'll stop it in court if he has to by Dana Rubinstein (Politico)

You must never vote for Michael Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg, to borrow a line from Elizabeth Warren, is running in the wrong presidential primary.

                                                         R.J. Matson (Cagle Cartoons)

Reading List:
✓ “In 2002, the first year Bloomberg was mayor, 97,296 of these stops were recorded. They surged during Bloomberg’s tenure to a peak of 685,724 stops in 2011, near the end of his third term. Nearly 90 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked were innocent of any wrongdoing”: You Must Never Vote for Bloomberg by Charles M. Blow (New York Times)
✓ Michael Bloomberg’s Right-Wing Views on Foreign Policy Make Him a Perfect Candidate for the Republican Nomination by Mehdi Hasan (The Intercept)
✓ The surging Democratic presidential candidate and Bloomberg LP have fielded nearly 40 sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits over decades: Why Is Bloomberg's Long History of Egregious Sexism Getting a Pass? by Laura Bassett (GQ)
Disparaging comments. Demeaning jokes. As the mogul reportedly considers a 2020 presidential run, it remains an open question whether his long-alleged history of undermining women will affect his chances: ‘I’d Do Her’: Mike Bloomberg and the Underbelly of #MeToo by Megan Garber (The Atlantic)
✓ "We need to confront the shameful legacy of discrimination, not lie about it like Mike Bloomberg": Warren Slams Bloomberg for Blaming 2008 Financial Meltdown On End of Redlining Policy by Julia Conley (Common Dreams)
✓ Bloomberg education plan to promote charter school expansion by Carl Campanile (New York Post)
✓ Michael Bloomberg On Marijuana: Legalizing 'Another Addictive Narcotic' Is Perhaps the 'Stupidest Thing Anybody Has Ever Done' by Tim Marcin (Newsweek)
✓ I’m an art teacher. Mike’s policies gutted my school. During those years, I was lucky to have enough copy paper for my students to draw on. How Bloomberg Trashed Public Education in New York by Jake Jacobs (The Progressive)
✓ The billionaire’s long history of contradictions, gaffes, and self-owns, in his own words: A List of Things Bloomberg Actually Said About Fat People, Rape, George W. Bush, and J.Lo by Tim Murphy (Mother Jones)

You can't make this shite up

Iowa

Bernie Sanders is ahead in the tally of votes; the delegate count is arriverd at by an arcane counting methodology (think Electoral College). Pete Buttigieg benefited from Joe Biden's collapse; there is no foreseeable pathway for the mayor to the Oval Office, but it was good of him to stick a fork in Uncle Joe. Donald Trump had a good night ... and so did Michael Bloomberg. Nevada is undecided. New Hampshire is Sanders' to lose. Biden is up by only 10% in South Carolina. Sanders supporters need to double their efforts. In 2008, progressives put aside their differences to stop Clinton (John Edwards got out of the way by suspending his campaign); expect the party centrists to try the same thing on March 3 to stop Sanders. Get to work.

Not Us, You

So when, as is likely, the nomination is stolen from him at the Democratic
Convention, will Bernie Sanders 1) concede as he did in 2016 and try

to get the "us" in his campaign slogan to fall in line behind Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg or whatever member of the kleptocracy the Democratic poobahs have chosen as designated hitman (which millions of "us" will probably perceive as a betrayal); 2) lead his delegates out of the convention to continue the fight in the streets; 3) declare the Democratic Party null and void and conduct an independent campaign; 4) convert his campaign into an independent political movement to organize the people to take on the political class; or 5) use his political organization as the starting place to create a new progressive party to take on the parties of the center and the right in 2022 and beyond?

The Party’s Over: Bernie’s Last Dance With the Dems by Jim Kavanaugh (CounterPunch)

The fact that Bernie Sanders can succeed without the party machine enrages those who sacrificed their idealism to play the game

"Yes, our electoral system is in substantial ways anti-democratic, and the influence of money in politics is pernicious, and Republicans suppress the vote in earnest. But those things have been true forever. They are a given. The job of capitalizing on the enormous demographic disadvantage that the upper class faces in the class war falls to the Democratic party. The Democratic party, however, has never had any interest in really capitalizing on it.

"Now, Bernie Sanders is threatening to make the class war reality by winning the Democratic presidential nomination. His biggest obstacle is not the Republican candidate – a rich, evil cartoon man who is a perfect foil for Bernie’s analysis of what plagues us – but the Democratic establishment. In their eyes, he is an existential threat to their traditional approach of determining their stance on moral issues by finding a point halfway between 'What’s right' and 'What the Koch brothers are advocating via attack ads.'

"You can sense their panic, rising like tree sap. As time grows shorter and the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire trend in Bernie’s favor, the Third Way-style Democrats voice increasingly desperate warnings that a party that lost to Trump may be about to make a mistake. The Wall Street set throws more money at Joe Biden; the famous columnists who backed the Iraq war sound the alarm about unelectability; the candidate who lost to a reality television clown joins in the doomsaying. A Hollywood casting agency specializing in budget comedies could not assemble a less credible group of opponents. One of Bernie Sanders’ greatest advantages in the race is that many of the most unlikable hypocrites in America despise him."

The rest of the story:
Bernie Sanders' real obstacle is not Trump. It's the Democratic establishment. by Hamilton Nolan (The Guardian)

Should there be an independent left outside of the Democratic Party?

"The Democratic Party is now the full-throated proponent of neoliberal austerity at home, aggressive militarism abroad, and the ubiquitous national security state. Democrats gave landslide approvals to a record high war budget and renewal of the Patriot Act, while Pelosi’s 'pay-go' act doomed prospects for future progressive legislation. The last Democratic president’s deportations, drone strikes, wars in seven countries, multi-trillion-dollar upgrading of the US’s nuclear war fighting capacity, multi-trillion-dollar quantitative easing gift to finance capitalists, extension of the tax cut for the rich, and so forth also rise – giving credit where credit is due – to the level of catastrophe."

The rest of the story:
✓ The Imminent Threat of Trump and the Value of Progressive Third Parties by Roger Harris (CounterPunch)
✓ An Open Letter to the Green Party for 2020 by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters and Michael Albert (TruthDig)
✓ The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem by Howie Hawkins (CounterPunch)

Sanders on the Stump

Here's the candidate who doesn't jab voters in the chest and tell them to vote for someone else. The headline is clickbait. Sen. Sanders doesn't "destroy" the voter. He treats him with respect and tries to earn his understanding, just as he has done for 40 years.

Where they stand: The Environment.

The CBD graded the 2020 Democratic candidates on four key environmental areas ("We evaluated every candidate polling above 1% in the latest national polls. We did not evaluate former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg because of his decision not to participate in any Democratic debate, build a grassroots network of supporters or compete in any of the early state caucuses or primaries"): Environmental Voter Guide (Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund)

Let's Do This

The People are within sight of having an advocate in the Oval Office. But we're going to have to fight for it, and fight hard. The reaction is going to be fierce. The oligarchs won't like it, of course. But if you want to witness terror look in the eyes of the aparatchiks of the Democratic Party. They know that decades of three-martini lunches and torrents of cash are over. This is our moment to kick the corporate bagmen, hustlers and bunco artists out of politics. There'll be no lesser-of-two-evils this time. We've had forty years of Middle-Managers-in-Chief. We need an Organizer-in-Chief. If you can't go to Ohio and Nevada and New Hampshire, send money. Get out the vote where you live. Let's take back the Senate. Let's put Sen. Bernie Sanders in the White House. Let's do this.

Not to miss. In theaters now.

Award-winning documentary about Lea Tsemel, a Jewish-Israeli lawyer who defends Palestinians: from feminists to fundamentalists, from non-violent demonstrators to armed militants.

Iran under US threat

America has a global empire in a modern sense, maintaining hegemony by through hundreds of airforce and naval bases scattered to every corner of the planet. Iran, a nation that has enjoyed our attention in ways extending from sanctions and cyberattacks to assassinations and coups d'etat, is surrounded by US military bases and naval forces. Under these conditions, it needs to said that Tehran has shown maturity and restraint in dealing with a superpower led by a lawless and erratic manchild who means it no good.

Noel Coward in a festive mood

quote unquote: Dorothy Day

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” -- Dorothy Day

Guilty until proven innocent

"According to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), since 1989, 2,515 men and women have been exonerated after proving their innocence. In total, among all known exonerees, Americans have shelled out a staggering $4.12 billion to incarcerate innocent men and women since 1989, according to a Yahoo Finance analysis. That’s largely money spent on trials, and the cost of housing inmates in prison. According to the Bureau of Prisons, in the fiscal year 2017, the average cost to house a prisoner was over $36,000 a year in federal facilities. But black men make up the majority of those wrongfully convicted — approximately 49%. And since 1989, taxpayers have wasted $944 million to incarcerate black men and women that were later found to be innocent. That number climbs to $1.2 billion when including Hispanic men and women."

The rest of the story:
US Taxpayers spent almost $1 billion incarcerating innocent black people (Blacks in Law Enforcement of America)

Too little, too soon

Only two articles of impeachment? Under most circumstances, prosecutors include all alleged crimes in an indictment. If the jury won't convict on one, they will on another. Multiple crimes also suggest a criminal mindset. His defenders are saying that even if Donald Trump is guilty of the Ukraine shakedown, it's a trivial and isolated offense that doesn't rise to the level of a high crime or misdemeanor. Nancy Pelosi's slowing down of the process opens the door to getting this right. If this is going to be done at all, there should be a second bill of impeachment. The Intercept points to 26 impeachable Trump offenses that were inexplicably overlooked or ignored by the House.

The rest of the story: The A to Z of Things Trump Could and Should Have Been Impeached For by Mehdi Hasan (The Intercept)

Corporate Media and 'Moderate' Democrats Are Defending the Oligarchy Against Bernie Sanders

The greatest trick the American oligarchy ever played was convincing the country they didn't exist.

by Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

For the United States, oligarchy is the elephant – and donkey – in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.

Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word “oligarchy” was heard once. “We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,” Bernie Sanders said, “where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.”

Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy – defined as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes” – can’t really be a democracy.

The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.

Over the weekend, The Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race” – Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar – for “offering a more positive future.”

But “a more positive future” for whom? Those “moderates” are certainly offering a more positive future for the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.

The Washington Post’s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign – from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the “PBS NewsHour” and NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it doesn’t require complete uniformity – only dominant messaging, worldviews and assumptions.

Prevailing in news media’s political content is the central, tacit assumption that oligarchy isn’t a reality in the United States. So, there’s scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA “now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.” As for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania Trump’s wardrobe.

Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there’s a renewed pattern of mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign’s progress. Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not surprising.

In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence – with no ceiling on the often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth – defenders of oligarchy see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.

For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity with the “moderate” orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is clear. Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.

While Buttigieg has emerged as a sharp corporate tool for the maintenance of oligarchy, Joe Biden is an old hand at such tasks. Meanwhile, ready to preempt the politician-intermediaries for plutocracy, Michael Bloomberg is offering a blunt instrument for direct wealthy rule. Estimated to be the eighth-richest person in the United States, he was urged to run for president this year by Bezos.

During the next few months, Bloomberg will continue to use his massive class-war chest to fund an advertising onslaught of unprecedented size. In just weeks, he has spent upwards of $80 million on TV ads, dwarfing all such spending by his opponents combined. And, with little fanfare, he has already hired upwards of 200 paid staffers, who’ll be deployed in 21 states.

If Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Bloomberg won the Democratic presidential nomination, that would be a triumph for oligarchy in the midst of rising grassroots opposition.

Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country – from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis – can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.

---- 

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

G.O.P. Lawmaker Had Visions of a Christian Alternative Government

He networked with local militia groups, talked about plans to create a 51st state called Liberty and distributed to his closest followers a “Biblical Basis for War” document that calls for the “surrender” of those who favor abortion rights, same-sex marriage, “idolatry” and communism. “If they do not yield — kill all males,” it said.

The rest of the story by Mike Baker (New York Times).

Should impeachment be a bipartisan effort?

Jimmy Dore, the former comic turned political commentator, now so smitten with the sound of his own voice he's become Rachel Maddow for Radicals, here interviews Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on her decision not to take a position on the articles of impeachment. Even at the cost of enduring Dore, Rep. Gabbard's argument is important, especially as the impeachment effort stalls.



Must reads:
✓ Pundits are pitting “fast” vs. “slow” and “Ukraine only” vs. “everything.” But smart and thorough is the way to go: Democrats Must Reject False Choices as They Pursue Impeachment by Joan Walsh (The Nation
✓ Tulsi Gabbard Releases Statement on Impeachment of President Trump
✓ The congresswoman, a Hawaii Democrat, called impeachment “a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities” and said she favored censure instead: Tulsi Gabbard Votes ‘Present’ on Impeachment Articles: by Michael Levenson (New York Times)
✓ The way to defeat a rightwing political coalition is through leftwing politics, not political theater: Impeachment is the wrong way to beat Trump by Bhaskar Sunkara (The Guardian)
✓ Socialists should see impeachment as an opportunity to attack a movement that poses a long-run threat to the Left’s very existence: The Left Case for Impeachment by Max B. Sawicky (Jacobin)
✓ Getting rid of Trump would be great, but Congress isn’t going to do it — we actually have to vote him out. And impeachment, a therapeutic ritual for MSNBC hosts and an act of score-settling by the national security state, isn’t helping: What’s the Point of Impeachment? by Doug Henwood (Jacobin)

Imagine

“I was stationed at CVS during the war on drugs.”

John Cleese Has a Theory on Why Political Correctness Is Rampant in Our Culture

“The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is one I absolutely do not subscribe to.” -- John Cleese

Christ Stopped at Ramallah

"Like all forms of tribalism, Identity replaces shared truths with private property. The Politics of Identity are therefore ideal expressions of capitalist economics. They also serve, quite directly, to kill mass numbers of our fellow human beings. All in the name of my pain trumping your pain. The embrace of the Holocaust as the defining act of inhumanity to which nothing else can ever be compared blinds those embracing its sonorities to other kinds of oppression and carnage, creating a deep perversity of meaning: making the condemnation of this towering act of evil the reason to ignore the rest, or to derogate them as inferior to the full-on nightmare of Nazi genocide. Merry Christmas, Palestinians." --- Joan Clams Bodenheim

He didn't know the half of it

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to degeneracy without the usual interval of civilization. -- Georges Clemenceau

Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar.

You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.

Why can't Jaws be a Russian submarine?

Hollywood may have gotten a little more woke of late, but every screenwriter who has ever had a pitch meeting go off the rails will appreciate this one:

“I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, ‘This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.' When someone pointed out that Roberts couldn’t be Tubman, the executive responded, ‘It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference’” (Gregory Allen Howard, writer-producer of the Tubman biopic, recounting early days of two-plus decades trying to get the film off the ground).

Even now, it's an even bet there is more than one development gnome hoping to route the Underground Railroad through Wakanda.

Truth in sloganizing

Joe Biden's campaign slogan, “Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead,” is lame bordering on pathetic. Can't one of his corporate underwriters contribute its marketing team for an hour or two to spin something catchy? In light of his comments on marijuana this week, I submit "No Pot in Any Chicken." More apt, given his campaign so far, might be the old MBA dictum, "Good Enough Is Good Enough." Or he could save time and money by unpack now the tattered "The Lesser of Two Evils" banner, the de facto campaign message of every Democratic presidential campaign, save 2008, of the last 40 years.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the millions of voters that agree with them are freaking out the billionaires.

The illustration is by Victor Juhasz.

Seem familiar?

Israel is doing to Palestinians no less than the United States did to Native Americans: stealing their land, penning them in reservations, impoverishing them, killing them.

Sanders, AOC Unveil $180 Billion Green New Deal for Public Housing

The legislation aims to repair and upgrade public housing by securing renewable energy sources for approximately one million federally owned public housing units, affecting some two million people.

Beauty is in the eye of the officeholder

The folks at UglyJerry made a font out of congressional districts, many of them twisted into alphabetical shapes by gerrymandering.

They want you to urge your congressperson to do something about it.

The biggest city in the US is joining a voting reform movement.

"New York City has become the latest -- and most populous  -- city to adopt ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for voting reform efforts.

"Voters in the city overwhelmingly approved Ballot Question 1 on Tuesday, enabling voters to begin using ranked-choice voting in local primary and special elections beginning in 2021.

"New York City joins 20 other cities around the country, as well as multiple states, that have already started using this method in various elections. Maine, notably, implemented ranked-choice voting for the first time in a federal election in 2018.

"Ranked-choice voting works much like its name suggests. Instead of picking just one candidate on the ballot, voters rank their top five in order of preference.

"Once those votes are cast, they are counted in the following way, Lee Drutman explains:

"Ranked-choice voting lets voters mark their first-choice candidate first, their second-choice candidate second, their third-choice candidate third, and so on. Each voter has only one vote but can indicate their backup choices: If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place rankings, that candidate wins, just like a traditional election.

"But if no candidate has a majority in the first round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Voters who had ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to the candidate they ranked second. This process continues until a single candidate gathers a majority.

"Advocates of ranked-choice voting argue that it has many benefits. Because candidates need broad-based support to win, they are forced to engage with a wide range of voters, including groups that do not always see outreach from political campaigns. Additionally, studies have found that ranked-choice voting increases the number of minority and women candidates who vie for elected office, partly because ranked-choice campaigning is less negative.

"In addition to shifting the nature of campaigns, ranked-choice voting also gives voters more freedom to consider the full slate of candidates. Because of the way that votes are tallied, an individual could feel free to pick their favorite option without worrying that in doing so they are acting as a 'spoiler' who contributes to the victory of an unfavorable or unpopular candidate.

"Opponents of ranked-choice voting argue that it complicates the process too much, both when it comes to voting and tabulating results.

"Overall, New York City’s decision to adopt the ballot measure — though it will only affect a specific set of races — will serve as a good test case for ranked-choice voting, and it signals growing momentum for this voting reform."

The rest of the story:
✓ New York City adopts ranked-choice voting, a major milestone for the reform by Li Zhou (Vox)
✓ How does ranked choice voting work? (The Committee for Ranked Choice Voting)
✓Voter Choice for Massachusetts is a campaign to place a question on the 2020 ballot that would bring Ranked Choice Voting to Massachusetts elections starting in 2022.

Bernie Sanders is Not a Radical, He Has Mass Support for Positions on Healthcare & Taxes

From 2016. True then. True now.

Trick or Treat

A lot of people on the streets today apparently still wearing their "homeless" costumes from last night.

Great nations do not fight endless wars.

 "Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald Trump is a vulgar and dishonest fraud without a principled bone in his corpulent frame. Yet history is nothing if not a tale overflowing with irony. Despite his massive shortcomings, President Trump appears intent on recalibrating America’s role in the world. Initiating a long-overdue process of aligning U.S. policy with actually existing global conditions just may prove to be his providentially anointed function. Go figure.

"The Valhalla of the Indispensable Nation is a capacious place, even if it celebrates mostly white and mostly male diversity. Recall that in the eighteenth century, it was a slaveholding planter from Virginia who secured American independence. In the nineteenth, an ambitious homespun lawyer from Illinois destroyed slavery, thereby clearing the way for his country to become a capitalist behemoth. In the middle third of the twentieth century, a crippled Hudson River grandee delivered the United States to the summit of global power. In that century’s difficult later decades, a washed-up movie actor declared that it was “morning in America” and so, however briefly, it seemed to be. Now, in the twenty-first century, to inaugurate the next phase of the American story, history has seemingly designated as its agent a New York real estate developer, casino bankruptee, and reality TV star.

"In all likelihood, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan would balk at having Donald Trump classified as their peer. Yet, however preposterously, in our present moment of considerable crisis, he has succeeded them as the nation’s Great Helmsman, albeit one with few ideas about what course to set. Yet somehow Trump has concluded that our existing course has the United States headed toward the rocks. He just might be right.

“'Great nations do not fight endless wars.' So the president announced in his 2019 State of the Union Address. Implicit in such a seemingly innocuous statement was a genuinely radical proposition, as laden with portent as Lincoln’s declaration in 1858 that a house divided cannot stand. Donald Trump appears determined to overturn the prevailing national security paradigm, even if he is largely clueless about what should replace it." -- Tom Dispatch

Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
                     -- William Epson (Missing Dates)

Old or young, climate change is the crisis of our lifetimes.

Meeting it is up to us. Mass civil disobedience is essential to forcing a political response.

"The political class, as anyone who has followed its progress over the past three years can surely now see, is chaotic, unwilling and, in isolation, strategically incapable of addressing even short-term crises, let alone a vast existential predicament. Yet a widespread and willful naivety prevails: the belief that voting is the only political action required to change a system. Unless it is accompanied by the concentrated power of protest – articulating precise demands and creating space in which new political factions can grow – voting, while essential, remains a blunt and feeble instrument."

"The media, with a few exceptions, is actively hostile. Even when broadcasters cover these issues, they carefully avoid any mention of power, talking about environmental collapse as if it is driven by mysterious, passive forces, and proposing microscopic fixes for vast structural problems.

"Those who govern the nation and shape public discourse cannot be trusted with the preservation of life on Earth."

The rest of the story:

Only rebellion will prevent an ecological apocalypse by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Must see TV

The best political ad of the season.

A Lego event in Helsinki yesterday included this Lego city.

Ha!

Basic Income: An idea whose time has come

"We live in a new world, remade by many forces: the disruptive technological revolution,
brought about by the computer and the internet; the globalisation of trade, migration and communication; a fast-growing worldwide demand running up against the limits imposed by a shrinking pool of natural resources and saturation of our atmosphere; the dislocation of traditional protective institutions, from the family to labour unions, state monopolies and welfare states; and the explosive interactions of these various trends." -- Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy

Brecht

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

             -- Bertolt Brecht

qoute unquote: Friedrich Engels

"In this country, social war is under full headway, everyone stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to anyone to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence or in a law-court. In short, everyone sees in his neighbour an enemy to be got out of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage." -- Friedrich Engels, 1845

End Game?

Bush the Younger abused executive power and overstepped constitutional boundaries.

Congress did nothing.

Obama abused executive power and overstepped constitutional boundaries.

Congress did nothing.

Then came Trump.

Congress?

Democrats test limits of oversight powers on Trump by Jacqueline Thomsen and Morgan Chalfant (The Hill)

Main Street, Santa Monica, July 4, 2019

                                                           (photo: John Gabree)