The Bill, The Bill, The Bill... And, Don't Forget For A Moment That The Bill Will Come Due

The House passed the $2.2 trillion Wall Street bailout, filled with goodies for corporate America, by voice vote today-- but not before Trump lost his shit on Twitter this morning when someone told him Thomas Massie (R-KY) had decided to force a roll call vote. Here's a narrative version of Massie's tweet storm after being savaged by Señor Trumpanmzee (above), who is now likely to back Massie's very right-wing primary supporter, Todd McMurtry. "I swore an oath to uphold the constitution, and I take that oath seriously," he began. "In a few moments I will request a vote on the CARES Act which means members of Congress will vote on it by pushing 'yes' or 'no' or 'present.'" Actually, what it means is that every member of the House might have had to go on record as being for it or against it, something both Pelosi and McCarthy wanted to avoid-- and were able to. And it meant that enough members of Congress had to drag their asses back to DC to give leadership a quorum. It's Pelosi's own fault that she refused to pay attention to the Members who have been urging her to institute remote voting during the pandemic. Back to Massie:

The Constitution requires that a quorum of members be present to conduct business in the House. Right now, millions of essential, working-class Americans are still required to go to work during this pandemic such as manufacturing line workers, healthcare professionals, I am not delaying the bill like Nancy Pelosi did last week. The bill that was worked on in the Senate late last week was much better before Speaker Pelosi showed up to destroy it and add days and days to the process. This bill should have been voted on much sooner in both the Senate and House and it shouldn’t be stuffed full of Nancy Pelosi’s pork-- including $25 million for the Kennedy Center, grants for the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts, and millions more other measures that have no direct relation to the Coronavirus Pandemic. That $25 million, for example, should go directly to purchasing test kits. The number one priority of this bill should have been to expand testing availability and creation of tests so that every American, not just the wealthy and privileged, have access to testing. We have shut down the world’s economy without adequate data. Everyone, even those with no symptoms, needs immediate access to a test. This bill creates even more secrecy around a Federal Reserve that still refuses to be audited. It allows the Federal Reserve to make decisions about who gets what, how much money we’ll print. With no transparency. If getting us into $6 trillion more debt doesn’t matter, then why are we not getting $350 trillion more in debt so that we can give a check of $1 million to every person in the country? This stimulus should go straight to the people rather than being funneled through banks and corporations like this bill is doing. 2 trillion divided by 150 million workers is about $13,333.00 per person. That’s much more than the $1,200 per person check authorized by this bill."

Oh, look-- two mega-rich worthless Wall Street suck-ups agree with each other that Massie is a bad, bad boy:

Massie amigo and fellow Libertarian, Justin Amash, who fled the Trump version of the GOP and became the House's only Independent, defended him in a twitter battle with Trump-worshipping Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw. Amash tweeted "Crenshaw has learned a lot from Donald Trump during his time in Congress. He mischaracterizes a $500 billion corporate welfare fund that will mostly benefit a few large corporations hand-picked by government. Then, when called on it, he changes the topic and calls others liars."

The Washington Post, as always, spoke for the ruling class Establishment: Mike DeBonis with a quintessential Postism: "The scores of lawmakers who rushed back to Washington Friday to secure passage of a $2.2 trillion rescue bill expressed shock and dismay at having to defy the advice of experts and risk their health amid a global pandemic that has already killed more than 1,000 Americans. But many were not surprised at which of their colleagues forced them to do it. During his seven years in Congress, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has established a reputation as a uniquely irascible congressional gadfly-- one who is frequently at odds with his own party’s leadership, rarely votes for major bills negotiated with Democrats, and, to make an ideological point, is willing to use the House rule book to inconvenience his colleagues. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic threatening the nation, many believe Massie has gone well beyond inconvenience into threatening the health-- and potentially the lives-- of lawmakers and staff. And while Massie’s GOP colleagues have long grumbled about his tactics, he has now attracted the scorn of the most powerful Republican: President Trump. Massie opposes the rescue bill on fiscal and constitutional grounds and threatened ahead of a planned voice vote Friday to require a quorum be present-- 216 members, half the House. Trump called him a 'third-rate Grandstander' on Twitter Friday. 'He just wants the publicity. He can’t stop it, only delay,' he said, calling on voters to 'throw Massie out of Republican Party!'"

Suicide Is Painless

There's disagreement on the left as well. Matt Stoller, writing for The Guardian this past Sunday, said it most clearly-- and most disturbingly: America will be unrecognizable after this pandemic if big corporations walk away with trillions of dollars and no strings attached.

Now, I’m not opposed to supporting industries. This is a crisis, and we do not want a lot of the productive capacity of the United States to fall apart because of a pandemic. But the key to supporting enterprises is to make sure that there are strict conditions, so that power doesn’t consolidate into the hands of monopolists and financiers cherry-picking distressed assets. Otherwise, America will simply be unrecognizable after this pandemic. CNBC personality Jim Cramer, for instance, is worried that after this pandemic America will have just three retailers. And he’s right to be worried about that.

Here’s how we can stop it. There are enough members of Congress to act and prevent what really looks less like a relief package and more a corporate coup. However, the problem is that this group is split into different political parties, and Congressional leadership is taking advantage of that dynamic to jam this through. US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell wants big business to rule, so he’s playing a trick. He is refusing aid to workers. Democrats are negotiating with him to try to get unemployment assistance and social welfare. McConnell knows Democrats won’t pay attention to corporate bailouts if he takes the public hostage, and Democrats know that they can hand out favors to big business if they just talk about how they got larger checks for workers.

Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, in the lead-up to the vote, said she's able to overcome her instincts about the very things Stoller is most worried about. Her own state, Washington "is reeling from the spread of COVID-19, and I have worked tirelessly to ensure the federal government steps up and responds to this crisis."

This bill is an important step forward. It significantly expands unemployment insurance benefits for laid-off and furloughed workers, puts money directly into the pockets of struggling working people and families, provides critical relief in the form of emergency grants and forgivable loans to devastated small businesses and nonprofits, infuses cash into strained local and state governments and health care systems, increases the amounts of personal protective equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile, and supports struggling industries that do right by their employees.

It is not perfect and there is far more Congress must do to do to fully meet our obligation to our constituents. We need to get more money to our health care system, states and localities, guarantee testing and treatment for everyone, expand benefits to those that have been left out and protect the health and safety of people in the criminal justice and immigration detention systems. Congress must also conduct vigorous oversight of industry assistance to ensure taxpayer dollars are used to support workers, not to further inequality.

We are already at work immediately on the next package to ensure it includes provisions we fought for but did not get this time. This is a crisis of epic proportions and we must continue to do everything we can to respond with the scale sufficient to meet the suffering of people across our country. I am proud to represent a district and a state with so much compassion and commitment, and I will continue to fight for all my constituents as we weather this together.

AOC, in the other hand, feels that the House could work a little harder before being stampeded into a bill so foul.





I don't know what to make of these three pictures from a #1 best selling book, The Eyes of Darkness written by Dean Koontz four decades ago and published in 1981. Amazing coincidence... right? CNN has already debunked it as a conspiracy theory. So has Snopes, based on the purported origin of the disease. OK.

The Importance Of Distinguishing Between Chronological Age And Physiological Age

About a month ago, we mentioned that Dan Levitin's new book, Successful Aging was about to be released. And now it is-- and #2 on the best seller list. This week he did an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal, A neuroscientist says these are the ideal ages for the optimal presidential ticket. "To a scientist or medical doctor," he told me today, "your chronological age is just a number that doesn’t reflect your health. There are 35 year olds with health problems that will vastly increase their risk of death before 40, and there are 80 year olds whose brains and bodies are perfectly fit. What’s important is not chronological age, but biological age, stress load, and overall mental and physical fitness. While it is true that 80 year olds are slower at tasks than most 35 year olds, speed isn’t everything, and not always a good indicator of overall health and potential for long and effective life."

Trump and Biden are clearly senile-- or at least rapidly approaching that state-- and unfit for the presidency. Bernie is older than either and fit as a fiddle and likely to be the best president since FDR. Mayo Pete and Tulsi are relatively young but the idea that either of them would make a decent president is patently absurd. Neither is likely to improve with age either. Bloomberg turned 78 last year and if you watched his debate performance Wednesday night, you could see he's even more unprepared for the presidency than Biden. None of that is a conclusion a scientist like Levitin would jump to but read between the lines of his OpEd and see if you can figure out who he's voting for on Super Tuesday.

One year shy of the constitutional age limit to be president of the U.S., at age 34, Finland’s Sanna Marin is the world’s youngest sitting prime minister. New Zealand’s Jacina Ardern is 39, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is 38, and Ukraine’s Oleksiy Honcharuk is only 35.

On the world stage of both politics and activism, youth seems to be having a moment. Malala Yousafzai is a leading advocate for the education of women and girls at 22. A group of high school students is leading the charge for gun-law reform in the U.S. And the world’s most recognizable climate activist is 17-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden.

Presidential candidates Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard are both 38, and vying to be the next politicians in their 30s taking on leadership roles. At the other end of the spectrum, Elizabeth Warren is 70. Donald Trump is 73. Joe Biden is 77. Bernie Sanders is 78. These candidates bracket the age range of presidential hopefuls. As a neuroscientist, people have been asking me “how old is too old to be president?”

Aging researchers (those who study aging, not those who are necessarily themselves old!) distinguish between chronological age and physiological age. Chronological age is simply how long you’ve lived. Physiological age is a subtler concept that reflects the various life events, stressors and illnesses you may have had.

We all know of older adults who hardly seem to show the effects of aging (like Jane Fonda, 82, Jane Goodall, 85, or George Shultz, 99), and others whose bodies seem to give out in their 50s or 60s (like John Ritter and Nell Carter, both of whom died of heart failure at 54). Chronological age can be misleading.

Take President Kennedy, who suffered from Addison’s disease, and served from age 43 to 46. Kennedy was in pain nearly every day of his presidency, and during the first six months alone, Kennedy suffered stomach, colon and prostate problems, spastic colitis, high fevers, dehydration, abscesses, sleeplessness and high cholesterol (above 300).

During his short term he took testosterone, high doses of antibiotics, hydrocortisone, antispasmotics, barbiturates, amphetamines, antihistamines, procaine for back pain and an anti-psychotic (although only for a few days). It would be reasonable to assume that he missed a large number of work days, and that he lacked the “vigah” that his image projected.

Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in 1919 at the relatively young age of 63, and he remained incapacitated for the final years of his presidency. The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was famously plagued by missed days due to illness. While in office, Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack (at age 62), developed Crohn’s disease and suffered a stroke. So, clearly, chronological age is not the whole story.

Today, we tend to embrace a societal narrative that the human brain grows and learns from birth up to a certain point (60? 65? 70?) and then begins a steep and precipitous decline. Old age, in this telling, is a time of inevitable loss of function, decay and illnesses.

But this narrative has not kept pace with medical science. From a neural standpoint, there is no reason why an older adult would not be as effective as a younger adult. We are living longer and healthier than at any time in history, and most older adults will experience improvements in certain areas.

In particular, older adults are better at pattern matching-- at seeing common threads across what younger adults might view as unrelated or disparate events. This gives older adults a better ability to predict outcomes, and to solve problems, particularly those involving interpersonal conflicts-- this is because older adults, as a group, also experience increases in compassion, tolerance and empathy. Together, these might be called wisdom.

Research in organizational behavior on the science of problem solving and productivity shows that diversity yields a competitive edge. Work groups and teams that are composed of people from diverse backgrounds-- races, ethnicities, gender, skill sets, religions and, yes, age-- are better at a range of problem-solving tasks and tend to come up with more innovative solutions.

Younger adults learn more quickly and are more willing to take risks to achieve their goals (sometimes a good thing). They’re also faster thinkers and more comfortable with new technology. Older adults often exercise better judgment, have a more nuanced sense of risk and, through their experience and enhanced pattern matching, can see analogies from previous situations that may help to solve current problems. The combination is powerful.

Don't worry, Bernie has pledged to put a woman on his ticket

This strongly suggests that the ideal presidential ticket will include an older adult and a younger adult, and a cabinet comprising age, gender, and geographic and racial diversity. Of course, our own self-interest may want us to elect someone who “thinks like us” or “looks like us,” but the best governance comes from conflicting views. In the free market of ideas, we are all better off if every idea is given a chance to compete with others, so that the best ideas win out.

How old is too old to be president? It’s not a matter of chronology-- it’s a matter of biology. Thanks to medical advances and a focus on healthy lifestyle choices, many people in their 80s and 90s have the stamina, wisdom and compassion necessary to solve some of the biggest problems that face the world today. And the best solutions will come when their perspectives are combined with the curiosity, values, digital nativism and skills of the young.

UPDATE: Alan Grayson

Before he was elected to Congress, Grayson, who had written his master's thesis on gerontology, founded the Alliance for Aging Research, where served as an officer for 22 years. The organization was instrumental in increasing federal support for aging research by 500%, leading to breakthroughs in the treatment of blindness, weak bones, Alzheimer’s disease, and other afflictions of the elderly. Grayson's gave it the motto: "Living to 100-and Loving It." IN Congress, no one worked harder for the well-being of seniors than Grayson. This afternoon he told me that "One of the great shortcomings of modern politics is the absence of reliable information about to what extent political candidates (and CEO’s, and generals) may have identifiable psychological issues and deficits that would affect job performance, whether age-related or not. (And this is true even if you are not a sociopath who writes your own medical reports, like Demented Donald.) People joke about making candidates take an IQ test, but maybe that’s not the psychological test that you really want them to take. Within a month of being in Congress, I knew several Members (and one Vice President) who had such issues, but their constituents didn’t know, and neither I nor anyone else had any incentive to inform them. In Trump’s case, the painfully obvious diagnosis (narcissistic personality disorder-- not exactly what we need in a President) received far less attention than whatever it was that the Half-Twit tweeted five minutes ago. It’s a flaw in democracy itself. As FDR demonstrated, it’s your mind that matters in that job, not your legs."

The Democrats Completely Control Sacramento-- So Why Is It Such A Cesspool Of Corruption?

If the old maxim is true that absolute power corrupts absolutely, then California Democrats have a very real problem. As the power and legitimacy of the GOP has waned, Democrats have seized control of a supermajority in the state, with both hands. With their power now left unchecked by a viable opposition party, the party politics of the left have drifted into corruption, led by party power players like Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Christy Smith, an unaccomplished freshman legislator running for the CA-25 seat abandoned by Katie Hill, as well as a wide cadre of party apparatchiks.

Their goal has been to put their thumbs on the scales of primary elections across the state in order to elect moderate back benchers who will maintain the status quo and not rock the boat for party leadership. The internal party bias has been especially hard on the progressive wing of the party, where the California Democratic party routinely tries to pick the winners of primary races.

The Young Turks recently reported one such story of unethical influence into races that are supposed to be democratic in nature. The story featured Eric Ohlsen who is running for State Assembly in District 36, the Antelope Valley district that is contained within the boundaries of CA-25. According to Ohlsen, he was told at a meeting with Christy Smith that the decision had already been made behind the scenes to support his opponent, Jonathan Ervin, so Ohlsen should just try again in a few years. She also took umbrage with his messaging to get big money out of politics and fight corruption. Ohlsen had said in a speech-- up top-- at the California Democratic Convention, "Democrats have a supermajority in Sacramento and they keep telling us that we need to learn how to compromise. We’re not compromising with Republicans to pass legislation, we’re compromising with industry because they’re donors." Regarding that anti-corruption stance, Ohlsen said, "Christy told me that my anti-corruption messaging was 'personally offensive' to her." Which is probably a good self-assessment because both Smith and Rendon had pushed Ervin from behind the scenes and made sure that opposing candidates did not get any endorsements, which gave Ervin a $121 thousand advantage over everyone else in his race.

Ohlsen confirmed in a follow up interview that during his meeting with Smith, she had noted that both herself and Rendon had endorsed Jonathan Ervin before any primary races had even begun, effectively removing any democracy from the Democratic Primary.

Rendon has a long track record of using his influence with the unions and special interest groups to deny funding and endorsements to any candidates that he does not hand pick. His position as Speaker of the House in the State Assembly gives him leverage over groups that may potentially offer endorsements to candidates. By offering to reduce access to legislators, Rendon can control or eliminate the flow of money to candidates that he does not approve of. Encouraging his membership in the Assembly to direct funds at particular candidates is another tactic that Rendon has used to starve out competition from progressive candidates, and favor ones, like Ervin, who will act as an empty vessel for his agenda.

Threats of the denial of funding have also been used against other progressive candidates such as those who support Cenk Unger. Alaina Brooks, SEIU delegate for California's 36th Assembly District, executive board member for Local 2015, made it very clear to the Ohlsen camp that if he continued to support his fellow progressive candidate that his political future would be in jeopardy.

"The amount of pushback that we have gotten is surprising to me," Ohlsen said, "Nearly every Democrat in Sacramento ran on talking points to get money out of politics, but as soon as you ask, 'that sounds great, so where is your bill?' they start working like crazy behind the scenes to block you from competing." With a supermajority of Democratic votes in the California Legislature, passing any anticorruption measures would be a simple task, the problem is that the measures would need the support of people who have spent their careers benefiting from the money in politics.

This is the reason why many states have enacted publicly funded elections, which limit the ability of party elites and special interests to pick and choose the winners of elections before they have even began. It is a proposition that has been supported on the national level by several Presidential candidates including Tom Steyer, who said, "I think the point about publicly funded campaigns means that if you are running, the public will fund a campaign that’s at least comparable to what anyone’s going to spend on their campaign," Steyer told reporters. "And that’s actually I think the easiest way to go about this and the proper way."

Also on the national level, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has faced many of the same problems by bucking the party establishment. She rose to prominence by defeating Joseph Crowley, a corporate Democrat who portrayed himself as being a progressive liberal while simultaneously taking money from Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Google, BlackRock, amongst others. AOC has continued to garner criticism from her own Democratic colleagues for holding House Democrat’s feet to the fire regarding financial corruption within the party.

The GOP lost their position as a viable opposition party in the state, but by quashing the voices of opposition within their own ranks, Democrats could undo any gains they have been given. The activities of Rendon and Smith to put their thumbs on the scales of party elections could create a culture of corruption that will bring down their own house. Matt Stoller summed the problem up nicely in a 2019 column for the Washington Post, "For too long, disagreements in the Democratic Party have been kept behind closed doors, and the result was the protection of powerful financial interests. It is time to start talking about this dynamic, so that voters can make a democratic choice about what kind of politics they actually want to build. That, in the end, is why it’s called the Democratic Party."

Can Congress Save America? Not This One, Hopefully The One We Elect In November

Today is Presidents' Day... but we'll forgo taking about that until we have a legitimate president in the White House again and, instead, say a few words about the legislative branch of government that was created with the power to check a possible tyrant in the White House. Political parties were not taken into account by the framers of the Constitution, particularly not one as supine and cowardly as today's GOP working hand in hand with a would be tyrant to undermine that constitution.

A substantial number of people would likely agree that the biggest problem facing mankind right how is the Climate Crisis. The GOP's response has largely been to deny there's anything to worry about-- let alone do anything about. Conservative Democrats generally agree with them to some extent, playing ostrich and hoping the problem will just go away or that when the full force of the problem becomes manifest, they'll be dead and gone anyway. Right now there are only 98 members of Congress co-sponsoring the Green New Deal resolution, all of them Democrats, a dozen of them freshmen.

Last cycle saw the election of 87 new members of the House and 9 new senators. All 9 of the senators have accrued voting records that have been graded "F" by Progressive Punch. Almost all of the House freshmen have also been graded "F"-- that includes all the Republicans (no exceptions) and 40 DCCC Democrats. These are the Democratic freshmen-- listed from best to worst in terms of the ProgressivePunch scorecard:

• Andy Levin (D-MI)- 100 A
• Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)- 100 A
• AOC (D-NY)- 98.33 A
• Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)- 98.33 A
• Chuy Garcia (D-IL)- 96.67 A
• Joe Neguse (D-CO)- 96.67 A
• Ilhan Omar (D-MN)- 95.00 A
• Veronica Escobar (New Dem-TX)- 93.33 A
• Sylvia Garcia (D-TX)- 91.67 A
• Tori Trahan (New Dem-MA)- 91.67 A

• Debra Haaland (D-NM)- 90.0 B
• Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA)- 89.23 B
• Madeleine Dean (New Dem-PA)- 88.33 B
• Jahana Hayes (D-CT)- 84.75 B

• Donna Shalala (New Dem-FL)- 85.00 C
• Mike Levin (D-CA)- 81.67 C
• Chris Pappas (New Dem-NH)- 78.33 C

• Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (New Dem-FL)- 81.67 D
• Greg Stanton (New Dem-AZ)- 81.67 D
• Sean Casten (New Dem-IL)- 78.33 D

• David Trone (New Dem-MD)- 78.33 F
• Jennifer Wexton (New Dem-VA)- 76.67 F
• Steven Horsford (New Dem-NV)- 75.49 F
• Joe Morelle (New Dem-NY)- 75.38 F
• Tom Malinowski (New Dem-NJ)- 73.33 F
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)- 73.33 F
• Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA)- 70.00 F
• Jason Crow (New Dem-CO)- 70.00 F
• Lizzie Fletcher (New Dem-TX)- 70.00 F
• Kim Schrier (New Dem-WA)- 70.00 F
• Haley Stevens (New Dem-MI)- 70.00 F
• Susan Wild (New Dem-PA)- 69.84 F
• Lauren Underwood (D-IL)- 68.97 F
• Harley Rouda (New Dem-CA)- 68.33 F
• Collin Allred (New Dem-TX)- 67.80 F
• Ed Case (Blue Dog-HI)- 67.12 F
• TJ Cox (D-CA)- 66.67 F
• Sharice Davids (New Dem-KS)- 66.67 F
• Josh Harder (New Dem-CA)- 64.41 F
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)- 63.33 F
• Lucy McBath (New Dem-GA)- 63.33 F
• Katie Porter (D-CA)- 63.33 F
• Antonio Delgado (New Dem-NY)- 61.67 F
• Chrissy Houlahan (Blue Dog-PA)- 61.67 F
• Andy Kim (D-NJ)- 60.00 F
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)- 58.33 F
• Ann Kirkpatrick (New Dem-AZ)- 53.64 F
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)- 50.00 F
• Angie Craig (New Dem-MN)- 48.33 F
• Abby Frankenauer (D-IA)- 46.67 F
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)- 46.67 F
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)- 45.76 F
• Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MI)- 45.00 F
• Cindy Axne (New Dem-IA)- 40.00 F
• Jared Golden (D-ME)- 35.00 F
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)- 31.67 F
• Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA)- 30.00 F
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)- 28.33 F
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)- 23.33 F
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)- 21.67 F

"Progressive policies are popular." That was how AOC began an e-mail to her supporters over the weekend.

"The corporate media and naysayers," she continued, "might try to convince us that we should compromise our values, but the facts just don’t lie. In Iowa, 92% of caucus-goers said that they support the Green New Deal-- our plan to transform our energy infrastructure, reach net-zero emissions, and create millions of union-wage jobs for communities that have been left behind. But as we speak, many in the Democratic Party still refuse to believe it’s possible to rise to the occasion of the climate crisis... The Green New Deal was introduced just over one year ago. In that time, with the help of organizations like the Sunrise Movement, we’ve built an incredible consensus in the Democratic Party. But the Green New Deal isn’t just popular with Democrats. Huge margins of independents and even Republicans support it, because Americans from all walks of life understand the necessity of saving our planet. We can’t let fear goad us into inaction."

But fear is what has largely kept almost all the corporate-friendly freshmen the DCCC selected and elected last cycle from getting behind AOC's resolution. In her words, "Passing a Green New Deal is not just a plan to save our planet-- but a chance for us to come together, to improve the lives of millions, and to ensure a better quality of life for our children. Let’s get to work."

Yes, let's get to work replacing members who do not recognize that the Climate Crisis must be a national priority, with challengers who are ready to devote their professional careers to enacting the Green New Deal. Alexander Kaufman wrote that "Sunrise Movement is pulling back from the presidential contest and redirecting its efforts toward a trio of March 3 congressional primaries in Texas, hoping a victory in the oil and gas industry’s mecca will add momentum to the two-year-old Green New Deal movement... [I]n the coming weeks, Sunrise Movement is sending its army of canvassers to knock on doors in support of [Heidi] Sloan, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar’s left-wing challenger Jessica Cisneros and Mike Siegel, the progressive Green New Dealer running against two other Democrats in the race to take on Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX). The group plans to direct its nearly 350 local chapters across the country to make phone calls for the three candidates. 'For us, Texas is both the frontlines of the climate crisis and the extreme energy fossil-fuel industry,' Sunrise Movement’s political director Evan Weber told HuffPost by phone Thursday morning. 'If we can show that running boldly on the Green New Deal without moderating or hedging is a path to victory for Democrats, we think it can transform the entire conversation in this nation.'" I spoke to Jessica Cisneros about how she was endorsed both by the AFL-CIO and by the Sunrise Movement. "We know that a just transition to renewable energy," she told me, "will provide our first opportunity in decades to truly invest in the working people of our district. Coming from a border district in Texas, we have an obligation to be a voice for workers during the transition, one that brings thousands of good-paying union jobs to our communities and ensures a sustainable future for generations to come."

Like Jessica, Eva Putzova is also running against a reactionary Blue Dog-- Tom O'Halleran. "My opponent, the incumbent congressman," she told me, "opposes the Green New Deal, or any bold climate action for that matter. Yet large areas of my state consist of Native American reservations that have been poisoned by the fossil fuel industry-- namely coal and uranium extraction-- for decades. There is a burning need for renewable energy production on the reservation. Solar, wind, conservation and light rail transportation systems would rejuvenate the economy of the reservation and produce thousands of good paying union jobs. This is what is envisioned in the Green New Deal that my opponent refuses to support. We need to elect representatives with the political will to fight the fossil fuel industry and invest in the green infrastructure we so sorely need. I will be that representative."

The Climate Crisis and how it impacts the farmers and rural communities of Iowa was part of the impetus that led to J.D. Scholten running for Congress against Climate Change-denier Steve King. "The climate crisis," J.D. told us, "is already ravaging our communities and economy in Iowa. Farmers are losing profit, crops, equipment, and their homes and fields from record-breaking floods, droughts, and temperature changes and southwest Iowa has climate refugees who have lost everything from devastating floods. We don't need more scientific evidence, more studies, or delaying tactics-- we need action. We need to bring rural America including our farmers to the table to enact solutions that will avert this crisis, create jobs, update our infrastructure, and ensure the health and well-being of our people."

"CA-16 has the least breathable air in America, and this is not by accident," said Kim Williams the reformer and insurgent running for a seat occupied by reactionary Blue Dog, Jim Costa. "Our corporate-backed incumbent rides atop a rigged system using right-leaning media, plants in environmental groups, and Exxon dollars to push out a message that he’s climate friendly. He’s not. He’s a millionaire farmer who has directly profited from his own policy decisions. He placates the worst polluters in the Valley and America knowing that his own constituents will see their lives cut short. But his days are numbered. Voters in the Valley are waking up to alternatives and demanding a Green New Deal. They understand that he is both 'bought' and 'bossed' by giant corporations and that he will never deliver the change our residents so desperately deserve. This primary is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver the fundamental change we need. We all know Bernie is the champion who will fight for us in the White House and I’m committed to fighting alongside him in Congress. Because we’ll need more than him to bring thousands of worker-protected, green jobs to the Valley to solve our air and water crisis. We’re going to need a progressive wave of representatives to send the Green New Deal to President Sander’s desk."

Will County Board member Rachel Ventura, the progressive Democrat running for the Chicagoland seat occupied by New Dem multimillionaire and incrementalist Bill Foster has an excellent chance at replacing someone who does nothing but stand in the way of progress. "Winning this seat as a Green New Deal Democrat against a scientist who is taking fossil fuel money and supporting carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery," she said, "is going to send a strong message that other Illinois Democrats will notice. I am actively campaigning on the GND. I envision using healthy tax incentives or direct rebates for people to make their homes more energy efficient with weatherization and gut rehabs, incentives to buy EV’s or hybrid vehicles and incentives to use wind or solar when it makes sense geographically. The same tax levers could be used for businesses and municipalities who want to make their automobile fleets electric or improve the efficiency of the building envelope, or HVAC system. We can push municipalities to build large-scale, public power projects using wind, solar and hydro technology where it makes sense. We need to upgrade commercial and residential building codes to achieve the highest levels of energy efficiency. The focus is to reward people and businesses who make carbon-free decisions, and move to publicly owned over corporate owned utilities."

She also noted that the 11th congressional district "is home to two oil refineries and a converted coal plant that has left coal ash pollution leaching into our water.  Additionally, the district encompasses the second and third largest cities (Aurora and Joliet) in Illinois that are home to high poverty rates and dominantly minority communities. These people work in low wage, temp agencies with few workers’ rights. Most of them work at the warehouses in CenterPoint, the largest inland port in the world. The Green New Deal would put people in the 11th CD to work retrofitting homes for energy efficiency, and installing solar panels and wind turbines. These jobs would pay union wages and reduce our carbon footprint. The Green New Deal isn't just a solution to the climate crisis but also a solution to fixing our economy. Nancy Pelosi has replaced the Green New Deal with another framework piece of legislation called the 100% clean economy bill. This bill allows the fossil fuel industry to continue to generate carbon as long as they find a way to capture the carbon through carbon sinks or other means. This makes absolutely no sense when the rest of the industrialized world is making huge technological advances in renewable energy and energy efficiency advances. I want to see America be a leader in these technological advances, not keep pumping out carbon with unproven carbon capture devices. My opponent is supporting both the 100% Clean Economy Bill and the Use it Act. This is a danger to our generation and for those to come."

Robin Wilt is also taking on a do-nothing New Dem, Joe Morelle. She told us that "As the mother of three, ensuring that our future generations inherit a habitable world is of utmost importance. We need bold political leadership that will not settle for ineffective and inequitable solutions to the climate crisis that fail to meet the urgency of the threat posed. I support the Green New Deal because it centers the needs of frontline and marginalized communities that have been historically most impacted by polluters and are currently most vulnerable to the impact of the climate crisis. We must address everyone’s basic needs for clean air, water and soil in order to build a broad coalition for fighting climate change. While my opponent has sat on his hands, refusing to meet the demands of the planetary crisis and failing to support the Green New Deal; by contrast, I have led on a local basis, supporting the implementation of Community Choice Aggregation in our town, in order to pool our community’s purchasing power to allow for sourcing our energy from 100% renewable resources at lower prices. When in Congress, I will not only immediately sponsor the Green New Deal and the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, I will ensure that we price carbon at its source, remove subsidies for fossil fuel companies, restore the authority of the EPA, bring clean water to Flint MI, ban fracking, stop the TPP, and implement the measures and principles articulated by Paul Hawken in ‘Drawdown’, in order to create a just and livable world, with the promise of improved human health, security, prosperity, and well-being."





Mark Gamba, mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon, is another stalwart progressive largely motivated by the Climate Crisis. His opponent is treacherous Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. Gamba declared a Climate State of Emergency, making Milwaukie the first city in Oregon to do so. "There is no question it’s an emergency," he told me. "The Antarctic was 65 degrees last week. That’s an all-time record high temperature. Last summer the Arctic was on fire! The Amazon Basin is on fire! Australia is on fire and billions of animals have perished, potentially driving some species to extinction. Parts of the Midwest were underwater for months. Houston has had three 500 Year floods, three years in a row! Eastern Oregon is flooding-- that would be the dry half of the state. How is this not an emergency? We are facing the greatest existential crisis our species has ever faced. But the federal government, who has known about this for 35 years has not only failed to declare an emergency, it has not done a damn thing, because most of Congress and the con man in the White House are sold out to the fossil fuel industry."

He noted that states like Oregon are trying to do the right thing and that a lot of cities like Milwaukie are doing everything they can to fight climate change. "But the Oil Barons and the timber barons fear a different kind of existential crisis-- one that will alter their ability to amass vast fortunes. And so, they will spend millions lying to loggers, lying to farmers, lying to politicians lying anyone that will listen, telling them that their lives will get worse if we address climate change the way we need to. We need to engage the climate crisis, with the ferocious intensity and all out investment that we engaged in WWII. In the process we need to make sure that we leave no one behind. As a matter of fact we need to use the catalyst of this crisis to lift everyone who is suffering-- out of poverty. To Create millions of family wage jobs, union jobs, jobs with good benefits to do all the things we need to do, to stop Climate Chaos over the next 10 years. We know how to do this, we have all the tools we need, we just need politicians with the backbone to stand up to the billionaires and let them know that the time has come for them to pay up for the damage they have been doing to our planet for decades."

He concluded by reminding us that "our young people are counting on us. The young people from the Sunrise movement have been kicking ass all over this country. Young people are not going to put up with our incremental, profits first, suicide cult. They want to live in the beautiful world we all got to enjoy, and they can. We can do this, we can heal our home and heal our people. It is time to elect a new president and a new Congress, one that is made up of members that are not taking millions from the fossil fuel industry. People like my opponent, Kurt Schrader are not only taking money from all sectors of the fossil fuel industry but he takes money from the Kochs! We can’t have “Democrats” whose actions are as bad as the climate denying Republicans. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for humanity and the effort must be led by the country that has done most of the damage-- the United States of America. It is why I’m running for congress to be a relentless fighter for our future, for the very lives of our children and grandchildren."

Pick One-- AOC Or Everyone Who Endorsed Biden Combined

AOC has 6.2 million Twitter followers, compared with 3.8 million for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and 1.3 million for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. People appear to be interested in what AOC has to say. There's an authenticity about her that attracts people, not lobbyists on K Street, but actual people.

Biden's campaign keeps talking about what a big deal it is that the two conservative freshmen backbenchers from Iowa, Cindy Axne and Abby Finkenauer, are his version of Bernie having AOC (as well as Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal) as surrogates. In the time AOC gathered 6.2 million followers, Axne gathered 11.7K and Finkenauer gathered 23.9K followers. Problem with the Biden campaign's claim, though, is that while hundreds and sometimes thousands of people come to see AOC in Iowa but in their own state, rarely do more than a dozen come to see Axne or Finkenauer.

Washington Post reporter Jada Yuan wrote yesterday about AOC's role in the primary election. Writing from Sioux City yesterday, Yuan wrote that "This past weekend, with the Iowa caucuses looming Feb. 3, Ocasio-Cortez was on a three-day, 10-event mad dash across the state. The senator from Vermont had asked her to be his voice while he was stuck in Washington, as she said, “fighting the good fight on impeachment.” (He got out of impeachment duty unexpectedly early Saturday and made it to Iowa by late afternoon.) Wherever the campaign needed her, she showed up, racing across Iowa’s vast, snowy fields with barely an hour between shaking hands in one town and rousing the crowd in the next. At a canvass launch in Fort Dodge, a dying steel town, so many people were crammed into an upstairs office space that there was barely room for a microphone. At a packed auditorium in the college town of Ames, an additional 400 to 500 people showed up and had to be stationed in a basketball gym."

In Sioux City in the far northwest, at a raucous rally of more than 1,200, she... talked about how her mother had cleaned houses when she was growing up in the Bronx and Westchester County, N.Y., and how “I would do my homework on other people’s kitchen tables, and I would read books on other people’s staircases. And even in high school, my mom cleaned an English teacher’s house for free so that I could have SAT lessons.” She talked about school counselors who discouraged her from applying to Boston University, where she eventually went, and about her first job, at 14 or 15, as a hostess at an Irish pub, where she first learned to pull a Guinness.

“I won’t say which one,” she said, laughing, “because they paid me under the table.”

Before that crowd at Sioux City’s convention hall, she wove this story of being a kid in houses her family could never afford together with Sanders’s background as the son of a paint salesman, and how they’d both wound up on Capitol Hill, “one of the ultimate places where working people aren’t supposed to be,” she said. Then she moved on to imploring the crowd to show up for Sanders at the caucuses and change the country.

And she did it all with that stool and without referencing notes, which her 2020 congressional campaign spokesman, Corbin Trent, says is the norm. “She used a teleprompter once,” says Trent, “and she was pretty good at it, too. She just doesn’t like using it.”

Gary Lipshultz, 77, a liberal who’s been active in Democratic politics since the ’60s, said he’s impressed.

“I mean, you could hear a pin drop in that room, and this is a girl from the Bronx in Sioux City, Iowa!” he said. “I’ve seen 19 presidential candidates this year. I think she had the most magnetism of any of them. Bernie included.” (Lipshultz is caucusing for Warren and came to the rally solely to see Ocasio-Cortez.)

Her big role in the campaign is being called a catalyst for Sanders’s recent surge in the polls. Her support for him runs deep: She was a self-described “scrub” knocking on doors as a Sanders field worker in 2016, well before she ran for Congress. And she was at his side in October, when his campaign had begun to decline after his heart attack, endorsing him (and calling him “Tio Bernie”) to a crowd of 25,000 under the Queensboro Bridge in New York City.

“I think everybody now, even in the small hindsight that we have, sees that as the moment that it turned around,” says the filmmaker Michael Moore, another Sanders loyalist who spoke at all of AOC’s events and is stumping for Sanders in Iowa for 12 days straight. Two of the other three members of the so-called Squad of freshman congresswomen of color, Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), came out with their own endorsements around the same time. “I was there in Queens with a front-row seat,” says Moore, “and I just thought, ‘If she can do that for the next president of the United States, what other wonderful power does she hold in her hands? And what’s the good she’ll do with that?’”

The superstar surrogate

All the senators left in the race-- Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and a barely registering Michael F. Bennet-- have the same dilemma as Sanders: being required to spend long hours, six days a week devoted to Trump’s impeachment trial. They need surrogates to keep their momentum going. In Iowa, Warren had Julián Castro, a former presidential candidate himself, and activist-actress Ashley Judd in New Hampshire. Klobuchar’s Iowa surrogates included her daughter, Abigail, and curling champion and former Olympic coach Phill Drobnick.

But none of the others have been the kind of draw that Ocasio-Cortez has been.

“Look, I’ll say it, she’s the progressive movement’s rock star,” says Stacey Walker, the first African American to be elected as county supervisor in Iowa’s Linn County, which encompasses Cedar Rapids. “So when she comes through, for people in the political space, she’s our Beyoncé.”

At her first headlining event, minus Sanders, on Friday night at Iowa University, several young bearded men waved a giant homemade sign with her initials and the ‘o’ replaced with a globe, while the crowd of hundreds chanted, “AOC! AOC! AOC!”

Sanders is a candidate who presents himself less as a personality than a conduit for a movement. And in the Bernie bubble, Ocasio-Cortez is seen as the future of the movement embodied. What makes her so effective as a surrogate, beyond her star power, is that if you campaign on electing a movement rather that a person, there’s no difference between hearing the message from the 78-year-old white male candidate or his 30-year-old Latina supporter. The perception among her supporters is that a vote for Sanders is also a vote for Ocasio-Cortez to continue her rise.

In fact, she’s been so focused on articulating her vision of the country, of “fighting for people we don’t know,” as she said many times, that at that first event, she spoke for 20 minutes and never mentioned Sanders’s name.

Breathless headlines and articles speculated that the Iowa trip was a prelude for something bigger.

“AOC Is Campaigning for Bernie Sanders in Iowa and Voters Are Falling in Love,” wrote BuzzFeed News.

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wows in Iowa, Probably Not for the Last Time,” wrote New York Magazine.

“ ‘I really hope she is the future’: AOC’s support of Sanders fuels 2024 speculation,” wrote The Guardian.

2024 would be the first year that Ocasio-Cortez, who was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, would be old enough to run for president.

Even her most enthusiastic fans, though, find that time frame a little over-the-top.

“Bernie’s another white male. It’ll be a nice ease for America and then I think in 10 years they’ll be a lot kinder to AOC,” says Daneissa Folker, 24, who’s black and showed up to a morning Cedar Rapids canvass launch after a overnight shift at a hospital emergency room.

“Oh, she’s going to be the first Latina president of the United States,” said Kenia Calderon, 26, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient from El Salvador who saw her at a campaign office in Ankeny, Iowa, outside of Des Moines. “But she has a lot more work to do in Congress.”

“I predict when she’s 45, or longer,” said Calderon’s sister Fatima, also a DACA recipient. “We’ve got to get Bernie elected first.”

Despite the glow, a rocky year

Bernie Sanders is consistent about many things, including the line he used to thank Ocasio-Cortez at the seven of 10 Iowa campaign events he showed up at and the two he phoned into last week.

“I have been in Congress for a few years”-- pause for laughs-- “and I honestly cannot recall any single first-term member of Congress having as much impact on our country as Alexandria has.”

Impact, yes, but it’s been a rocky year.

She’s been a political superstar since her upset primary win in 2018, as the bartender who handily beat a 10-term incumbent who was also the fourth-most-powerful Democrat in Congress.

She ran as a democratic socialist, meaning she hoped to create a benevolent state safety net like that in Finland, but was painted by her political opponents as someone who wanted to turn America into Cuba.

Her Twitter following coming to Capitol Hill was so many millions (then 3.8, now 6.2) that her congressional colleagues asked her to give them lessons. Her family is Puerto Rican and she drew the ire of President Trump, who told her and other members of the Squad to “go back to your own country,” even though all are U.S. citizens and all but one of them was born in the United States.

She drew the ire of Fox News, which studies showed mentioned her an average of 75 times a day for two months and mocked her shoes, designer clothes she wore for a photo shoot and a video of her dancing in college-- one that was meant to embarrass her as carrying out conduct unbefitting a member of Congress, but only served to further endear her to her supporters. She drew the ire of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for joining in a climate-change protest outside Pelosi’s office at the start of the term and for being the one Democrat who voted against reopening the government after the 2019 shutdown, because the bill continued to fund ICE. She got flack on both sides for introducing her first piece of legislation, the Green New Deal, with a flawed summary. Senate Republicans easily defeated it. Pelosi called it “the green dream, or whatever.”

At the same time, she’s earned the praise of the likes of conservative commentator David Brooks for her thorough, tough questioning of witnesses in congressional hearings, with videos of her floor speeches and grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a former ExxonMobil consultant going viral.

“She’s made me feel like I can inspire other people. I’ve shown a lot of people her videos,” said Tyler Terrell, 34. He’d come straight off a night shift working in a local emergency room to see Ocasio-Cortez at a canvassing launch in Cedar Rapids. “I would vote for her tomorrow,” he said. “I think I’ve donated more money to her than any candidate in Iowa.”

At a canvass launch the next day in Ankeny, Esperanza Pintor Martinez, a Mexican immigrant, had waited for over an hour with her 3-year-old daughter, Zarai, to hear Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s important for me as a Latina to bring my daughter here and show her that we can show up and do something, in this country where Trump is trying to extinguish us and make us go away,” she said.

If there was dissent outside that bubble in Iowa, though, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t see it. She traveled with an all-woman team of her campaign manager, a field officer and a photographer. The media was kept at a distance, and she was not available for questions.

As Ocasio-Cortez campaigned her way through Iowa for Sanders, she turned the ups and downs of her first year in Washington into strengths.

At a solo town hall in Cedar Falls at the University of Northern Iowa, she told the story of how she got to Congress and realized she wouldn’t get her first paycheck for an entire month, yet was being attacked by Republicans for being unable to pay for maintaining apartments in both her New York City district and Washington.

“It’s funny because there’s a lot of kind of confusion in messaging, especially from the right,” she said. “One minute I’m a know-nothing. The next minute I’m a mastermind who’s taking over the party. They can’t figure out if I’m an elitist or if I’m embarrassingly poor-- which there’s no such thing.”

She couldn’t afford “a second home,” and she certainly couldn’t afford a second set of furniture, she said, so for her first three months in Congress, she slept on an air mattress. “And it was such a surreal experience, because I’d wake up on that air mattress and I’d walk to my work where the nation’s laws are made and be told all the time that health care for my family wasn’t possible... To be able to walk into a space and be told that our lives are too politically inconvenient to fight for is quite an experience.”

Soon after, a woman stood up, sobbing, and told the story of how her wages were being garnished to pay off her medical debt. Ocasio-Cortez gave her a hug, told her that a system that asked that of her was “morally wrong” and launched into another story. Eighteen months ago, when she had only catastrophe insurance with an $8,000 deductible, she said, she’d tried to pay a doctor with a bag of her cash tips, then burst into tears when the doctor told her she needed a blood test, because she couldn’t afford one.

“And the doctor said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And I said, ‘I’m running for Congress.’”

At that same town hall, an Asian immigrant from Brooklyn stood up and began telling a long and winding story of his awakening to the idea that society saw him as different, and how his time in the military had shown him that people all around the world aren’t so different from one another; they just want dignity, freedom, home, “and if you’re lucky you get to spend that journey with loved ones.”

There was no question in sight, and that had been clear from the beginning, but when the man apologized for taking so long, Ocasio-Cortez laughed and said, “You’re halfway there. Keep going!”

Filmmaker Moore said someone took a picture of him weeping during that moment.

“That guy, he went on and on, and at first it was a little weird, but she sat down on the stool,” he said. “She didn’t have that look of, ‘Hurry up,’ or, ‘Let me interrupt you.’ She let him tell his whole story, and when the story expanded and we all heard it, the people were choked up in the audience. A normal politician would not have let a guy go on that long. That’s what’s different about her. She’s not thinking like a politician. She’s thinking like a human being. She’s not that far from that bag of cash and the air mattress.”

As of September 30, 2019 she had raised $3,354,732 for her reelection bid, taking exactly no corporate money. And so far she has raised nearly a million dollars for her Courage to Change leadership PAC which will be helping finance progressive Democrats, some of whom are being blacklisted by the DCCC.

It's Not Moscow Mitch Who Is Preventing A Debate And Vote On Medicare-For-All... It's Pelosi

Pelosi's designated heir, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, was the last person to co-sponsor Pramila Jayapal's Medicare for All legislation (H.R. 1384). He was number 118 on the list of co-sponsors. That's over half the Democrats in the House for a bill that was introduced on February 27, 2019. Pelosi quickly farmed it out to a bunch of committees, some of which are chaired by hostile and corrupt anti-healthcare conservatives, namely the first two on the list:

• Energy and Commerce- Frank Pallone
• Ways and Means- Richard Neal
• Education and Labor- Bobby Scott
• Rules- Jim McGovern
• Oversight- Carolyn Maloney
• Armed Services- Adam Smith

Pelosi has made it clear to the chairs that she wants the bill slow-walked (to death). Yesterday, all hell broken loose when it came to light that AOC was talking out loud about this again.

She e-mailed her supporters that "The Democratic Party is not a 'left' party. It is a 'center' party. Years of corporate control and compromise with Republicans have brought us down the path where a majority of Democrats think that corporations and capitalism at large can solve poverty and systemic injustice in this country. That sentiment is wrong. And while the Democratic Party itself may not be 'left', there are many progressive leaders in Congress who use the principles of justice to guide us. Electing more people like that is exactly how we shift away from corporate apologism and towards a real democracy... This fundamental reality is clear for all: Our system is not working for working people. As the wealth of the top 0.1% skyrockets, the minimum wage has remained the same since 2009. In NYC, there are three empty apartment units for every one person experiencing homelessness. Families are expected to do more with less, while our media and politicians push this notion that we can’t critique billionaires. But of course that’s false, because billionaires didn’t make billions of dollars, but rather, they took billions from the people who made their products or ran their company."

Chris Armitage is an admirer of AOC and the super-progressive Democrat competing with lockstep Trump puppet Cathy McMorris Rodgers for the eastern Washington state congressional district (WA-05). Last night, Chris told me that "We are fighting for our future, not for self enrichment. If that puts us 'to the left' so be it. In 1958, union membership peaked in the U.S. and that was the same year the bottom 90% of workers held the highest concentration of wealth in U.S. history. That's our fight, while the establishment works to send us back to the 19th century, complete with child labor and robber barons." If you'd like to see Chris working with AOC in the House next year, you can contribute to both of their campaigns here.

This morning, Central Valley progressive congressional candidate Kim Williams told us that she wholeheartedly agrees "with AOC’s sentiments. The system is not working, and our problems are structural. The 200 most politically active corporations in America spent $5.8 billion over the last five years in lobbying and campaign contributions. They write our policies and then our representatives tap dance around reasons why nothing improves at club meetings back home. They own our media and the ads that play before our news casts. They make the investments in field staff and shape who makes it to the polls and who stays home. They don’t just own our politicians, they own the process, and they own the messaging that tells us what we can or can’t change."