Who Is More Likely To Have Been Created In A Right-Wing Super-Lab, Fox-bot Marie Bartiromo Or Arkansas Closet Case Tom Cotton?

The Democratic Party is giving far right extremist crackpot Tom Cotton a free ride this cycle, not bothering to run an opponent against him, although Dan Whitfield, who calls himself a "progressive independent," is running on an independent line. Cotton has raised $7,583,447 for his reelection campaign. Whitfield hasn't raised the $5,000 that would trigger an FEC report. Cotton, who had presidential ambitions before he was outed as a closet case, is a garden variety Trumpist with nothing to recommend him.

Sunday, the NY Times noted that he's been spreading a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was manufactured in a high-security Chinese biochemical weapons lab near Wuhan, although he admits he has no proof of this. The Times noted that "The rumor appeared shortly after the new coronavirus struck China and spread almost as quickly: that the outbreak now afflicting people around the world had been manufactured by the Chinese government. The conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists. But it has gained an audience with the help of well-connected critics of the Chinese government." It looks like another psychopath from TrumpWorld, Stephen Bannon, started it.

Cotton has been carrying on about it for weeks and Maria Bartiromo had him on her show Sunday to spread it further, despite the rumor having been debunked by the scientific community. Yesterday, for example, Chemical Biology Professor Richard Ebright (Rutgers University) told the Washington Post that "there's absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered. The possibility that this was a deliberately released bio-weapon can be firmly excluded."

Cotton on Fox: "We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all." This of course, is a perfect explanation to a typical low-IQ Fox TV viewer incapable of independent thought.

Russian versions of Tom Cotton are blaming the U.S. in the same way he is blaming China.

[I]n Russia the misinformation has been particularly pointed. Russia’s spin doctors have capitalized on the fear and confusion of the epidemic to point the blame at the United States, following a well-established pattern of previous Russian disinformation campaigns and evoking a Cold War-era plot by the KGB to paint HIV as a U.S. biological weapon... [I]n Russia these theories are appearing on prominent mainstream news discussion shows such as Big Game and Time Will Tell on Channel 1, rather than just being confined to squalid corners of the internet. In late January, the firebrand leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia party told a Moscow radio station that he thought coronavirus was an American bioweapon or a big plot by pharmaceutical companies to get richer.

...The overarching theme of the stories that appear across the Russian media, from fringe websites to prime-time television, is that the virus is the product of U.S. labs, intended to kneecap China’s economic development. Some articles have flirted with the idea that Bill Gates or Kremlin nemesis George Soros might have had a hand in the outbreak. In one of the more bizarre turns, a host on Russia’s state-funded Channel 1 floated the idea that the name “coronavirus,” is a veiled reference to its American origins, because U.S. President Donald Trump once handed out crowns at beauty pageants, and corona means crown in Latin. (Coronaviruses are, in fact, a well-established group of viruses whose name is a reference to their shape.)

There is, however, no agreement between Russia’s propagandists about who foretold the virus, with some claiming it was Nostradamus, others say it was the blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga, or maybe even Stephen Hawking.

The Russian messaging fits a now well-established pattern in that it doesn’t look to persuade audiences of a single alternative truth. That would take effort, planning, and persuasion. Modern-day Russian propaganda has instead been described by the Rand Corp. as a “firehose of falsehood,” a steady stream of underdeveloped, sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories intended to exhaust and confuse viewers, making them question the very notion of objective truth itself.

Right now, the main audience is largely domestic, with a sprinkling of conspiratorial reports across the different language services of Sputnik, the more tabloid of Russia’s international broadcasters. The conspiracy theories haven’t featured prominently on English-language Russian government-backed international broadcasters such as RT and Sputnik, however, according to Bret Schafer, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy who studies disinformation. While these channels have historically played around the edges of conspiracy theories, “they still want that veneer of being a legit international broadcaster,” Schafer said.

...[W]hile the Russian media has speculated wildly about the virus, the Russian government has taken the threat seriously, closing its land borders with China and checking the temperatures of reporters and officials at events attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Two people in Russia were diagnosed with the virus, having contracted it on trips to China, but they are reported to have since recovered. While disinformation doesn’t appear to have hamstrung Russia’s response to the virus, the lasting danger may be in its continued erosion of trust in the notion of truth itself.

“Where I do think is it’s unhelpful is that it flies in the face of facts and science,” said Schafer. “The real danger is more the impact it has on trust in information.”

I wonder if someone has been whispering in Trump's ear yet that this could be a plausible excuse to cancel the 2020 elections.

If Trump Were Innocent, Wouldn't He Testify? Don't Hold Your Breath + When Will Jeff Van Drew Leave The Democratic Party And Formally Join The GOP?

Rhapsody in Blonde by Nancy Ohanian

The new ABC News poll by Ipsos (Nov 17) indicates that 51% of Americans believe Trump’s actions in Ukraine were wrong and he should be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate, while 19% say his actions were wrong but he should not be removed from office and 25%-- the dead-enders-- say he did nothing wrong. A new Harvard Institute of Politics poll finds 52% of young Americans-- and 58% of likely general election voters under 30-- want Trump impeached and removed from office. Only 28% of likely voters of that age feel differently. This will get a lot worse for Trump in the coming weeks.

Yesterday, Desmond Butler, reporting for the Associated Press, shattered Trump's plaintive cry that his "perfect call" bullshit is backed up by the Ukrainians. Butler wrote that "Despite his denials, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was feeling pressure from the Trump Administration to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden before his July phone call with President Donald Trump that has led to impeachment hearings."

In early May, staff at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, including then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, were briefed on a meeting Zelenskiy held in which he sought advice on how to navigate the difficult position he was in, according to two people with knowledge of the briefings.

He was concerned that Trump and associates were pressing him to take action that could affect the 2020 U.S. presidential race, the people said. They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic and political sensitivity of the issue.

The briefings show that U.S. officials knew early that Zelenskiy was feeling pressure to investigate Biden, even though the Ukrainian leader later denied it in a joint news conference with Trump in September.

Congressional Republicans have pointed to that public Zelenskiy statement to argue that he felt no pressure to open an investigation, and therefore the Democrats’ allegations that led to the impeachment hearings are misplaced.

“Both presidents expressly have stated there was no pressure, no demand, no conditions, no blackmail, no corruption,” one Republican lawmaker, John Ratcliffe of Texas, argued on the first day of public hearings last week.

The central allegation in the impeachment inquiry is that Trump, through his allies, demanded that Ukraine, which is fending off Russian aggression, launch an investigation that would benefit him politically in exchange for crucial military and strategic support.

Witnesses have detailed, in closed-door depositions and public impeachment hearings, that allies of Trump pressed Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son while withholding military aid and a coveted meeting between the newly elected Zelenskiy and Trump.

The U.S. briefings-- and contemporaneous notes on Zelenskiy’s early anxiety about Trump’s interest in an investigation-- suggest that Democrats have evidence in reach to contradict Republican arguments that Zelenskiy never felt pressure to investigate Biden.

The Associated Press reported last month about Zelenskiy’s meeting on May 7 with, two top aides, as well as Andriy Kobolyev, head of the state-owned natural gas company Naftogaz, and Amos Hochstein, an American who sits on the Ukrainian company’s supervisory board. Ahead of the meeting, Hochstein told Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador, why he was being called in.

He separately briefed two U.S. embassy officials, Suriya Jayanti and Joseph Pennington, about Zelenskiy’s concerns, said the two people who spoke to the AP. Jayanti and Pennington took notes on the meeting, the people said.

After the meeting, Hochstein told the embassy officials about Zelenskiy’s concerns and then traveled to Washington to update Yovanovitch on the meeting. The ambassador, who was fending off a smear campaign, had just been called back to Washington, where she was informed that she no longer had the confidence of the president. She was relieved of her duties as ambassador on May 20.

Jayanti was also one of three witnesses to a phone call in which Trump discussed his interest in an investigation of Biden with his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. The call occurred while Sondland was having lunch with three embassy officials in Kyiv. David Holmes, political counsel at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, has already detailed to House investigators what he overheard. Jayanti and the third witness, Tara Maher, have not been interviewed.

Hochstein, a former diplomat who advised Biden on Ukraine matters during the Obama administration, has also not been questioned in the impeachment proceedings.

The Republican arguments about Zelenskiy’s lack of concern stem from a Sept. 25 joint media appearance by the American and Ukrainian leaders in which Zelenskiy discussed the July call with Trump that effectively launched the impeachment inquiry.

The appearance came shortly after Trump released a rough transcript of the call.

“You heard that we had, I think, good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things. And I-- so I think, and you read it, that nobody pushed-- pushed me,” Zelenskiy said in the appearance with Trump on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York.

“In other words, no pressure,” Trump spoke up to add.

In the impeachment hearings, Democrats have countered that Zelenskiy’s public comments came when he was trying to calm the waters with the U.S. president in the immediate wake of the transcript’s release. The burgeoning scandal has brought further uncertainty for Ukraine with its most important Western partner as the country faces simmering conflict with Russia. Zelenskiy’s May 7 meeting suggests that he had been concerned about U.S. support from the start.

Pelosi wants to get to the bottom of the discrepancy. So she invited Trump to testify-- either in person or in writing. Pelosi on Face The Nation: "If he has information that is exculpatory, that means ex, taking away, culpable, blame, then we look forward to seeing it. Trump could come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants if he wants."

The chances of Trump testifying are zero but Monday morning he said he would "strongly consider" doing so, reminding reporters that "she also said I could do it in writing." And he sent out a delusional tweet on the matter as well:

Abbey Marshall (Politico): "If Trump were to submit a written statement rather than appearing in person, he would avoid live questioning that could put him in danger of accidentally perjuring himself, but his answers would still be considered under oath. Trump previously submitted written answers to questions from special counsel Robert Mueller as part of the Russia investigation. In his report, Mueller said Trump's answers were 'inadequate' and 'incomplete or imprecise.'" Actually, Trump lied in his responses to Mueller and should be charged with perjury.

Meanwhile, one of the DCCC's top recruits for 2018-- they had been trying to get him to go from being the worst Democrat in the New Jersey state legislature to the worst Democrat in Congress for years-- is very likely about to switch parties. Fox is his home away from home. Here he is on Fox with Maria Bartiromo reciting White House talking points word-for-word and performing a Tokyo Rose scene. "What I’m hearing out in the street is-- with most people is they’re kind of tired; they’re kind of worn out; they’re kind of bored, most folks, and they really want to move unless there’s something new and amazing... If there’s something new, something we haven’t heard, something that really rises to the level of treason or, you know, a high crime, that would be different, but we don’t see that. We see little, different variations, hearsay, discussions. Somebody heard something that somebody else said." That was Van Drew, not Lee Zeldin. This is that garbage the DCCC went out and dragged into Congress, knowing full well exactly what he is and has always been. Please listen to himont Fox and then please contribute to the progressive candidates running to replace these garbage Blue Dogs here on the Primary A Blue Dog page.

Sometimes We Forget That The Worst Thing About Trump Is That He's Incapable Of Defending The Country From Real Enemies

The House Republicans' clod-like Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, went running to Fox yesterday to complain to Maria Bartiromo about Justin Amash. "Those who know Justin Amash," whined McCarthy, "this is exactly what he wants. He wants to have attention. Now, you have got to understand Justin Amash. He's been in Congress quite some time. I think he's only ever asked one question in all the committees that he's been in. He votes more with Nancy Pelosi than he ever votes with me. It's a question whether he's even in our Republican Conference as a whole. What he wants is attention in this process. He's not a criminal attorney. He's never met Mueller. He's never met Barr. And now he's coming forward with this? 'Cause this is what he wants. He wants a Sunday show to put his name forward with a question. It's really disturbing, 'cause, when you watch on the floor, you could have a bill with 400 votes all supporting it. There will always be one opposed, and that will be Justin Amash... [I]t's very disturbing. This is exactly what you would expect from Justin. He never supported the president. And I think he's just looking for attention."

Seeking to discredit Amash, McCarthy lied that he had trouble winning his last election. That's juts not true. First of all, despite GOP establishment prompts, there was no primary opponent. In the general election, Amash took 169,107 votes (54.4%) to Democrat Cathy Albro's 134,185 (43.2%). Amash beat the last 3 Republican presidential candidates in the district. McCain lost with 48.6%. Romney got 53.1% and Trump got 51.6%, well below Amash's share. In any case, Amash certainly inspired more voters to come out than McCarthy did in his own race:

• Justin Amash- 169,107
• Kevin McCarthy- 131,113

You know who's probably lovin' this? Putin. Really, this kind of discord is exactly what he paid for in his efforts to get Trump elected. Last week Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, adapted his book, The Shadow War-- Inside Russia's And China's Secret Operations To Defeat America, for an article he penned for The Atlantic, Russia Has Americans’ Weaknesses All Figured Out. "What are Americans supposed to think," he asks, "when their leaders contradict one another on the most basic question of national security-- who is the enemy? This is happening every day on the floors of the House and the Senate, in committee hearing rooms, on television news programs, and in President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Is Russia the enemy, or was the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election just a slow-motion attack on the president and his supporters? Are Russian fake-news troll farms stirring up resentment among the American electorate, or are mainstream-media outlets just making things up?"

U.S. military commanders, national-security officials, and intelligence analysts have a definitive answer: Russia is an enemy. It is taking aggressive action right now, from cyberspace to outer space, and all around the world, against the United States and its allies. But the public has been slow to catch on, polls suggest, and Trump has given Americans little reason to believe that their president recognizes Russia’s recent actions as a threat.

All the uncertainty is part of Vladimir Putin’s plan. America’s confusion is both a product and a principal goal of a qualitatively new kind of warfare that the Kremlin is waging-- a campaign that systematically targets a democratic but politically divided society whose economy, media environment, and voting systems all depend on vulnerable electronic technologies. The essence of this strategy is to attack U.S. interests just below the threshold that would prompt a military response and then, over time, to stretch that threshold further and further. The purpose of this shadow war is simple: to create what Russian General Valery Gerasimov has called “a permanent front through the entire territory of the enemy state.”

In a 2013 article bearing the innocuous title “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight,” Gerasimov, one of Russia’s top military leaders, spelled out his government’s intentions. “In the twenty-first century, we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace,” he wrote. “Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.”

Today Russia is applying this “unfamiliar template” on multiple battlefields at once. During the Cold War, Moscow had few levers by which to manipulate American public opinion or meddle in American political campaigns. But the rise of social media created opportunities for troll farms, and poorly secured email systems offered a bonanza for hackers. According to the January 2017 assessment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Russia interfered in 2016 to “denigrate Hillary Clinton and harm her electability” with “a clear preference for President-elect Donald Trump.” It tried to interfere in the 2018 campaign, and all evidence suggests it will do the same in 2020.

Meanwhile, Russia’s military preparations continue. In outer space, Russia has deployed weapons designed to damage or destroy U.S. satellites, the basis for a host of systems that undergird American military and economic superiority in the world. Under the waves, Russia has deployed two new classes of attack and ballistic-missile submarines that are harder to track and therefore more capable of expanding the nuclear threat right to America’s shores.

And on land, Russia has invaded and occupied territory in sovereign nations, including Ukraine and Georgia, and attempted a coup in Montenegro, threatening treaties and the rule of law that have helped keep the peace in Europe for decades.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea in violation of a peace agreement it had signed with Ukraine, the United States, and Europe. Months later, it then occupied large swaths of eastern Ukraine. In both cases, Moscow sent in special forces posing as something other than soldiers of the Russian Federation. The “little green men” who turned up in unmarked uniforms were supposedly helping ethnic Russians who feared for their safety in what was then part of a sovereign Ukraine, and what is still recognized as such by the United States and the West today.

In retrospect, those events should not have come as a surprise. In his article the year before, Gerasimov was remarkably specific in describing the exact tactics Russia would soon employ. “The open use of forces-- often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation-- is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict,” he wrote.

Yet for years after the end of the Cold War, leaders in the United States and other Western nations were willfully blind to Russia’s hostility. They fell victim to “mirroring,” imagining that the Russians-- and the Chinese, for that matter-- wanted what the U.S. wanted: for them to be drawn into the rules-based international order. But leaders of both Russia and China view that system as skewed toward the interests of the West. Perhaps not coincidentally, China is pursuing a strategy nearly identical to Russia’s, and with similar success-- from stealing U.S. trade and government secrets to manufacturing territory in the disputed South China Sea to deploying offensive weapons in space. Only now, as these events unfold, are decision makers in the American public and private sectors abandoning misconceptions about the kind of relationship they might have with Moscow and Beijing.

“It took a long time to sink in,” former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told me in an interview for my new book.

Yet even when the United States and the West have recognized Russian aggression, the penalties have proved wanting. Following Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the U.S. named and shamed the Kremlin a full month before Election Day, and later imposed a series of sanctions on Russian individuals and entities. But Russian election meddling has continued. What happened in the intervening months and years that allowed Russia to get away with one act of aggression and then lay the groundwork for another, even bolder one? By the simplest measure-- did Russia then stop or soften its attacks?-- the U.S. response has failed. This cycle of Russian aggression, followed by an ineffective U.S. retaliation, followed by more Russian aggression, is the shadow war in action.

The West’s handling of Russian aggression in Europe has been similarly futile. Today, despite U.S. sanctions and public condemnation, Crimea is effectively a part of Russia, and parts of eastern Ukraine remain very much under Russian control. In eastern Ukraine now, Russia may be laying the groundwork to assert more formal authority, offering passports to ethnic Russians-- a step it also took before its 2008 invasion of Georgia. America’s NATO allies in eastern Europe, including the Baltic states, fear they may now be next.

Belatedly, the United States is adjusting its strategy and defenses to meet these new threats. Aboard submarines and surveillance aircraft, in National Security Agency operations centers, and on bases that make up the growing Air Force Space Command, I’ve met many of the Americans who are now on the front lines of the shadow war, doing all they can to shore up their country’s defenses. However, U.S. intelligence officials, military commanders, and lawmakers all agree that an effective response requires firm leadership from the very top.

Despite their own failures, officials from the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations argue that they at least directly confronted Russia over its boldest acts of aggression. Writing in the Washington Post in August, on the tenth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted that the Bush administration had returned Georgian troops from Iraq to help protect Tbilisi, their country’s capital. She wrote that she had personally warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov against forcing out Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s democratically elected president.

Officials in Obama’s administration say he twice warned Putin personally against further election interference, first in a face-to-face conversation at the G20 summit in China in September 2016 and then eight days before the election over a hotline originally designed to help prevent nuclear war.

President Trump has shown far less appetite to confront Russia. He has in fact repeatedly questioned whether Russia is an enemy at all. By accounts from within his own administration, Trump’s reluctance to confront the Russia threat is driven in part by his perception that acknowledging the 2016 interference would diminish his victory. Special Counsel Robert Mueller may have absolved Trump of an explicit conspiracy with Russia. But Trump’s continued reluctance to identify and address the Russia threat may be just as damaging to the U.S. and just as helpful to Russia-- and the possibility that political intrigue will leave America paralyzed suits the architects of Russia’s shadow war just fine.

Trump's Proposal Was Radical-- AOC And Elizabeth Warren Are Reformers

I wish that crazy Trump would just settle down and go spend his days playing golf again so AOC could get Congress working on a sensible agenda. You know who's work I'm really enjoying? Eric Levitz at New York Magazine. Once a poetry lecturer at Johns Hopkins, this guy has been writing excellent essays on the nexus of where politics meets the world of finance. And this pinned tweet is pretty awesome too, don't you think?

His latest, AOC Thinks Concentrated Wealth Is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders, shows he still has a poetic heart. He's become a reliable defender of Alexandria Ocasio every time the forces of the extreme right mass against her and her program. When Hannity spewed out his creed about how "general economic equality is not a precondition for the American dream, but rather, an insurmountable obstacle to it," as a way of trying to rouse his viewers against Ocasio's tax ideas, Levitz noted that "after popularizing the idea of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate earlier this month, the freshman congresswoman recently suggested that the mere existence of billionaires was both immoral, and a threat to American democracy."

What Ocasio said (in an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on Martin Luther King Day) was that she doesn't "think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” The day day Ocasio approvingly quoted an op-ed by the economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, which argued that the purpose of high taxes on the wealthy wasn’t merely to generate revenue, but rather, to safeguard "democracy against oligarchy." Recall, these are the two who have been advising Elizabeth Warren on the matter of her wealth tax proposal.

Hannity’s not buying it. The Fox News host informed his audience Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez had “called the American dream immoral,” and that she wants to “empower the government to confiscate” said dream. “Better hide your nice things,” Hannity advised his audience (whom he ostensibly believes to be composed primarily of billionaires), “because here come the excess police.”

Hannity and his attorney

Hannity was hardly alone in deriding AOC’s antipathy for billionaires as fundamentally un-American. But in reality, there’s nothing foreign or communistic about the idea that concentrated wealth is incompatible with democracy, or all-too compatible with mass poverty. Republicans might call such notions radical. But many of our republic’s founders would have called them common sense.

Compare AOC’s first argument-- that the simultaneous existence of billionaires and poverty is immoral, and thus justifies steeply progressive taxation-- with Thomas Jefferson’s reflections in 1785. During a visit to the French countryside, Jefferson found himself scandalized by “the condition of the labouring poor.” In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote that the extremity of European inequality was not only morally suspect, but economically inefficient. Aristocrats had grown so wealthy, they were happy to leave their lands uncultivated, even as masses of idle workers were eager to improve it. Thus, these proto-billionaires undermined both the peasants’ ability to transcend mere subsistence, and their society’s capacity to develop economically:

[T]he solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands…I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured.

Here is how Jefferson proposes to address the obscene coexistence of concentrated wealth and underemployed workers:

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right…It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state. [Emphasis Levitz's.]

If Ocasio-Cortez’s views are un-American, then surely these words from our third president’s are, as well.

...[AOC is] channeling one deeply rooted strain of American thought on economic morality. And while that strain might have been marginal among the leaders of the American Revolution, it was pervasive among its foot soldiers (there’s a reason the leading propagandist of the war effort, Thomas Paine, was one of the earliest champions of an American welfare state).

Regardless, Ocasio-Cortez’s second argument against the existence of billionaires-- that concentrated wealth is incompatible with genuine democracy-- was something close to conventional wisdom among the founders (including those who opposed democracy).

America’s first political theorists took these truths to be self-evident: that a person could not exercise political liberty if he did not possess a modicum of economic autonomy, and that disparities in wealth inevitably produced disparities of political power.

The notion that political freedom has a material basis did not originate with Karl Marx and the creed of Communism; it was a core idea of the 17th-century British political theorist James Harrington, and his formulation of classical republicanism. A man who does not own the means of his own reproduction can never exercise political freedom, Harrington argued, because “the man that cannot live upon his own must be servant.” Likewise, the man of immense wealth-- whose fortune consigns great masses of men to servitude-- is inevitably a kind of tyrant. After all, “where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be no commonwealth.”

These premises deeply informed the American founders’ conception of republican liberty. The Jeffersonian ideal of a yeoman’s republic derived from the conviction that only independent landowners were politically free-- and only a (very) rough equality in the distribution of land could preserve such freedom. Even a consummate elitist like Alexander Hamilton couldn’t help but echo Harringtonian thinking, writing in the Federalist Papers, “A power over man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”

...Thus, Ocasio-Cortez’s belief in the moral necessity of mass democracy (and women’s suffrage, and the abolition of slavery) would have struck many a Founding Father as radical. But her insistence that true democracy is incompatible with America’s present distribution of property-- in which the richest 0.1 percent of Americans command as much wealth as the poorest 90 percent-- would have struck Jefferson & Co. as tautological. And a large body of political science research suggests that their shared intuition is correct.

All of which is to say: If the right to self-government is an inextricable component of the American dream, then it isn’t AOC who regards that dream as immoral-- it’s Sean Hannity, and every other multimillionaire who believes that legislators should not invent “many devices for subdividing property.”

Yesterday Stephanie Kelton reminded me that Warren's wealth tax proposal went from the 2% she proposed for wealth over $50 million to 3% on wealth over a billion dollars. Trump's proposal called for real confiscation-- 14.25%. AOC and Warren are just sensible reformers. Kelton was on NPR's Marketplace Thursday. She told Kai Ryssdal that "If you control your own currency and you have bills that are coming due, it means you can always afford to pay the bills on time. You can never go broke, you can never be forced into bankruptcy. You're nothing like a household. Ryssdal tried explaining what he took away from his talk with her and what MMT is all about.

Because the government controls how many dollars are out in the economy, Kelton and MMT said Congress and the president shouldn’t worry about balancing the money coming in through taxes with the money going out to fund government programs.

For those of you screaming “Inflation! Inflation! Inflaaation!” at the idea of the government creating fresh money every time it needs to pay the bills, calm down. The MMT economists know about Weimar, Germany, too. If Congress stops worrying about balancing the budget, Kelton said the government could spend too much money into the economy with ambitious programs and end up causing inflation.

That’s where tax policy comes in. Kelton said taxes can act as a “release valve” for inflation.

To wrap your brain around this concept, picture a bathroom sink. Think of the government and its ability to create more money whenever it needs to as the faucet and that bucket area of the sink where the water goes as the economy.

The government controls how much money, or water, is flowing into the economy. It spends money into the economy by building interstates or paying farm subsidies or funding programs.

“And so as those dollars reach the economy, they begin to fill up that bucket, and what you want to do is be very mindful about how full that bucket is getting or you're going to get an inflation problem,” Kelton said.

Inflation is where the sink overflows. If that happens, Kelton said there are two ways to fix it: “You can slow the flow of dollars coming into that bucket. That means the government then has to start slowing it's rate of spending, or you can open up the drain and let some of those dollars out of the economy. And that's what we do when we collect taxes.”

Let's back up for a second and think how this stuff works. Chairman Jay Powell and the gang at the Federal Reserve are the people thinking about the economy's big picture and keeping that water level right.

The Fed uses monetary policy-- interest rates-- to keep that sink we were talking about from getting too empty or too full. The MMT folks want Congress to be doing that using fiscal policy-- government spending and taxing decisions.

Randall Wray, a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College and one of the developers of MMT, said he thinks the Fed should stop focusing on inflation.

“If you ask what I think ideal monetary policy would be, what the Fed really should do is stabilize interest rates at a low level," he said.

The catch, of course, with telling the Fed to just keep interest rates low and controlling inflation with fiscal policy is the political reality in Washington.

“The making of fiscal policy, it’s never neat and tidy. It’s not efficient,” said Sarah Binder, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a political science professor at George Washington University. “The political constraints on members makes it harder to use fiscal policy and to use tax policy,” she said.

Running the federal government the way the MMT economists would if they were in charge would require Democrats and Republicans to change the way they think about fiscal policy and monetary policy.

Wall Street Shill Maria Bartiromo Exposes A "Continued Assault On The Banks" (No, Really)

Watch CNBC's Maria Bartiromo (above) further ingratiating herself with the banksters on Thursday: "While the banks have done wrong, it is time to ask the question, 'what more does the public want from the banks and why are we trying to destroy this vital industry?' Federal Reserve official Dan Tarullo's recent speech on the banks, creating another alternative to break up the mega banks, he is proposing linking liquidity and capital, meaning the more a financial firm relies on wholesale funding, the more capital it must carry. This is one way to target the big supermarket banks like J.P. Morgan, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and others. Those all have large broker/dealer operations and tend to rely more on wholesale funding than traditional banks. My question is 'how come we never hear about the changes that have already been put in place in the last few years?' Debt: it's been cut by institutions. Capital: it is soaring; has been raised by hundreds of billions of dollars across the industry. Compensation has come down, has been cut across the world, in particular severely in Europe. Money in reserve: the highest levels many of these companies have ever seen. That's why some of them are not lending the way you would want. Yet it is probably inevitable that regulators will adopt more measures that go beyond what they are proposing in Europe, the Basel Three, to ensure that the biggest banks have huge piles of cash in the event of another financial Armageddon. While I do not believe the push for this kind of capital, stockpile and other regulations will in fact result in the major banks splitting up right now, it is having a major impact nonetheless. The uncertainty, the confusion-- we don't even know which companies will be deemed systemically important to the economy, which would totally change the terms for those banks and how they would need to operate-- all of these open questions are causing the banks to sit on money, reluctant to hire, reluctant to lend, unable to invest in the future, and hire workers. I would love to hear some of the positives from regulators as opposed to the constant drumbeat of attacks. Banks are not angels, but they are not the devils they are being made out to be. They remain a vital part of what makes capitalism the best system in the history of the world."

Blue America doesn't endorse candidates who aren't 100% pro-Choice and pro-equality. But that isn't to say that we endorse every pro-Choice/pro-equality candidate. We look for courageous men and women of good character who have fully embraced economic and well as social justice. Right now there is a concerted-- and quite successful-- effort to roll back the modest achievements of Dodd-Frank reforming a few aspects of the giant Wall Street rip-off. Despite Bartiromo's wailing, none of the criminal banksters-- not one-- was sent to prison. Not one was arrested or tried or forced to pay back the millions they looted from the economy. I haven't heard a single politician demanding that banksters should be rounded up en masse and put in front of firing squads before their estates are confiscated. If that happened, I might not agree with Bartiromo, but I could at least understand her pathetic caterwauling on behalf of the horribly beset .001%.

Lately we've seen sleazy New Dems make common cause with the Republicans and the banksters to undermine Dodd Frank. EVERY New Dem on the House Financial Services Committee was pimping the Wall Street agenda last week. Fighting valiantly for working families and ordinary bank customers were Maxine Waters (D-CA), Al Green (D-TX), Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), Mike Capuano (D-MA), and Keith Ellison (D-MN). The worst culprits and bank whores on the committee were Jim Himes (New Dem-CT), Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL), Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ), John Delaney (New Dem-MD), John Carney (New Dem-DE), Denny Heck (New Dem-WA), Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL) and David Scott (New Dem-GA). Maria Bartiromo and her CNBC colleagues are part of the captive media pumping those efforts up to the public. ALL of the Blue America candidates want to strengthen financial reform, not weaken it. We asked a couple of them to take a look at what Bartiromo had to say about the banks.

Massachusetts state Rep. Carl Sciortino is running for the congressional seat that Ed Markey is giving up. He faces a gaggle of middle-of-the-road, garden variety Democrats. That's not something anyone will ever label Carl, who helped organize the Massachusetts legislature progressive caucus and takes on the cutting edge issues that everyone else is afraid of. "The worst economic collapse in three generations was created when big Wall Street banks exploited policies of severe under-regulation. Does anyone just assume that banks left to their own devises would protect the interests of the economy and middle class? History would clearly tell us otherwise.

"We have seen far too many predatory loans resulting in foreclosures, a barely-avoided systemic collapse of our financial system, and blatantly illegal practices by some of our largest institutions. When private institutions have so much power over the economic security of our citizens, it is the federal government’s role to make sure they operate on a level playing field and everyday peoples' interests are protected.

"It’s true that banks are a vital part of the economy. But appropriate regulations ensure banks continue to function and support our economy-- instead of being a part of breaking it.

'What more does the public want from banks,' she asks? We should demand full accountability for past illegal and predatory practices, and less whining about how big banks are somehow the victim."

Daylin Leach is also a progressive icon in his state legislature, the Pennsylvania Senate. He's running for the seat Allyson Schwartz is abandoning in northeast Philly/Montgomery County and he sees Bartiromo's outburst a lot like Carl did. "Nobody is assigning religious attributes to banks," he began. "It's not a question of them being 'angels' or 'devils.' Mitt Romney's musing aside, they are not even people. They are financial institutions created to serve us. When they do so honestly, fairly and transparently, they should be applauded. When they cheat, lie, rig the system or violate the law they should be punished and reformed.

"Maria's apologia glosses over the very real damage that some banking practices have wrought on our country. She dedicates precisely one sentence to 'banks have done wrong.' Really? Have they?? The rest of her speech makes the case for not enacting the very changes that will ensure we never have the sort of economic collapse we've recently seen again. If I could distill her speech down to its essence, it would be 'move along, nothing to see here.' The truth is, that consumers are going to need a lot more than that to ever again feel the system works for them."

And Nick Ruiz, a young father and professor, is taking on grotesque and longtime bankster apologist, John Mica in the Orlando area. As always, he sees the problem through the eyes of a typical American family. "The public wants the banks to work for everyone, not just the mega-account holders, and those receiving mega-compensation and mega-bonuses."

Banks are vital, and should be treated as such. But what that means, is that they must function to sustain adequate levels of capital circulation, rather than function to exact austerity and sequestration. Their job is to help people and society through the 'miracle' of reasonable capital security and credit-- not cause people and society enormous pain and suffering. But that is what they have done.

And so now, we have to process that history and decide what to do. It's clear that left to their own devices, too many financial institutions will hoard and speculate, but that does not in itself produce a greater society with a better standard of living. Left to their own devices, too many have acted in such a way as to concentrate their wealth and political power, sequestering the lion's share of the gains to themselves and their most intimate beneficiaries. Their behavior has a wide-ranging effect: it is devastating our society and we must act to alter this historical course now.

The truth of the matter is, a change in this financial aspect of our society will require far more than shoring up capital requirements and the size of different financial institutions-- rather, it will require a progressive change in the ideology of finance and banking itself, along with the redefinition of what banks exist to do. There is a new measure of corporate social responsibility that banks have come to be recognized as worthy of, and it's up to us to be sure that responsibility materializes in our body of laws. In reality, the collective activity of these financial institutions comes to bear upon all sectors of society; from employment, basic scientific research and industry-- to the arts, childhood education, the military, the social safety net and more-- their reach is foundational and constitutive of our entire socioeconomic circulatory system. If they fail-- all of society fails with them. It is this level of understanding, collective reciprocity and solidarity that must come to be expected and managed between Wall Street and Main Street. It is all of this that we must work toward.

Again, if you'd like to help bring about a different world that folks like John Mica, Maria Bartiromo, Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan envision, you can help Carl, Daylin and Nick here.