Up Close And Personal With Bernie In Iowa

Our old friend, Valley Girl, sent me this video with a note. All I can say is that I agree with her assessment and I'm more than happy to share it with you. Valley Girl wrote that she "found this, saw that it was 26 minutes long, and inwardly groaned because I am flat out worn out. I wasn't sure I had the attention span for it. But I started watching, and the time flew past. I just couldn't stop watching it. There were no surprises here in what Bernie said. Bernie was asked sensible questions, not corporate media 'gotcha' questions. And it covered an effective array of topics, given the time limit. The interview was very well-paced, and that's why I just couldn't stop watching from it start to finish. I feel a whole lot less tired after watching!"

When asked about trade policies, I especially liked this response: "We're going to develop trade policies with the input of workers and farmers, trade policies that work for ordinary people, not just the CEOs of large... The function of trade is not just to make large corporations wealthier."

Many of the same people who saddled the Democratic Party in 2016 with Hillary-- very old ones-- are prepared to repeat the same mistake next year. No, Hillary isn't running. But she has a substitute for 2020: Status Quo Joe. You know who's not buying into the centrist bullshit? Young Latinos. A poll commissioned by Latino Decisions was filled with food news for Bernie-- and good news for America.

The balance of power among Latino voters is tilting toward younger voters.  Every 30 seconds a Latino turns 18 years old and becomes eligible to vote. Indeed, the growth of the Latino electorate is largely driven by young citizens turning 18 and less by declining immigration from Latin America. The Latino Community Foundation and Latino Decisions directs our attention to young Latino voters by oversampling this population in a recent survey of California voters.

The likelihood that young Latinos will vote is frequently doubted. This may be one of the reasons candidates and parties typically target voters that are older, more educated and affluent. Despite this perception and inattention by campaigns, the results of the survey show that 70 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 39 said they plan to vote in the March 2020 primary. These figures are consistent with other research by The Latino Community Foundation which found 68% of registered Latinos in California voted in 2016.

Other survey questions also show a high degree of political interest and engagement among young Latinos. Nearly 40 percent said their interest in politics has increased since Trump became president and 71 percent said they read and watch news about politics and current affairs “somewhat” to “very often.” Finally, 84 percent said they are planning to complete the U.S. Census form in 2020, despite efforts on the part of the Trump administration to discourage such participation.

Understanding the power and future direction of the Latino electorate requires us to focus on the values, beliefs and behaviors of young Hispanics. We focus on California because the state will pay a pivotal role in the Democratic primary and the state is home to the largest concentration of Latino voters, making them decisive players in that outcome. Our data suggests candidates should pay closer attention! The political power is shifting toward young Latino voters in California.

Support from younger Latinos in California, who tend to be very progressive, is so strong and so firm that the latest polling shows Bernie winning the most votes in that crucial Super-Tuesday state.

• Bernie- 24%
• Elizabeth- 22%
• Status Quo Joe- 14%
• Mayo Pedro- 12%
• Kamala- 7%
• Yang- 3%
• Klobuchar- 3%
• Bloomberg- 2%
• Tulsi- 1%
• Booker- 1%
• Steyer- 1%
• Castro- 1%

"Moderate" Is A Valued Political Term-- But What Does It Mean And Who Gets To Define It?

America's most popular political leader is pushing positions popular with voters but not with billionaires

The word "moderate" is more popular with voters than words like "liberal" or "conservative," and politicians always try to claim the word for their own agenda (which is rarely much more than careerist). The Republicans-- and their media allies-- relentlessly define their reactionary agenda as "moderate." Repeating a lie often and passionately enough, especially with lots of money behind that lie, will make it so. Even Democrats, who have issues on their side, start too believe the GOP definition of "moderate." And the members of Congress referred to as "moderates" always seem to be the Wall Street-owned New Dems and right-of-center Blue Dogs who make up the foot-dragging Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Their policy agenda is set by their corporate donors and they ruin the progressive agenda and the Democratic Party brand. Remember, it was the New Dems and Blue Dogs who ruined Obamacare by killing the public option. Republicans had no seat at that table. And that decision brought on the 2010 debacle that gave us close to 2 decades of reactionary rule and, ultimately, Donal Trump. “Beware the latest call,” waned Matt Taibbi, “to ‘move to the center’— which is just the same old tune, re-packaged.” Taibbi:

The New York Times meanwhile said the results were a “vindication of the party’s more moderate wing,” and that Democratic winners “largely hailed from the political center.”

NBC said the results were a “gut punch for progressives,” although at the bottom of the piece it noted that high-profile incumbents who “tacked aggressively to the center” also lost-- like Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin concluded, “It’s a good idea to go with a moderate,” and avoid a “fire-breathing progressive.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s basically the same post-mortem we get all the time: Democrats must move to the center, capture the suburbs, and embrace a less policy-specific, more personal-profile-based approach to politics, often pushing candidates with military records.

Meanwhile, after every loss, Republicans insist that moving to the center hurt them (“Conservatives join Trump in blaming moderates for House loss,” was a typical red-audience headline this week).

This results in an entire electorate that appears to continually move right, which in turn accelerates the cycle. Because the electorate is increasingly crazy and conservative, the thinking goes, Democrats need to be even more careful not to stand for anything that might scare “moderates.”

What is a “moderate,” exactly? Nearly every election cycle, the press comes up with a neat catch-phrase that purports to describe this person. The moderate is said to live in the suburbs and can be captured without offering much on the policy front. Implicitly, this voter is white.

…The point is, conventional wisdom is pretty much always wrong, and often spectacularly so. Invented media storylines too often dominate elections. The worst was probably the infamous “beer standard,” i.e. America always picking the candidate it most wants to have a beer with (Slate last time, in a headline it would probably like to forget, declared “There has never been a better candidate to have a beer with than Trump”).

Voters are not skittish, brainless creatures afraid of strong policy proposals. That more accurately describes the politicians and corporate donors who are invested in things staying as they are. Most actual people are living on the edge financially, are angry, and will take policy help from anywhere they can get it.

Polls today show Americans in large majorities now support expanded Social Security, drug re-importation, single-payer health care, free college, and they want Medicare to be able to negotiate lower drug prices. These positions would do well if any party threw its support behind them.

But conventional wisdom, once again, will likely insist heading into 2020 that something other than policy will matter, when it comes to picking candidates. CNN earlier this year, quoting pols and consultants, actually said that “in the era of Trump, where uniqueness is prized,” Democrats should search for “candidates with distinct backgrounds.”

Two days earlier, Taibbi had published his interview with Bernie in which he warned against the Democratic establishment’s core: “complacency and insisted it would be a ‘very, very serious mistake’ if Democrats did not at least try to pass progressive legislation, so as to call Trump’s populist bluff. Failure to do so, he implied, would mean ceding vital territory to Trump, a man with ‘no core beliefs.’ By now Bernie should know that plenty of careerists in his own party have the same allegiance to core beliefs that Trump does. He told Taibbi that Tuesday “night was a significant rejection of Trumpism. Not only did the Democrats regain control of the House, which was the most important development, Democrats won seven governors’ races. Democrats won 300 races at the state legislative and in the four states that Trump won in order to get his Electoral College majority— Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan— all four of those Senate Democratic candidates won. And three out of the four [Democratic] candidates for governor won…

Bernie told him that all the ‘moving to the center bullshit’ “was the line that they had which enabled Republicans to gain control of the Senate and the House and the White House and for Democrats to lose almost 1,000 seats in the previous nine years. Of course, that’s what the establishment will say, and that’s what the establishment Democrats will say. But the truth is that what has happened in this election is a significant step forward in terms of the revitalization of American democracy. It wasn’t moderate Democrats or conservative Democrats who got young people into the political process. It wasn’t moderate Democrats who increased voter turnout in this election compared to four years ago, I think by almost 50 percent. It wasn’t just moderate Democrats who won incredibly great victories for the House. There were some moderates, to be sure. But I think the Washington Post is going to be very surprised at who shows up on the first day of Congress and gets sworn in, because that is going to be the most progressive freshman class in the modern history of the United States. Many of these folks are not just women, not just people of color, who campaigned on Medicare-for-all, raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks, campaigned on making public colleges and universities tuition-free, of undoing Trump’s tax breaks for billionaires. The political establishment notwithstanding, the future belongs to progressives.”

He chose not to comment on the battle over House leadership but did say that “the Democrats in the House have got to come out with a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of working people. And that leads to— as you know, the Medicare-for-all bill I introduced, which is to be implemented over four years, lowers the eligibility age from 65 to 55, covers all of the children, and lowers the cost of prescription drugs. My guess is that about 80-percent of the American people would support a proposal like that. It’s wildly popular. And that’s what the Democrats have got to do. They’ve got to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, they’ve got to make public colleges tuition-free and they’ve got to lower student debt. All of these proposals are enormously popular. And they’re good public policy. And here’s what I think, Matt, that maybe nobody else in the world believes. As you know, Trump is a 100-percent political opportunist, who has no political views other than how he can win elections… He has no core values. I would not be shocked that if the Democrats passed popular, good legislation, that Trump would look around him and say, ‘Hey, why not? What do I give a damn?’ And he may come on board, because ultimately he doesn’t believe in anything except winning. So I believe it’s terribly important that the Democrats come out of the gate full-steam ahead and start passing really good legislation that puts Trump and the Republicans on the defensive.”

He continued, “[P]eople can chew bubble gum and walk at the same time. Democrats can do that. And if all they’re going to do is investigate Trump, that would be, in my view a very, very serious mistake. I think finally we are going to have oversight over Trump’s behavior. And I think investigations are absolutely appropriate. But simultaneously, people who are making $11 an hour are not worrying about investigations. People who have no health care, or can’t afford prescription drugs, are not worried about subpoenas. People who can’t afford to send their kids to college are not worried about another investigation. So it would be a tragic mistake in my view if all the Democrats did is focus on investigations. They must, must, must go forward with a progressive agenda to win the support of the American people. Is Pelosi listening or just running around and sweet talking freshmen about her ultra-conservative plan to re-institute PAYGO and kill all hopes of a progressive agenda?

For progressives to cede the word "moderate" to the New Dems and Blue Dogs, let alone Republicans, what does that make forward thinking Democrats like Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Judy Chu, Jamie Raskin, Ted Lieu, Barbara Lee, Katherine Clark and Jan Schakowsky? Radicals? Extremists? How is that possible, since these are the people who are pushing the ideas that are most popular with the most voters?

Jeff Bezos, America's Richest Man, Gets A Bill Named For Him: Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies

Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS for short) is the Senate version of a bill Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced to Congress yesterday. It's not popular with plutocrats and oligarchs. One of their newspapers, the Wall Street Journal phrased their coverage as "an unusual public spat between Amazon.com Inc. and Sen. Bernie Sanders over workers’ wages... Sanders specifically targeted Amazon founder and leader Jeff Bezos, contrasting his vast personal wealth with the compensation of the companies' lowest-paid workers." It goes well beyond Bezos-- and Bernie.

First off, the House version, doesn't specifically target Jeff Bezos. Ro Khanna's bill-- co-sponsored by progressives Nanette Barragán (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Gwen Moore (D-WI), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD)-- is called The Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act and like Bernie's Senate version would make large corporations, not the taxpayer, pay for the costs of federal programs that low-wage employees turn to in order to make ends meet, such as nutrition or housing assistance. Khanna: "Companies are short-changing their employees by not paying a living wage. These companies are creating a drain on the economy by underpaying workers and should be responsible for covering the cost of the programs their employees rely on to make ends meet. It is my hope that this bill will further incentivize these companies to pay their employees a living wage without cutting their hours."

When large corporations underpay their employees, it hurts working families who are living paycheck to paycheck. It also places a burden on the taxpayer, who pay for the benefits and services low-wage workers need to help put food on the table or ease housing costs. In fact, low wages cost taxpayers $152.8 billion per year according to a 2015 University of California, Berkeley Labor Center study.

The reasoning behind the Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act is simple: An employee making minimum wage bagging groceries should not have to rely on nutrition assistance to put food on the table for his or her family. And taxpayers should not have to subsidize low-wage workers so wealthy corporations can get richer.

The Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act would make large corporations pay their fair share. By levying a direct fee equal to the public assistance each corporation’s employees are eligible to receive, the legislation is designed to compel all employers to pay their employees fairly with the goal that ultimately no company would be taxed for underpaying their employees.

Covered public assistance programs in the bill include:

• Medicaid
• Section 8 Housing
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs (administered under Child Nutrition Act)

Barbara Lee didn't mince words: "Every American should have the basics: affordable housing and a livable wage. It is unconscionable that CEOs siphon off billions to line their own pockets while their employees struggle to make ends meet" and called the bill "a bridge over troubled water for Americans in need by strengthening essential programs for struggling families. Jamie Raskin got to the same conclusion from a different path: "It's very simple. The public should not be in the business of subsidizing giant corporations when they take the low road and pay inadequate compensation to their workers. It's not fair to the taxpayers and it's not fair to the vast majority of high-road businesses which pay their employees a fair day's wage for a fair day's work."

These were some of Bernie's remarks about the bill on introduction:

At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the 3 wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent, the American people are tired of subsidizing multi-billionaires who own some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America.

Let me give you just a few examples of what we are talking about.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is the wealthiest person on earth.

Today, his net worth is $168 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.]

Since the beginning of this year, his wealth has increased by about $260 million-- every single day.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bezos continues to pay many thousands of his Amazon employees wages that are so low that they must rely on food stamps, Medicaid or public housing in order to survive. Programs that are financed by middle class taxpayers.

According to a recent report from the New Food Economy, one out of three Amazon workers in Arizona and 2,400 in Pennsylvania and Ohio need food stamps in order to feed their families.

...In April, Amazon reported that half of its workforce makes less than $28,500 a year-- about $13.67 an hour.

Even that figure is misleading because it doesn’t include an estimated 40% of Amazon’s workforce who are employed through temporary staffing firms.

...But let me be clear: This discussion is not just about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

The Walton family of Walmart is the wealthiest family in the country with a net worth of nearly $175 billion.

This one family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

Meanwhile, just like Amazon, Walmart pays its workers’ wages that are so inadequate that many of them are forced to depend upon public assistance programs in order to survive at a cost to taxpayers of some $6.2 billion each and every year.

The fast food industry is another major recipient of corporate welfare.

While the co-owner of Burger King, Jorge Paulo Lemann, has a net worth of more than $25 billion, low wages at this fast-food chain cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $356 million a year.

And Burger King is not alone.

McDonald’s workers are actually encouraged to sign up for government assistance-- meaning the company fully acknowledges that it pays its employees wages that are non- livable.

Shockingly, 52 percent of all fast food workers rely on public assistance programs to make ends meet.

...The working families and middle class of this country should not have to subsidize the wealthiest people in the United States of America. That’s absurd. That’s what a rigged economy is all about.

The fact is that if employers in this country simply paid workers a living wage taxpayers would save about $150 billion a year on federal assistance programs and millions of workers would be able to live in dignity and security.

That is why we are proposing legislation to demand that Mr. Bezos, the Walton family of Walmart and other billionaires get off of welfare and start paying their workers a living wage.

Specifically, this bill would establish a 100 percent tax on corporations with 500 or more employees equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low-wage workers. For example, if a worker at Amazon receives $2,000 in food stamps, Amazon would be taxed $2,000 to cover that cost.

Our legislation gives large, profitable employers a choice: Pay workers a living wage or pay for the public assistance programs their low-wage employees are forced to depend upon.

Let us be very clear: We believe that the government has a moral responsibility to provide for the vulnerable-- the children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled.

But we do not believe that taxpayers should have to expend huge sums of money subsidizing profitable corporations owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country.

Amazon's p.r. department, sounding like a more educated and slicker version of Trump, denied everything.

Wells Fargo-- The Anti-Medical Marijuana Bank-- Strikes Again

There was some excellent news out of Florida, where the primaries are next Tuesday. The progressive in the race, Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, is surging into first place. A new poll shows him with 33% while his two closest rivals, conservatives Gwen Graham and Philip Levine are each down to 22% and the other progressive in the race, Jeff Greene, is languishing at 10%. Gillum's message is finally resonating and Democratic voters are realizing he isn't just another garden variety lesser-of-two evils Democrat. He's touring the entire state and just did raucous overflow rallies with Bernie Sanders in Tampa (above) and Orlando, giving Florida voters a chance to see what dynamic, bold progressive leadership looks like.

But not all the new was. Right at the time Elizabeth Warren was delivering her sweeping anti-corruption proposal, I learned about another Wells Fargo outrage. Wells Fargo has long been one of the most corrupt banks in America, making a business of ripping off their customers. No one should be banking with them but Nikki Fried, Democratic candidate for agriculture commissioner was. Was. No more. Wells Fargo told her to take her business elsewhere because of her advocacy and interaction with the medical marijuana industry. Medical marijuana is legal in Florida, despite GOP efforts to defy the will of Florida voters.

“They told me my account was being flagged because of my political platform,” Fried said during a news conference at the Capitol. She lists greater access to medical marijuana as one of the main issues of her campaign.

Many large banks have refused to do business with the burgeoning industry of legal marijuana. While some states have legalized it for medical or recreational purposes, it remains illegal under federal law to grow, sell or possess marijuana.

“It is Wells Fargo's policy not to knowingly bank or provide services to marijuana businesses or for activities related to those businesses, based on federal laws under which the sale and use of marijuana is illegal even if state laws differ,” Wells Fargo spokesman Michael Gray wrote in an emailed statement in which he did not answer a series of questions sent to the bank about the matter. “We continually review our banking relationships to ensure we adhere to strict regulatory and risk guidelines.”

Fried says Wells Fargo took it a step too far when it asked her end the banking relationship.

“I’m a candidate. I have a right to be heard,” Fried said. “I am not touching the plant, I am not selling the plant, I’m not producing the plant. I’m simply advocating for the expansion of medical marijuana.”

Fried provided emails, starting on July 11, from Wells Fargo employees asking if she would be receiving donations from the medical marijuana industry.

“Can you confirm the types of transactions expected for this customer and if any of the transactions will include funds received from lobbyists from the medical marijuana industry in any capacity?” Antoinette Infante, Wells Fargo senior relationship manager, wrote to Fried campaign treasurer Gloria Maggiolo.

After Fried campaign officials confirmed they would receive funds from the industry, and that Fried herself was a former lobbyist for the industry, the bank called on Aug. 3 to say the account would need to be closed. An Aug. 14 letter followed, giving the campaign 30 days to end the account.

The Fried campaign switched its funds to BB&T Bank. A political committee supporting Fried, Florida Consumers First, also switched its funds to BB&T.

As of Aug. 10, Fried’s campaign has received at least $7,500 from medical marijuana industry executives and employees, including $3,000 from Jake Bergmann, CEO of Surterra Wellness, one of the companies licensed by the state to sell marijuana for medical uses. Florida Consumers First has received $50,000, including $35,000 from Bergmann.

Fried said she hasn’t heard of any other candidate in the country having their bank suspend their account over medical marijuana industry donations. Since the race for Florida agriculture commissioner isn’t a high-profile race nationally, she suspects someone alerted the bank to the issue, but wouldn’t speculate who it was.

Even Without Paul Ryan To Kick Around, Randy Bryce Is Poised To Turn A Red Seat Blue

Unless you can make a clear case for outright villainy-- a really clear case-- Democratic primary voters do not like Democratic primary opponents attacking each other. They hate it. Republican primary voters love to see their primary candidates attacking each other, but Democrats want the attacks saved for general elections, not primaries. Sunday, Randy Bryce shared a stage in Lake Geneva with the very negative and desperate vanity candidate running against him. For her sake, I hope she learned that lesson-- and the one about being careful about what you wish for. Her barrage of negative slurs against Bryce, the clear front-runner, angered the audience and won her no votes. Bryce owned the room and refused to even acknowledge her weak, mean-spirited attacks. He concentrated on the positive messages of his campaign and on going after Bryan Steil, the Paul Ryan clone, Ryan is trying to deliver the GOP nomination to. He opened his remarks by saying on his first day in Congress he would either sponsor or co-sponsor a Medicare-for-All bill. That's what people want to hear and they reacted with loud, sustained cheers.

Saturday, Bernie is back in southeast Wisconsin, this time in Janesville (Ryan's hometown) for a rally with Randy at the legendary UAW 95 headquarters at 5PM. That'll be Bernie's second rally with Randy in Wisconsin this year. This morning, the 10,000 member South Central Building Trades union, which has always endorsed Ryan in the past, unanimously endorsed Bryce. How's that for momentum?

Monday, a few hours after the debate, Dan Kaufman ran a so-so piece about Wisconsin in the New Yorker, The Fall Of Wisconsin And The Rise Of Randy Bryce. Like so many observers have, Kaufman credits the meteoric rise of Bryce to the introductory video launched a year ago. It went viral and Bryce attracted both celebrity supporters and ordinary folks who would stop him on the street to talk and share their own stories about their families with him.

Kaufman had met Bryce while Bryce was working on the Scott Walker recall effort and Kaufman was covering it for the magazine. They stayed in touch.

CNN was hosting a town hall with Paul Ryan in Racine, a small city on Lake Michigan twenty-five miles south of Milwaukee, in the southeastern corner of the state. It was Ryan’s first town hall in nearly two years-- which some took as a sign that Bryce’s early success was making the House Speaker nervous. As I drove through town to the venue, I saw nearly as many vacant storefronts as open businesses. The industrial jobs that had sustained the local community for generations were mostly gone. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the passage of nafta and China’s admittance to the World Trade Organization have cost Wisconsin nearly seventy thousand manufacturing jobs, most in its industrial southeastern corridor. In the Walker era-- a period during which Republicans have maintained nearly uninterrupted control of the state’s governor’s office, legislature, Supreme Court, and most of its seats in Congress-- Wisconsin has also experienced a large decline of the middle class. Its child-poverty rate has increased dramatically, while funding for K-12 education and the state’s public university system has been sharply reduced. And union membership in the state, which had been fourteen per cent when Walker took office, has fallen by almost half-- a change that can be traced directly to the anti-union laws that Walker has championed.

A few hours before the town hall was scheduled to begin, dozens of protesters gathered nearby, on a patch of grass blocked off by barricades-- the sanctioned protest area. Many held sheets of paper with their Zip Codes written in black marker, proof of their residency in Ryan’s district and of their exclusion from a forum with their representative. Bryce showed up at around 5:30 p.m., trailed by campaign staff, intending to join the protesters. He was greeted like a rock star. The crowd was mostly older white union workers and Latino immigrants—the kind of voters Bryce was counting on to help him flip the district. Ryan had first won election to Congress in 1998, and the Democrats who had challenged him in 2014 and 2016 each failed to attract more than forty per cent of the vote.

Yet in the lead-up to the CNN town hall, Ryan’s poll numbers were falling. His campaign staff had begun arguing that Bryce was nothing more than a “liberal agitator,” but Bryce’s campaign had reminded people that Wisconsin’s First District wasn’t really that conservative a place-- it went for Barack Obama in 2008, and only narrowly for Mitt Romney in 2012, when Ryan served as the Republican Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee. And Ryan’s awkward relationship with Donald Trump-- occasionally issuing a mild rebuke of Trump’s latest sexist or racist outrage while supporting and serving as a prominent ambassador for the President’s agenda-- wasn’t playing particularly well back home.

Outside the town hall, Bryce did a local-TV interview, took selfies with a few young supporters, and talked to a reporter from Rolling Stone. Eventually, Bryce and his campaign crew headed for downtown Milwaukee, to watch the event from a bar. “You’re like a real-life superhero, Randy,” a woman sitting next to him said. Bryce smiled politely, then turned back to his phone, which he was using to tweet responses to Ryan’s performance. Bryce’s background would make him something of a novelty in Congress, which has long been occupied by the professional class. Of the four hundred and twenty-eight current members of the House of Representatives, three hundred and forty-seven have backgrounds in law or business. Only three are tradespeople. For many of Bryce’s supporters, though, his greatest appeal is that he is an ordinary worker, like them. “We don’t need a lot of people with classroom knowledge,” a retired Kenosha plumber named Tom Nielsen told me. “We need people who have experience in the field and know people who have suffered, been discriminated against, and got thrown under the rug and mistreated. These people deserve better.”

Bryce grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the southwestern edge of Milwaukee. His stepfather, Richard, was a beat cop, and his mother, Nancy, was a doctor’s secretary whose grandparents were immigrants from Poland. Bryce’s only memory of his birth father, a Mexican immigrant, is a box of crayons marked with “Enriquez”-- his father’s last name. Richard adopted Bryce and helped raise him. A proud patrolman, Richard could be forgiving, like the time he pulled over a group of Bryce’s teen-age friends for speeding and let them go without a ticket. But he could also be severe. When Bryce was eleven, Richard took him into his precinct house, put him in a cell, and closed the door. “It was a warning to follow the right path,” Bryce said.

... [Byrce] began to worry about Walker, who was then the Milwaukee county executive. Already a declared enemy of the county’s public-employees union, Walker was winning praise from national conservative organizations for his anti-union positions. In 2010, when Walker ran for governor, Bryce became one of the most active participants of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, an umbrella group of the Milwaukee-area A.F.L.-C.I.O. locals. The Act 10 fight that followed Walker’s inauguration in January, 2011, made international headlines-- it came in the wake of the Arab Spring protests on the other side of the world, and was seen as a forerunner of the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged the following September. During the protests, tens of thousands of people descended on Madison every day, including Bryce, who began taking off work to go to the capitol, driving two hours each way, morning and night. This commitment soon cost him his job working on an addition to a Nestlé plant in Racine. It also contributed to the strain on his marriage, which eventually ended in divorce.

Walker, for his part, had relished the conflict that Act 10 created. And, after he survived the recall effort, and watched the movement that had risen up to oppose him mostly dissipate, he became a politician whom conservatives talked about as a potential future President. In 2015, during a question-and-answer session at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Walker was asked what he would do to confront Islamist terrorists such as isis. “If I can take on a hundred thousand protesters, I can do the same across the world,” he said.

While other Act 10 participants went back to their day-to-day lives, Bryce kept protesting: he participated in rallies for immigrants’ rights, Black Lives Matter, a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, and a unionization effort at Palermo’s Pizza, one of the largest frozen-pizza makers in the country. Around the same time as the union drive, Palermo’s terminated eighty-four workers who could not produce documents confirming their residency status. The company claimed that the firings were unrelated to the union campaign, but the workers didn’t see them that way. About a hundred went on strike, and Bryce joined them. He was the only member of the building trades to walk the picket line. “Whatever’s been going on, I’ve usually been involved with,” he told me once. “Just showing up and holding a sign and talking to people. It’s a way of saying, ‘I’m an ironworker, and I am with your cause.’ It’s something that keeps me going.”

...During the past seven years, Wisconsin’s Republicans, enabled by a combination of dark money, gerrymandering, and a weak Democratic opposition, have enjoyed unfettered control of the state. Tax cuts, deregulation, and other corporate-friendly policies have been at the top of the state government’s agenda, most recently exemplified by the four-and-a-half billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies that Walker and his allies want to give to Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer, in exchange for building an LCD-screen factory near Racine. Last month, Trump, Ryan, and Walker spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony of Foxconn’s plant. Bringing Foxconn to Wisconsin “is the most vivid picture of what a strong and healthy economy looks like,” Ryan said. Afterward, Trump held a fund-raiser for Bryan Steil.

Dale Schultz, a moderate former Republican state senator, once described to me a Republican caucus meeting he attended a few years back with a prominent conservative lobbyist, which in his view illuminated his party’s current approach. “All we need is fifty per cent of the vote plus one,” the lobbyist told Schultz and his colleagues. “If we get any more than that one vote, then we didn’t push the state far enough in the direction we want to push it, because we had votes to spare. And if we lose an election we’ll win it back, and then we’ll start up where we left off.”

Conservative activists see a model to emulate in Wisconsin. “Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 did not lay the groundwork for Republican political dominance,” the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist wrote after Trump’s victory. “But the March 2011 signing of Act 10, a dramatic reform of public-sector labor laws, by Wisconsin’s Scott Walker certainly did.” Since Walker signed Act 10, Republicans in many other states have passed measures restricting collective bargaining. An extreme version of Act 10 was passed in Iowa in early 2017, after Republicans seized the governorship and both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1998. The bill, supported by Americans for Prosperity-Iowa-- a non-profit group funded by the Koch brothers-- eviscerated collective-bargaining rights for Iowa’s hundred and eighty thousand public workers, and it went further than Act 10 by placing some restrictions on even police and fire-department unions.

The number of right-to-work states, meanwhile, now stands at twenty-eight-- Missouri, West Virginia, and Kentucky have joined the ranks since Trump’s election. A 2018 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that right-to-work laws correlate with lower vote shares for Democrats up and down ballots, from Presidential candidates to state legislative races. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Janus v. afscme nationalized right-to-work for public employees-- a coast-to-coast threat to union funding and Democratic Party power.

Walker knew that by crushing labor in Wisconsin he could atomize his opposition. Whether the state’s labor movement can ever reacquire its past political power is unclear, but, after seven years of Republican control of the state government, Wisconsin’s beleaguered Democrats have begun winning small victories. Just a few months before Ryan announced his retirement, in a special election for an open state senate seat, a Democrat named Patty Schachtner trounced her Republican opponent in a rural western district that Trump had carried by eighteen points in 2016. “Everything we have done is at risk if we don’t win in November,” Governor Walker warned in a fund-raising e-mail after Schachtner’s victory. Since then, liberals have won an open seat on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court and another state senate race.

Bryce has drawn inspiration and hope from those victories, as he has in the success of underdog progressive candidates across the country this year, and in the recent wave of teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma. “We are going to have to go back to things like that to get what we need,” Bryce told me. “Without people doing the work, nothing is going to happen.”

Bryce is a private kind of guy, taciturn and brooding. Sometimes I get the feeling he hates politics and is revolted by politicians. I know he hates the negativity and slime and I worry if he'll stay in this for long enough to achieve his lofty, heart-felt goals. Sometimes I think he'd rather be "working the iron" than dealing with campaign bullshit and the ugly attacks a panic-stricken NRCC is planting about him, often through useful idiots. Yes, exactly, he's just like the rest of us, a flawed human trying to do his best in a new environment that must be scaring the crap out of him. He's not politically ambitious. He's ambitious to make the country a better place.

November's Midterms Will Be A Referendum On Trump

The Republicans always planned that the Midterms would be all about the greatness of their tax cuts. That isn't working at all. And Plan B probably don't either. The Hill reported that they're "working on a backup plan in case the GOP tax law does not turn out to be a strong selling point for their party in this year’s midterm elections. While the booming economy is expected to be a core pillar of the GOP’s midterm messaging, it’s unclear whether the party is going to get credit for the tax law, which has lagged in polls."

Unfortunately for the Republicans-- and luckily for America-- the voters seem to have already made up their mind about Trump and his congressional enablers... and none of the plans from McConnell and Ryan-- the two least admired political figures in American politics-- are going to turn things around. The latest poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal shows why. Top line: "By a whopping 25-point margin, voters say they’re more likely to back a congressional candidate who promises to serve as a check on Trump. And by a similar margin, they say they’re less likely to vote for someone who has supported the president on most issues."

At the same time, six-in-10 are satisfied with the U.S. economy, and a plurality of voters give Trump credit for the economic improvement.

Despite that economic optimism, however, the poll shows that Democrats enjoy a 10-point advantage on congressional preference, with 50 percent of registered voters wanting a Democratic-controlled Congress, versus 40 percent who want a GOP-controlled one.

Democrats held a 7-point edge on this question back in April, 47 percent to 40 percent.

What’s more, Democrats are more enthusiastic about the upcoming midterms, with 63 percent of them registering either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale of interest, while just 47 percent of Republicans signal the same level of enthusiasm.

And 48 percent of voters indicate they’re more likely to support a congressional candidate who promises to provide a check on President Trump, compared with 23 percent who say they’re less likely to support such a candidate.

By contrast, a majority-- 53 percent-- say they’re less likely to vote for a candidate who supports the president on most issues.

The margins are even more pronounced among voters living in competitive states and congressional districts, with more than 50 percent of them signaling their support for a candidate who serves as a check on Trump.

“The polling data points to a repudiation of Donald Trump and to the benefit of Democrats,” says Democratic pollster Fred Yang, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “I think this is becoming a traditional midterm where the party controlling the White House is going to lose seats.”

...Asked about the possibility of impeaching President Trump, 25 percent said their vote would be a signal of opposition for impeaching him, and 22 percent said it would be a signal of support for impeachment.

Thirty-three percent said their vote wouldn’t be a signal either way about impeachment, and another 20 percent said they were unsure.

Finally, 37 percent of voters say that-- based on what they’ve seen, read or heard-- Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign did collude or work secretly with Russia, while 34 percent disagree; 28 percent didn’t know enough to say.

Those findings are essentially unchanged from the December 2017 NBC/WSJ poll.

Additionally, a combined 53 percent of voters say they either had “some” or a “great deal” of confidence in special counsel Robert Mueller conducting a fair and impartial investigation, versus a combined 40 percent who have little to no confidence.

And 46 percent believe that Mueller’s investigation should continue, while 36 percent think it should be ended.

The Boston Globe noted that from statewide contests to local races all politics are about Trump. Over 40 state legislative seats have flipped from red to blue since he occupied the White House, the latest on Tuesday in a Missouri state Senate seat he had won. The DCCC is undermining local autonomy and their own grassroots to interfere in local primaries to elect the shittiest batch of unelectable garbage candidates imaginable. Nothing could elect the crap careerist candidates... from Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ) to Gil Cisneros (Lottery Winner-CA) they are gettng the nominations for... except Trump hatred.

How Much Longer Will It Take To Institute Single Payer Here In America?

Saturday evening Bernie was in Pittsburgh Saturday for a Don’t Take Away Our Health Care rally at the Convention Center. He addressed Republican Pat Toomey directly. I hope he takes the same message to Ted Cruz in Texas and to Jeff Flake in Arizona, two Republicans up for reelection in 2018. (Dean Heller has already said he’s voting no.) Sunday he brought the message to Rob Portman in Columbus and then to Shelley Moore Capito in Charleston. Listen to his 27 minutes speech above; you can’t hear his points enough. “This so-called health care bill passed in the House last month is the most anti-working-class piece legislation passed by the House of Representatives in the modern history of this country,” he said to loud applause. “And the Senate bill... is even worse… We will not allow 23 million Americans to be thrown off of the health insurance they currently have in order to give over $500 billion in tax breaks to the top two percent, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, and to other multi-national corporations... What kind of a country are we if anyone can come before you and talk about cutting health care for children with disabilities in order to give tax breaks to the richest people on earth?”

After the Pittsburgh rally he appeared briefly on Meet the Press, where he told Chuck Todd much the same message he explained to the audience in Pittsburgh (and Columbus and Charleston), even though Todd just wanted to talk about disunity and divisiveness. Bernie’s learned how to use questions like that to springboard into getting to the message he wants to deliver. “For the last 9 years,” he replied to a question about why Ossoff lost, “Democrats have lost the White House, we’ve lost the Senate, we’ve lost the U.S. House. Two-thirds of governor’s chairs are controlled by Republicans. A thousand seats have been lost the Republicans in state legislatures all over this country… There is a massive amount of demoralization on the part of the American people, with the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party. I think the American people, in many cases, are seeing themselves work longer hours for lower wages. They’re worried about their kids not being able to go to college. They’re worried about what’s going to happen to them when they are retiring. They’re seeing almost all new income and wealth going to the top 1 percent. There is an enormous amount of pain in this country, Chuck. People are saying, ‘Does anybody in Washington know what’s going on in my life-- that I’m 60 years of age and I have nothing in the bank and I’m going too be retiring in 5 years or that I have $50,000 in college debt and can’t find a decent job. Does anybody know that? Do the Republicans know it? Do the Democrats know it?’ And I think what the Democrats have got to say is that we will be on the side of the working class of this country. We are prepared to stand up to Wall Street and the drug companies who rip us off everyday and the insurance companies. [at this point Todd got nervous that Bernie was attacking his advertisers and started trying to cut him off] And that we’re going to fight for an agenda that makes sense to working families.”

Ah, and there’s the rub… that elusive agenda. Look how close the Democrats in blue, blue California came to passing single-payer-- only to see Jerry Brown have Assembly Speaker Rendon kill it? The Intercept pointed out that someone who disagrees with Governor Brown’s opposition-- that single payer is too expensive, the Republican argument, which somehow always manages to manipulate the facts and forget to mention the “the efficiencies created from having one public insurer save a lot of money-- was, none other than presidential candidate Jerry Brown in 1992 (when he was still toying around with the idea of posing as a progressive).

It was a cornerstone of his unsuccessful 1992 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In April of 1992, Brown passionately argued for this system in a debate with then-Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton on the nationally-syndicated Phil Donahue Show.

“My preference is that we create a single system, put everyone under a universal health care system. We treat health care not as a commodity to be played with for profit but rather the right of every American citizen when they’re born,” he explained.

He then went on to explain how this system would save money:

“You cut out all the private health insurance. You have one single payer either at the national level or through the 50 states. And that one single payer will be the one that negotiates with the doctors, the hospitals, and the other providers. And since you have only one source of income in the whole medical establishment, you can drive down the cost. With the holding down of the cost, you can eliminate the intermediary, the middle man, the bureaucracy. In some of these hospitals there’s more people doing the billing then there are in direct patient care on an eight-hour shift. It doesn’t make any sense. But through a single payer, as we’ve seen in Canada, you can eliminate tremendous amounts of paperwork both for the doctors, the hospitals, and the part of the insurance companies.”

We ran the video of this moment of Brown's long past progressive dalliance here yesterday, if you want to check it out. Here's the whole Meet the Press interview from Sunday morning:

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The Democratic Party Establishment Desperately Needs Reform-- Instead It Got More Schumer, Pelosi And Hoyer

Friday night Bernie was at Dominican University in Marin County, ostensibly to promote his new book, Our Revolution: A Future To Believe In. In launched right into an attack against the Democratic Party establishment, blaming party elites for creating the environment in which Trumpism could thrive. His point, not unlike Thomas Frank's in Listen Liberal, is that Democratic Party leadership abandoned the working class and offered them nothing with which to address the severe economic dislocation brought on by the globalization the elites had embraced.

Bernie told the crowd that he looks "at this election not as a victory for Mr. Trump, who wins the election as the most unpopular candidate in perhaps the history of our country but as a loss for the Democratic Party." To Bernie, as it has always been, the defeat of the Democratic Party was all about their unwillingness and inability to address gross economic inequality. He had no interest in the critique of Trumpism that blames the phenomenon on racism, sexism or the rise of the alt-right. "I don’t believe that at all,” he told the overflowing crowd. "I think a lot of people ended up holding their noses and voting for Trump because they are in pain... There are a lot of people in our country who are hurting and they are hurting very, very badly. The political establishment is not hearing their pain; the financial and economic establishment could care less about their lives; and the media establishment is not dealing with the reality of their lives... and along comes Mr. Trump."

He attacked Obamacare from the left-- for leaving out millions of people, for overly expensive prescription drugs and for prohibitive deductibles that puts insurance out of reach for many struggling families. He talked about an increase in drug addiction and stagnating life expectancy for the poor and that, in the end Trump would disappoint the people who turned to him to solve these problems. Trump's own tendency towards oligarchy will make things worse for working people-- much worse.

What does he want to do? Easy: "transform the Democratic Party from a party led by a liberal elite to a party led by working people and young people and people who really want to transform society." He is trying to rally Americans not beholden to Wall Street.

Shaun King is a Bernie-oriented reporter for the New York Daily News. Last Wednesday he wrote a scathing piece on the Democratic Party leadership that I've been trying to work into a DWT post. It doesn't go after the party elites from the same direction Bernie prefers (economically) but King's analysis is no less crucial. A Senate staffer clued him into the soft bigotry of Senate leaders. Here we've talked a lot about the not so soft bigotry within the ranks of the House Democratic leadership, particularly Steve Israel who has enforced his ugly racist diktat as head of the DCCC, namely that African-Americans should not be candidates for Congress except in black-majority districts. But King didn't have obscure grubby little hacks like Israel in his sights, but Democratic Senate leaders.

“They are all so phony,” the staffer told me. “Every time I hear any of the Democratic senators, including my own boss, talk about diversity, I cringe, because it’s all one big lie. That they’ve been allowed to enjoy this reputation as a party that values diversity, while doing next to nothing of substance to align their actions with their words, is expert-level deception.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

The staffer went on to detail a private network of conversations being held by staff members of color in the U.S. Senate which they half-jokingly call the “Underground Railroad.”

“Democrats in the Senate use demographics as their excuse for the fact that they only have one African-American member in their ranks. They’ll tell anyone who listens that they wish this wasn’t the case and to the untrained ear, it sounds true. It isn’t. The Senate looks just the way want it,” the staffer told me.

I must admit that I had also bought the lie-- hook, line, and sinker-- that only two current U.S. Senators out of 100, Cory Booker, a Democrat, and Tim Scott, a Republican, were black because state by state demographics just made it too hard for African-Americans to win statewide elections.

“No, that’s not it. Of course demographics are a factor in every election, but the Senate looks the way Senators want it to look. Let me prove it to you.”

What I learned next made my jaw drop.

“Do you know how many black Chiefs of Staff exist in the Senate? The whole Senate? One. Out of one hundred chances they had to hire a black chiefs of staff, they hired just one African-American,” the staffer said in disgust.

“But hold up, hold up,” the staffer continued. “I haven’t even given you the punchline yet. Guess who the one black Chief of Staff works for?”

“Who?” I asked-- having no idea what the answer was.

“Tim Scott,” the staffer replied. “The lone black chief of staff in the entire United States Senate works for South Carolina Republican, Tim Scott. His office may be the most diverse in the entire Senate.”

It was like a punch to the gut. It’s one thing for the elected officials in one of the most important halls of government in our nation to be just 2% black-- that could be blamed on voters or demographics or fundraising, but the fact that only one U.S. Senator has hired a black chief of staff, and that senator is a Republican, is an indefensible choice.

It doesn’t stop there.

According to a recent study from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, of the 336 senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate, 0.9% of them are held by African-Americans. That’s three people.

This is inexcusable and it has a devastating impact on the positions and priorities taken by senators themselves.

“When Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were shot and killed by police in Minnesota and Louisiana, I practically begged my boss to issue a statement. My request fell on deaf ears,” the staffer said.

It’s no wonder the Senate has done so little of substance on issues that truly matter to black folk.

The lack of diversity in the U.S. Senate is so severe that it was called “one of the world’s whitest workplaces” in a scathing critique authored by The Atlantic’s Russell Berman. Berman also highlighted how the online magazine, Diversity Inc., “the nation’s worst employer for diversity.”

“We’re pissed,” the staffer said referring to the small but close-knit community that has formed among staffers of color. “Many of the interns and junior staffers of color come from a generation where we really don’t suffer in silence. We’re here to make a difference and this type of soft bigotry from the Democratic Party needs to be exposed.”

...Yeah, Donald Trump’s a bigot, but Senate Democrats aren’t far behind.

This morning, Glenn Greenwald wrote at The Intercept that "ever since he announced his candidacy to lead the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, the first American Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, has been the target of a defamation campaign that is deceitful, repugnant, and yet quite predictable. At first expressed in whispers, but now being yelled from the rooftops by some of the party’s most influential figures, Ellison is being smeared as both an anti-Semite and enemy of Israel" And that smear, Greenwald writes reveals much about Washington. "Ellison is a mainstream liberal Democrat... What makes him such an easy and vulnerable target for smear campaigns such as the one Saban and the ADL are pursuing is that he is Muslim-- a black Muslim to boot... If you’re a Democrat, it’s easy to embrace the language of anti-Islamophobia when it comes to condemning Donald Trump and other Republicans. It’s more difficult, but more important, to do so when that poison is coming from within the Democratic Party itself. One of the few silver linings of the ugly Trump rhetoric on Muslims can and should be (and has been) a unified rejection of this sort of toxicity, regardless of where it comes from. Democrats who are sincere about wanting to oppose anti-Muslim bigotry can do so by defending Keith Ellison from these incredibly ugly, baseless and defamatory attacks."

Muhammad Ali, Bernie and Brazil

-by Sam Husseini

This last week, many spoke laudingly of the recently deceased Muhammad Ali.

As some noted, Ali's great contribution was not being a talented athlete, heavy weight champion-- there are many such prominent sports figures, but they don't play a historic role. His true greatness came because at the height of his fame and powers, he challenged an oppressive system: He refused to go into the Army during the Vietnam War. It cost him a great deal of money and stature-- and tremendously helped the world and assured his canonization.

Sanders has a similar opportunity now. As pundits are voicing alleged ecstasy over Hillary Clinton "shattering the glass ceiling" by becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major political party, the first female president in Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has been ousted in a defacto coup. This has been fostered by establishment media in Brazil, as for-profit media often plays the role of king maker in ways stark and subtle in every country, including the U.S., as we've seen in this current election.

Rousseff's cabinet was diverse, both in terms of gender and ethnically. The new government is all white males. Rousseff was set to investigate corruption, including in the Brazilian Senate, and the coup was planned out by corrupt senators. Indeed, the anticorruption minister in the new coup government was recently forced to resign when a tape was leaked about how he was trying to cover up corruption. All this and more is being done with U.S. government silence and tacit support.

Certainly, Sanders has challenged the power of Wall Street and the wealthy from within the Democratic Party. But, largely because of the role of the media in fostering a mantle of celebrity around Hillary Clinton (and Donald Trump for that matter), they are the likely nominees.

But perhaps, for all the good that Sanders did, he might feel a measure of remorse for what he hasn't done: Spoken serious about the U.S. government's role in the world. Even in his discussions of inequality, he's confined himself to inequality inside the U.S. But what about global poverty?

Has Sanders been moved by slums in Latin America? Refugee camps in the Mideast? Stark poverty in Africa? Sweatshops in Asia? He went to a Vatican conference where Bolivian President Evo Morales also spoke. They chatted. What can be built from that? How can progressive leaders work together globally? How can movements cross boundaries? Are not movements weakened when they confine themselves to national barriers?

Ali took himself out of his comfort zone. He focused not just on getting a seat on a bus for himself, and not just for African Americans, but spoke against the Vietnam War. Sanders has not transcended himself. As Ben Jealous has said, Sanders "has been giving the same damn speech for 50 years." Well, that's not necessarily a good thing. There are people living in horrible conditions around the world, in large part because of economic, political and military policies determined in facade marble buildings in Washington, D.C. Sanders has been remarkably mute about that.

The power of the establishment rests in large part because of its global connections. But progressive forces have been reluctant to wield such power. Recall shortly before the invasion of Iraq, there were quasi-global protests against the war on Feb. 15, 2003. Just after that, the New York Times called the peace movement "the second super power." Yes, that didn't stop the war, but that was because there was only some global solidarity late in the day. The answer is more solidarity sooner.

And now, Sanders has campaigned in all 50 states. It's late in the day, but not too late for him to break the wall and seriously engage the rest of the world. That should start with going to Brazil and meeting with Rousseff. It would help overturn the coup, thus doing a tremendous service to the people of Brazil and it would put the heat on the U.S. government regarding its behind the scenes machinations. It would also highlight the fake feminism that surrounds the Clinton campaign. Do we want women in officialdom simply so that they can be a murderous and corrupt as men have been? Or do we want a different kind of politics that is inclusive in terms of gender, but that is based on solidarity and uplift rather than "I got mine"?

Clinton's crimes on foreign policy constitute quite a rap sheet. Sanders has at best scratched the surface. From bombing Libya, to voting for the Iraq war, to backing Netanyahu, to backing the Honduran coup and responsibility for the killing of Berta Cáceres, it's a gruesome tail that few have really come to grips with.

And perhaps Sanders, struck by fear of Trump, desperately wants to look away. He doesn't want a sun rise, he wants a sunset. Does he want to be a pawn in the Clinton machine? See the roles that other past "insurgent" candidates play now: Howard Dean, Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich. They played the role of what Bruce Dixon has called "sheepdogging"-- they ended up being little more than a tool of the Democratic Party establishment to get presumably serious progressives to end up supporting an increasingly pro-corporate Democratic Party. That same fate of accessory or marginalization likely awaits Sanders.

Now, the consultants and "advisers" he's meeting with this weekend are probably pushing Sanders to accept what bread crumbs he can get from Clinton & Co. After all, they have their careers to think about, and their careers are with the Democratic Party machine or some appendage of it.

But real power, real greatness, doesn't come from accepting such a role. That's why we remember the name Muhammad Ali and forget many, many others.