UNITY!!! Or Maybe Not? Can The Democratic Party Be Reformed?

This week, Bernie and Status Quo Joe named leaders of their "unity task forces" in the hope of bringing progressive voters back into the Democratic fold by November in the worthwhile attempt to dislodge Trump, albeit with the utterly worthless Biden. Quint Forgey, reporting for Politico yesterday, wrote that the purpose of the task forces are "to advise the Biden campaign on six key policy areas: climate change, criminal justice reform, economy, education, health care, and immigration. The task forces’ membership consists of a stable of prominent Democratic leaders and public policy experts, but its most notable appointee is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive New York congresswoman and superstar of the party’s left wing who backed Sanders during the primary contest and has evinced skepticism toward Biden’s more moderate ideology." Do you think that will help? Obviously that will be up to Biden. If he actually follows through, it may. First problem: her co-chair is sold-out establishment hack John Kerry.

The other co-chairs include Chiraag Bains, director of legal strategies for the liberal think tank Demos; California Rep. Karen Bass; Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge; Dr. Heather Gautney, a sociology professor and former Senate staffer; Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center; Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal; former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; union activist Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA; California Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard; and Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott. Sara Nelson, Pramila Jayapal, Heather Gautney, and Chiraag Bains are progressives. Biden and Sanders also named Carmel Martin of Biden for President and Analilia Mejia of Friends of Bernie Sanders as their respective campaign representatives "to coordinate and support the work" of the task forces.

The incorporation of Ocasio-Cortez and other high-profile progressives on the task forces in leadership capacities is certain to help assuage concerns from left-leaning Democrats that Biden will not heed their counsel when mounting his general election campaign against President Donald Trump. The groups are certainly not stocked with the party yes-men and shrinking violets that some liberals feared would fill out the advisory panels.

In a news release, the Biden campaign said the task forces “will meet in advance of the Democratic National Convention to make recommendations to the DNC Platform Committee” and to Biden directly. “Building upon the work of the Democratic campaigns to date, the ultimate goal of the Unity Task Forces is to develop the most successful possible agenda for Democrats in 2020,” the campaign said.

Biden said in a statement that a “united party is key to defeating” the president in six months, as well as “moving our country forward through an unprecedented crisis.” The task forces “will be essential to identifying ways to build on our progress and not simply turn the clock back to a time before Donald Trump, but transform our country,” he said.

“In the midst of the unprecedented economic and pandemic crises we face, the Democratic Party must think big, act boldly, and fight to change the direction of this country,” Sanders said in his own statement, adding: “I commend Joe Biden for working together with my campaign to assemble a group of leading thinkers and activists who can and will unify our party in a transformational and progressive direction.”

However... there is this:





This letter went out to Our Revolution groups from Jerry Perez on Monday:

My name is Jerry Perez and I am the field director of Our Revolution Los Angeles. Today, we announced that our members voted overwhelmingly to support forming a new party that is free from corporate interests and is accountable to the people. We are joining the Movement for A People's Party, and we'd like to invite other Our Revolution groups to join us with founder and executive director of MPP, Nick Braña for an informational call on Thursday at 5:30pm PST for a conversation about the People's Party.

We are building a mass movement that seeks to stop the exploitation of our communities, reject the money of wealthy special interest groups, educate and empower our constituency, train uncorrupted candidates accountable to the people's platform, and provide everyone with the tools to take control of their local politics. We will organize through electoral politics, nonviolent direct actions, and educational programs that further our movement and work toward our policy goals.

We are free to meet with you before Thursday's call so we can connect and address any questions you have. Please consider joining us.

This is going to be pretty awkward.

True, Mitch McConnell And Trump Are Blocking Medicare-For-All... But So Are Pelosi And Her Team

Nancy Pelosi by Nancy Ohanian

Immediately after Pelosi took over as Speaker, she and her leadership team insisted on ramming through a rule that will likely cripple any big-thinking progressive proposals like the Green New Deal, Medicare-For-All, free public college, etc. The rule, PAY-GO, and its impact-- purposeful impact-- was explained by Stephanie Kelton on Jimmy Dore's show at the time:

There was a big stir from progressive activists but Pelosi and Hoyer moved rapidly-- and relentlessly-- to clamp down on wavering progressives. She threatened some (regarding committee assignments) and bribed others. She persuaded the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus by promising to allow an open debate and vote on the new and improved Medicare for All legislation that has been advanced by Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). In the end, only 3 brave souls had the courage of their convictions strongly enough to vote against PAY-GO: Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna and Tulsi Gabbard. That's it.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Pelosi lives up to her word and allows the debate and the vote. I've been noticing that more than a few Democrats who co-sponsored Medicare-For-All, when there was no chance Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy would ever allow it to reach the floor, have not signed on for 2019 now that it will be voted on. And where are the freshmen who campaigned on single payer? Only 11 are on board as of today:

• Chuy Garcia (D-IL)
• Debra Haaland (D-NM)
• Josh Harder (D-CA)
• Jahana Hayes (D-CT)
• Andy Levin (D-MI)
• Mike Levin (D-CA)
• Joe Neguse (D-CO)
• AOC (D-NY)
• Ilhan Omar (D-MN)
• Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)
• Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)

Did you campaign for, donate to. vote for anyone who promised to support single payer but who isn't on that list? If you want to call, the number for Congress is 202-858-1717.

But while Pelosi was promising Pocan and Jayapal that she would guarantee them a Medicare-For-All vote, she was already working to kill it. Ryan Grim had a powerful-- albeit horrible-- report at The Intercept yesterday, Top Nancy Pelosi Aide Privately Tells Insurance Executives Not To Worry About Democrats Pushing Medicare For All. She sent over her top healthcare advisor, Wendell Primus to talk withBlue Cross Blue Shield executives and reassure them that "party leadership had strong reservations about single-payer health care and was more focused on lowering drug prices." The message she wanted Primus to deliver was that her leadership team "would be allies to the insurance industry in the fight against single-payer health care." In return, they want the insurance companies to back them when they move to lower drug prices.

The debate over Medicare for All is playing out on a number of different levels, with no clear consensus over how the government-run, single-payer health plan ought to take shape. Presidential candidates are arguing over whose plan is stronger and gets to full Medicare for All faster, with a debate raging over whether private insurance should be banned outright or operate in addition to universal Medicare coverage.

In the House, even as the idea has picked up momentum with voters and members of the Democratic caucus, Democratic leadership has remained deeply skeptical. Pelosi’s consistent messaging, instead, has been around protecting the Affordable Care Act and lowering prescription drug prices.

“Speaker Pelosi has ensured that Medicare for All will have hearings in the House and tapped Congressman Brian Higgins to take the lead on Medicare buy-in legislation. For the first time, House committees will be seriously examining and tackling some of the questions and possible solutions raised by Medicare for All legislation,” said Connelly.

“The biggest obstacles facing Medicare for All right now are Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump,” he added.  “But in the near term, there is a window for Democrats to press Trump to help pass aggressive legislation to negotiate down the skyrocketing price of prescription drugs.”

...Primus is known in Congress as one of the staunchest foes of Big Pharma, while Pelosi’s posture toward Medicare for All is more complicated. Publicly, she has long said that she supports it aspirationally. “I was carrying around single-payer signs probably before you were born, so I, you know, I understand that aspiration,” she said in 2017 during an interview with TV host Joy Reid.

“This is an idea that if we had a tabula rasa, if we were just starting clean, would be the most cost-effective way to go forward. We don’t have that,” she said. “Over 120 or 150 million people in our country have employer-based access to their health coverage and insurance.”

At the time, her objection to Medicare for All was that it distracted from the fight to defend the ACA, which Republicans were trying to gut. “So right now, I’m going to be crude. Now we’re in my living room, so I can be crude. It isn’t helpful to tinkle all over the ACA right now,” Pelosi said. “Right now, we need to support the Affordable Care Act and defeat what the Republicans are doing.”

At other moments, she has said that single payer isn’t popular, arguing, also in 2017, that “the comfort level with a broader base of the American people is not there yet.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which operates under Pelosi, in 2017 presented House Democrats with survey data, claiming that it showed that single-payer was a political loser, and that Democrats should focus their messaging on lowering drug prices and protecting the ACA.

Yet a significant number of Democrats who flipped Republican districts blue in 2018 were publicly supportive of Medicare for All, suggesting that it isn’t necessarily the albatross Pelosi and the DCCC believe it to be. A poll from October found that more than half of Republicans support the concept.

Pelosi’s agreement to hold House hearings on Medicare for All came after pressure from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Yet the hearings will be held by the Budget Committee, which, unlike the powerful Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees, would not have final jurisdiction over Medicare for All in the event of a genuine attempt to pass it.

Primus, like Pelosi, is well-known to be a deficit hawk, and both subscribe to the argument put forward by the late Pete Peterson that the debt and deficit are among the gravest threats facing the country. When Peterson, a billionaire who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to push Washington policymakers toward austerity, died in 2018, Pelosi delivered a floor speech that praised him and his vision effusively, speaking of the man as if he’d dedicated his life to eradicating child malnutrition or curing cancer, rather than as a Wall Street tycoon who spent millions pushing for major cuts to Social Security and Medicare. “Pete was a clarion voice for fiscal responsibility, and a strong moral conscience in Washington,” Pelosi said in her House floor eulogy of Peterson, who, by 2012, had already spent half a billion dollars targeting Social Security, Medicare, and other spending programs.

“Pete’s prophetic voice on the importance of fiscal sustainability brought together generations of policymakers, no matter their political background,” Pelosi said. “His legacy will endure in many ways, but especially through the work of the Peterson Foundation, which continues to focus on solutions to America’s fiscal and economic challenges.”

Two of Primus' five objections to single payer before the Blue Cross audience related to such alleged fiscal challenges. That argument, though, runs headlong into a surge of new interest among Democrats in Modern Monetary Theory, the idea that policymakers are still constrained by a mindset that was justifiable when the U.S. was on the gold standard, but is no longer defensible. Now that the U.S. issues a currency independent of its gold reserves, the obstacle to government spending is inflation, not the debt or deficit, proponents of MMT say. “This zero-sum mentality has no place in a post-Bretton Woods world,” said economist Stephanie Kelton in reaction to Primus’s argument that spending on Medicare for All would foreclose other priorities. (Post-Bretton refers to the global agreement that the dollar will be the global economy’s reserve currency, ultimately decoupled from gold.)

“The U.S. dollar is no longer tethered to gold, which means the federal government is not constrained in its spending by the need to raise revenue. The federal government cannot run out of dollars. This should be painfully obvious, but the gold-standard mentality continues to grip many lawmakers,” Kelton said.

As long as inflation remains low, the government can continue to authorize additional spending. That’s not so much an argument as it is simply an observation of the post-gold-standard reality that austerity advocates like Peterson have spent billions to distort. “The government can afford any new program it chooses to fund. The limits are in the real economy-- if producers can’t keep up with the additional demand, inflation will result,” said Kelton, a former adviser to the Senate Budget Committee when it was chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The federal government-- as the issuer of the U.S. dollar-- can create all the money that is needed to guarantee health care for all of its people. It’s the rest of us-- who merely use the dollar-- who have to worry about costs and where to come up with the money to pay a huge medical bill when our private insurer refuses to cover the cost of care.”

This reality has been recognized by former Federal Reserve Chairs Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, as well. “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So, there is zero probability of default,” Greenspan once said.

Meanwhile, if you missed this-- Bernie's response to the illegitimate fake "president's" State of the Union address-- last night... it is well worth watching today:

Who Thinks The DCCC Needs To Recruit More Republican-Lite Candidates To Win In 2018?

Brand New Congress put out that graphic just above, presumably as a reminder to House Democrats that Democratic voters very much favor H.R. 676, John Conyer's bill to make Medicare available to all Americans. Paul Ryan and his leadership team have it buried in the Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs but there were 51 original co-sponsors and since then over two dozen more have signed on. The graphic isn't strictly up to date.

Sure most of the names are the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- reactionary Bluye Dogs and New Dems and their fellow travelers, scum who all deserve to be primaried. But some of the names on it are absurd. I'm pretty certain, based now hat she's said in the past, that Maxine Waters (D-CA) supports Medicare for All. I called Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and said something to the effect of, "Dude, this is got to be a mistake, right?" And he said something to the effect of, "Dude, that is totally wrong; I signed on as an official co-sponsor."

Two of the most right-wing Democrats in Congress are from Arizona and they're as far from Gallego as you could be politically. Freshman Tom O'Halleran is an ex-Republican who got into Congress-- thank Pelosi for spending $2,696,962 to elect him-- and immediately started voting with his old comrades in the GOP. According to ProgressivePunch, he doesn't just have an "F," he has a crucial vote score of 30.77, worse than any Democrat in Congress other than fellow Blue Dogs Josh Gottheimer (NJ) and Stephanie Murphy (FL), each of whom scored 23.08. Among non-freshmen, the worst Democrat in Congress is the loathsome Kyrsten Sinema with her lifetime score of 35.82. This year Sinema seems to be trying to break a record. Her crucial vote score is 7.69, not just the worst of any Democrat in Congress but worse than 11 Republicans and exactly tied with almost two dozen other Republicans-- like Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) and laughable crackpot Louie Gohmert (TX). Most of the crap Democrats aren't subject to primary challenges. Sinema, however, has drawn a much-deserved prgressive opponent, Talia Fuentes.

But look at the two dozen worst Democrats in the House-- based on their lifetime vote scores-- from bad to worse:

• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)- 60.77
• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)- 58.66
• Al Lawson (FL)- 58.33
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)- 57.83
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)- 56.42
• Brad Schneider (Blue Dog-IL)- 52.07
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)- 51.91
• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)- 50.38
• Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA)- 49.10
• Raul Ruiz (CA)- 49.10
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)- 48.99
• Cheri Bustos (Blue Dog-IL)-48.35
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)- 45.11
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)- 43.63
• Charlie Crist (FL)- 41.67
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)- 39.71
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- 38.96
• Lou Correa (Blue Dog-CA)- 38.46
• Jacky Rosen (NV)- 38.46
• Tom Suozzi (NY)- 38.46
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)- 35.82
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)- 30.77
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)- 23.08
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)- 23.08

And how many of them have signed on to the Medicare for All legislation? None. Not one. And how many have primary challengers? Just two as far as I can tell: Sinema and Long Island freshman Tom Suozzi, who looks like he's getting a rematch from Jon Kaiman. Democrats should be able to do better than that-- much better. Weak incumbents in blue districts who should be targeted: Schrader (OR), Bishop (GA), Lipinski (IL), Cooper (TN), Schneider (IL), Vela (TX), Bera (CA), Aguilar (CA), Ruiz (CA), Peters (CA), Maloney (NY), Costa (CA), Cuellar (TX), Correa (CA) and Rosen (NV). Helluva lot of garbage in blue-blue California!

Did you read Nick Kristof's OpEd, In Trump Country, Shock at Trump Budget Cuts, but Still Loyalty, over the weekend? Democrats can't depend on buyer's remorse over Trump to win them back the House in 2018. He tells the story of a moron in Tulsa, Rhonda McCracken, who was beaten and choked by her husband, once until she was unconsciousness. A moron unable to deal in abstracts and connect that kind of behavior to Trumpism, she voted for him anyway and is now upset because his budget would cut federal funds for Tulsa Domestic Violence Intervention Services which she credits with saving her and her son's lives. She's praying Congress will step in and save the day. A brain-dead Republican, she's unaware that all 5 congressmembers from Oklahoma-- including her own, Jim Bridenstine-- are Republicans who are opposed to any spending on these kinds of services and would happy to see them abolished. (They also voted against the Violence Against Women Act.) But she's prayin'.

Kristof says he was interviewing people like her in Oklahoma-- "fervent Trump supporters who now find that the White House is trying to ax programs they have depended on, to pay for Trump’s border wall and for increases in military spending. And they’re upset." But not that upset. "These voters may be irritated, but I was struck by how loyal they remain to Trump." He wrote that he "talked to many Trump voters about the impact if Trump’s budget cuts go through, and none regretted their votes in November. They all said that they might vote for Trump for re-election." Although one of the bigoted morons-- who voted for Trump because she hates Hispanics-- acknowledged that Trump's proposed cuts to a Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program that she considers "her lifeline" might means that she's lose her job. "I'll sit home and die." That'll keep her from voting for Trump and his Republican enablers, but probably nothing else.

Some of the loyalty seemed to be grounded in resentment at Democrats for mocking Trump voters as dumb bigots, some from a belief that budgets are complicated, and some from a sense that it’s too early to abandon their man. They did say that if jobs didn’t reappear, they would turn against him.

One recent survey found that only 3 percent of Trump voters would vote differently if the election were today (and most of those would vote for third-party candidates; only 1 percent said they would switch to voting for Hillary Clinton).

Call me a hopeless idiot but maybe if the Democratic Party offered good candidates-- unlike the ones discussed above... What do you think? Maybe? We should try. What do we have to lose? Pelosi and her DCCC already lost dozens and dozens of congressional seats by offering dog shit quality Republican-lite candidates year after year after year. If people want something like Jim Bridenstine, that's what the Republican Party is for. How about a real alternative, rather than crap like Kyrsten Sinema or Jim Costa?