Why We Should Get Behind Debbie Boothe-Schmidt In Oregon-- A Guest Post By Mark Gamba

 

Most of the West Coast is still suffering one of the worst, if not THE worst fire season in recorded history. Contrary to the lies coming from the White House, the reason they are so bad is that humans have altered the climate, so things are hotter and drier than they have been for millennia. Add to that tinder box, unusually strong winds (also caused by climate change) and you have the perfect recipe for catastrophic fires. Portland Oregon, generally known as having pretty good air for a large city, had the worst air quality in the world, several days running. The Air Quality Index was off the charts. We were in unknown territory for the health effects on humans and every other breathing creature we share this region with.

If this were the first year with bad fires due to climate change, maybe you could forgive the Republican state legislators for their obstinance when it comes to passing some kind of climate bill. But it isn’t, and I don’t expect any change in that attitude in the foreseeable future. This matters, because even though the Democrats had super majorities in both houses and an exceedingly “fair minded” and thoughtful cap trade bill that looks to help the rural areas more (per capita) than it did the urban areas, the Republican members of both houses ran away from their jobs to deny a vote on the floor due to a lack of quorum.

So, if Oregon is going to pass any kind of worthwhile climate bill, let alone universal health care or any other truly progressive changes we will need a majority so big that the Democrats alone form a quorum. It just so happens that one of the seats that got us that supermajority is up for grabs because the Representative, Tiffiny Mitchell has decided to move out of the state.

Into this fray steps Debbie Boothe-Schmidt, a strong candidate who has deep roots in district 32. She raised her two girls as a single mom working two jobs to make ends meet. As former president of her union she has advocated for our working Oregonians and she also served as board chair on her local transportation board to improve public transportation in her district. She is now a small business owner and is running for state Representative to expand affordable housing and healthcare, funding for our schools and, of course, to fight against climate change.

This seat is one of the most competitive in the state with Debbie’s opponent being bankrolled by Timber Unity, Koch Industries, Chevron, Shell and many other large corporations. In the last two years, Timber Unity (responsible for the walkout against cap and trade) has become very strong on the North Coast. They staged a recall against Rep. Tiffiny Mitchell because of her vote for Cap and Trade and have also pledged to put $1 million behind Debbie’s opponent.

  If we want to pass any type of climate legislation in the state legislature, we are going to need to hold onto this seat to keep the house majority as well as hopefully flip a few more seats to expand the majority. This is a critical race.

The clock is ticking, we have 9 years to dramatically shift the way we function on this planet or we will doom our kids to a hellscape beyond the imaginings of worst post-apocalyptic movies.

Every city, every state and every nation should be addressing this issue like our lives were on the line. We can’t afford to let critical races like this be bought by the fossil fuel industry and their friends in the wall street timber companies.

Do You Support A Center-Right Party? You're A Conservative???

I lived in Holland for four years and it was a pretty progressive place, Amsterdam more than the country as a whole, but even the most conservative areas seemed more progressive than the U.S. When I was there, the political party that headed the government was the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy-- better known as the VVD. It's a classic center-right party and pretty much stands for everything the American Democratic Party stands for, not the FDR Democratic Party, but the floating garbage heap Bill Clinton turned the Democratic Party into... except the VVD is maybe slightly more progressive. If the classic center-right party is like the American Democrats, is there a Dutch political party like the GOP? Of course: the PVV (the Party for Freedom). It isn't as far right as the GOP but it's generally a neo-fascist party like what the Republicans have drifted into since Reagan became president. The Dutch also have a couple of left-of-center parties as part of their legislature-- the Socialist Party, the Green Party and the Labor Party-- but the U.S. doesn't have anything like that.

Early this week, AOC spoke at an event honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. and she explained that there are "left members inside the Democratic Party," progressives, like herself, who are pushing the Democratic Party towards it's Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt roots. "She noted, reported Newsweek "that there are some 'true believers' within the Democratic Party who think capitalism can end poverty. 'If anything, that's probably the majority,' she said, adding that she disagrees. 'That's an area in which I agree with Dr. King, that that assessment is flawed,' Ocasio-Cortez said as the audience erupted into loud applause." She described the Democratic Party as a "center-conservative" party, not as a party of the left. Like King, she believes that capitalism has ingrained poverty into society.

It's why actual progressives argue for structural change in society... and for real change in a Democratic Party which is dominated by its own Republican wing-- New Dems, Blue Dogs, corporatists, corruptionists... AOC: "We don't have a left party in the United States. The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center, or a center-conservative, party." She noted that even with a large, robust Democratic majority-- led by a woman pretending to be vaguely progressive, "We can't even get a floor vote on Medicare for All, not even a floor vote that gets voted down. We can't even get a vote on it. So this is not a left party."

Newsweek brought up a King speech gave the year before he was assassinated: "And one day we must ask the question: Why are there 40 million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that, more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society." Sounds like Bernie, AOC and a tiny, tiny, tiny handful of today's post-Bill Clinton Democrats. Not like Joe Biden, that's for sure. In fact, AOC had noted in an interview that "In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America we are."

Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a democratic-socialist, as does Sanders and many other progressives within the Democratic Party. This block of lawmakers advocates for progressive policies such as universal health care, or Medicare for All; free college education; student loan forgiveness; a higher minimum wage; and a Green New Deal to address climate change.

Most Democrats-- most, think about that-- do not advocate for those things. It astounds me, that given a choice, Democratic primary voters-- for whatever reason-- often pick the neo-liberal establishment candidates rather than the progressive reformers... not always, but often. In the last few weeks some real progressives have beaten right-of-center Democrats in primaries-- Mike Siegel in Austin, Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones in New York and good and very clear examples. But far more progressive reformers didn't make it. I asked Mark Gamba, a thoughtful mayor in Oregon who I expect to see running again, what happened in his congressional race against very conservative Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. "Well the short answer," he told me this morning, "is that Schrader used all of that corporate cash to outspend me 10 to 1. Our campaign was really dependent on the grass roots, on door knocking and on events where folks could get to know me and ask questions. Covid killed most of those opportunities, and so it went back to being a race won on who could spend the most. The really funny thing was that when you read Schrader’s 6 mailers, he came off like a progressive. He talked about everyone getting health care and taking strong climate action, neither of which he will actually do. Until we have publicly funded campaigns, the candidate who is the most sold out to the corporations will be the one most likely to win. All the political labels aside, what Americans have to decide is: Do we want a society that benefits everyone, providing a dignified and decent life for every single American? Or, do we want a society designed to make a handful of people obscenely wealthy, while having millions living in desperate poverty? That is literally what we have now, and nothing about the status quo and the neo liberal posturing is going to change any of that."

I asked Alan Grayson, who lost his first race and two years later went on to be, arguably, Congress' most important and effective progressive champion, what he makes of this party split and why more progressives don't get elected. "Progressives," he told me yesterday, "operate at a disadvantage because right-wingers in the party corrode the ability of progressives to deliver on the promises that they make, which undermines the credibility of the party as a whole. When a RWNJ in a red state says 'I will ban abortion more than ten minutes after conception,' there’s no debate about whether he’ll be able to deliver on that promise. When a progressive says 'I will deliver affordable healthcare to everyone,' the widespread public response is 'uh-huh. Well, you haven’t done it so far.' In fact, it’s been more than a decade since anyone in a position of authority in the Democratic Party has promised anything to anyone, except perhaps to lobbyists. This tends to discredit the whole notion that you can make the world a better place-- progress-- which is the first eight letters of progressivism. Obviously, there are serious money issues, as well, without a doubt.  But money is not the mother’s milk of politics. The mother’s milk of politics is promises-- promises that you keep."





Florida produces so many really bad politicians but, ironically, the state is responsible for some really good ones as well. Adam Christensen, still in his 20's and a first time congressional candidate, is going to fall into the latter category. I think Grayson will see a young version of himself when he meets him. "At the end of the day," Christensen told me, "even those who say that they want change and they want progress, don’t ever want to feel extreme. They want to feel like they are at the center, the norm. What has happened is the one party actively fights to silence the radicals within it, and the other doesn’t. The republican party understands that if they allow a few choice individuals to push the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable, then they are able to push the conversation farther than they ever would’ve been able to before. The Democrats do not do that, they fight tooth and nail to silence the left side of their party because they don’t want to appear 'extreme.' When in reality, because they do this, they themselves are seen as the “extreme” left even though they are 'center-right' in any other country.

An entrepreneur and CEO himself, Christensen pointed out that "Every good negotiator knows that you always ask for more than you believe that you were going to get, and you should always have things you are willing to give up in order to get to where you wanted to be in the first place. The Tea Party effectively pushed Republicans to the right and made their moderate wing seem reasonable, despite the fact that they are extreme. Democrats need to do the same thing, they need people/activists pushing farther than anyone has pushed (ie. nationalized healthcare/defund the police) so that things like Medicare For All seem like the 'compromise position,' the 'safe position.' They need a truly left party, so that the semi-progressive ideas can be seen as the middle ground instead of the extreme left. We need a truly LEFT movement in the US to move us back to where we should be, where we were 60 years ago. It’s not 'extreme'-- it’s smart politics."

Hector Osceguera, a thoughtful young reformer in New Jersey who I expect to see running again, just ran his first race. It won't be his last. So what happened to make the voters in northeast Jersey go for an establishment boss-candidate instead Oseguera. "There is one very Jersey-specific reason for the outcomes of progressive challengers in the state," told me. "Our byzantine and anti-democratic ballot structure known colloquially as the 'County Line,' artificially props up incumbents and means that we were effectively running against two Presidential candidates in Joe Biden and Cory Booker. Lining up establishment candidates the way we do in this state creates a perception issue that always hurts challengers and gives an unearned benefit to incumbents."

While we realized how the COVID pandemic made us shift resources to the digital landscape, there was not enough attention on reaching those not on social media. The voting age population trends not to be as active on the web and we should have done a better job finding ways to reach our senior citizens during COVID.

The future lies in taking the lessons we learned this year and amplifying those efforts. Progressives still have a lot of work to do, and now that the primary season is over, we can go back to the drawing board and think like organizers again. Even if this race didn't have the outcome I wanted, I now hope to lay the foundation for the next progressive challenger.

There Are Important Lessons To Learn From Marie Newman's Second Try Win And Mark Gamba's First Try Loss

Technically, you can't call Marie Newman "Congresswoman Newman" until January when the Speaker swears her in. But in IL-03-- a district where Trump didn't get to 40% of the vote-- it is the Democratic primary that determines who goes to Congress. It took her two cycles and incredible focus. organizing and effort, but Marie vanquished the DCCC-Blue Dog, Dan Lipinski, and won a truly glorious grassroots victory, running on a powerful progressive agenda built around representing the interests of working families.

"When I  ran in 2018," said Marie in a statement last week, "Blue America was the first organization to endorse me and I was incredibly appreciative. When I decided to run in 2020 to finally unseat Dan Lipinski, one of my very first calls was to Blue America. We were aligned in 2018 on every issue and nothing had changed the second time. Given that I do not accept corporate money, I knew it would be important to work closely with Blue America to drive support for key issues like Medicare For All, The Green New Deal and worker’s rights. Blue America has been with me every step of the way, unconditionally. And, guess what, we all stood together and won! I cannot express how important this unwavering support was to me and is to me now."

Yes, we all stood together-- behind Marie and her team-- and won. She led the way; we followed. Groups like Blue America don't create candidates. And we can't go to Walmart and find them on a shelf. And a list of Bernie/Elizabeth platform positions do not make an electoral victory. The kind of hard, smart campaign Marie Newman-- and Kara Eastman, to name another candidate who just won big-- was able to organize and direct... that's what produces the kinds of wins we need.

"Now, more than ever in the midst of a pandemic," said Marie, "we need to stand in solidarity to have an economy that works for everyone, make certain everyone has healthcare and we build a green economy. I will always be there for Blue America, just as Blue America has been there for me. Now, let's go get this work done!"

Marie was also endorsed by House members AOC (D-NY), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), all of whom did something out-of-the-ordinary and courageous: endorsed a reform candidate against the entrenched incumbent of their own party. But Marie and a handful of progressives are not going to be able to steer the campaign donor-controlled House leadership and a White House dedicated to the status quo and a conservative Senate-- whether a conservative Senate led by McConnell or, more likely, a conservative Senate led by Schumer-- in a more progressive direction. Only numbers will do that... more members like Marie. And that means electing men and women like Julie Oliver and Mike Siegel in Texas, Lisa Ring, Michael Owens and Nabilah Islam in Georgia. Audrey Denney and Liam O'Mara in California, Jim Harper and Jennifer Christie in Indiana, Robin Wilt, Shan Chowdhury, Tomas Ramos and Lauren Ashcroft in New York... and other focused progressives. Want to play a part? One way is to contribute, which is why I've included the 2020 Blue America congressional thermometer on the right. Please click on it and contribute what you can.

When Marie lost in 2018, I had what I think of as my Donna Edwards conversation with her-- about how it often takes 2 cycles to displace an entrenched incumbent, the way Alan Grayson, Jerry McNerney and Ro Khanna did. Now we're on the verge of wins for candidates who came close in 2018 and are ready to go all the way this year-- J.D. Scholten, Mike Siegel, Julie Oliver, Audrey Denny, Kara Eastman...

I'm feeling great about all of their chances to close the deal in November.

But you know what else I feel great about? A fantastic candidate who didn't win-- Mark Gamba-- and who is already working towards 2022! "Tuesday night didn't turn out the way we hoped it would," he wrote to his supporters on Wednesday, "but there's more to this movement than one election. As Bernie said, 'This is not about me, this is a movement. Not me, us.' Part of the reason I ran for Congress was prompted by Bernie’s truth that when we stand together, we can accomplish extraordinary things." He'll be in it again and he'll prevail. Like I said, it takes more than one cycle to displace and entrenched incumbent. Mark:

Just look at what we have achieved over the course of this year. We have reached 10s of thousands of voters, rallied thousands of volunteers, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and given a corporatist incumbent a real run for his money... and we know he has a lot of it.

We knew we were the underdogs coming into this race. We knew we would be running on the power of the people while our opponent would be leveraging the power of profit to fund his campaign.

But here’s the thing I want you to know and remember. If we took the corporate money out of this race, Kurt Schrader would be hard pressed to win.

Now it’s not fair and it’s not right that the best candidate to represent the people of the 5th district should lose because he DIDN’T take money from Corporate America. But there’s a lot about the way this country is run that isn’t fair and that’s why I’m not giving up.

I’m in this for the long haul and I’ve got my sights set on the next milestone. 2022 isn’t that far away and with momentum we’ve built so far, I KNOW that we’ll be more prepared than ever to take back our country, our democracy, and our planet from those who seek to profit off of the suffering and hard work of millions of folks like us.

So today, though we feel the disappointment of a momentary loss, I am undeterred from our course of action. We will continue to build our movement, one conversation, one donation, and one community at a time until Kurt Schrader has no place left to spread his profiteering propaganda that has left so many of us behind. Your unflagging support, generosity, and care are the wings that will carry us closer to the world we are actively campaigning to bring about. My gratitude for your investment in our vision of better world is boundless.

From the bottom of my heart to all of you, THANK YOU.

Our work will continue, our passion will fuel action, and my commitment to you to take no corporate money and to represent working people and our planet will only grow stronger.

We will have work to do over the next year before another campaign starts. We need our movement and those like it across the country to force the people in Congress to recognize that now is the perfect time to pass medicare for all and make sure that we handle this ongoing pandemic better than anywhere else in the world,  rather than worse than anywhere else in the world like they have so far.  We also need to make them wake up to the reality of climate change and the opportunity in this moment to put the millions of people who are becoming jobless, back to work solving the greatest threat to human kind that has ever existed.

This is not the end of anything, this is just the beginning.

Be good to yourselves, rest up, and I’ll see you back out there--ready to strategize and take back our Democracy so we can heal our planet and thrive.

I love you all!

Two Weeks From Tomorrow-- Oregon Voters Have A Chance To Send Kurt Schrader Off To Join Lipinski In The Blue Dog Kennel

There aren't any Democrats in the House more ideologically antithetical to the legitimate aspirations of working class Americans than Oregon Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. And 2 weeks from tomorrow the all mail-in primary threatening to replace him with a champion of those same working and middle class Oregonians ends. After that, we'll either be celebrating Mark Gamba's victory in a blue district the way we were celebrating Marie Newman's a few weeks ago, or we'll be kicking ourselves for not having done more.

Last week's Northwest Labor Press endorsed candidates in the Oregon races unions felt we're most important. In several there were split endorsements-- as in Eugene, where the endorsement was split between incumbent Peter DeFazio and progressive challenger Doyle Canning and in Portland where the labor vote is split between incumbent Earl Blumenauer and progressive challenger Albert Lee. But in OR-05 there was no such split. In the Salem, Clackamas, coastal district all the union support-- from AFM, AFT, IBT, ILWU, SEIU, WFP-- and the endorsement all went to one candidate-- and it wasn't the reactionary Republican-lite incumbent.

Mark Gamba, the mayor of Milwaukie, is challenging five-term incumbent Kurt Schrader, who has one of the worst labor records of any Democrat in the House. Not only has Schrader voted for every NAFTA-style trade treaty, but he voted to restrict unionization on Indian reservations, sponsored a bill to stop slowdowns by longshore workers, and has engaged in public carping against the national AFL-CIO. This February he was one of only seven Democrats to vote against a bill to make it easier to unionize and eliminate anti-union “right to work” laws. Half a dozen national unions have given a total of about $20,000 to Schrader in the last two years, but no local union appears to back him, and his campaign declined to list any union endorsers or provide a list of union endorsers to the Labor Press. With a $3 million campaign war chest full of contributions from business groups, Schrader may not feel he needs labor support. Meanwhile, Gamba is a well-liked mayor who helped build affordable housing and pass a $15-an-hour minimum wage for city employees. He’s a big advocate of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.

The Willametter Weekly is now a more establishment-oriented publication and no one expects them to be politically cutting edge any longer. Oregonians expect them to back incumbents-- and, in every case that's exactly what they did this cycle. Although... in reading the Schrader endorsement, one had to wonder what message the editors were actually sending voters.

The flinty former veterinarian did draw a Democratic primary opponent to his left this time: two-term Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba, 61, who has moved aggressively to get his city to adopt ambitious climate goals and a generous minimum wage. Schrader, a budget expert in his earlier career as a state legislator representing Canby, hasn't welcomed Gamba's input, accusing his opponent of trying to foist "elitist" metro-area policies on a working-class congressional district that extends from Portland's western suburbs to the central coast. That's funny, given that Schrader is a pharmaceutical industry heir and Gamba is a freelance photographer whose mayoral pay is $3,600 a year.

We like seeing Schrader annoyed-- it seems to wake him up a bit. As a member of the centrist Blue Dog Democrats and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, he's taken public positions that reflect the balanced nature of his district but can also feel like fence-sitting. (GovTrack, which crunches numbers on members of Congress, ranked Schrader the fifth-most conservative of the 200 Democrats who served in the 2018 session). Schrader publicly opposed the reelection of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as House speaker when Democrats reclaimed the majority. And he was slow to call for President Trump's impeachment-- in fact, he was the last Democratic member of Oregon's congressional delegation to support it.

But the most important of the endorserments came from the Portland Mercury, which made a powerful and compelling case for Mark Gamba, reminding its readers that "Rep. Kurt Schrader has a curious distinction: He’s largely recognized as one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress. Whether he’s voting on environmental policies, easing regulations for corporations, or opposing a federal minimum wage raise, Schrader is at best a reliably moderate member of Congress, and at worst a Republican disguised as a Democrat."

Schrader represents a very purple district that includes much of the Oregon Coast as well as Clackamas County, so some might argue he’s the best fit for the seat. But for Clackamas County voters who don’t feel Schrader is representing their values, we suggest instead voting for Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba in the primary. Gamba hopes to make universal healthcare and a Green New Deal his top priorities if elected, and has a track record of progressive accomplishments in Milwaukie.

And even if he doesn’t win, a strong primary showing for Gamba might send Schrader a message about what Democrats in his district value. If you want to shake up the status quo, vote for Gamba.

Even if you can't vote in the Oregon primary, please consider contributing to Gamba's campaign by clicking on the Blue America Primary A Blue Dog thermometer above. This is one of the best chances left in the 2020 cycle to replace a very bad Democrat with a very good Democrat. Gamba entitled the first guest post he wrote for DWT-- last July-- What We Need Are A Lot More People Like AOC In Congress. At the time, he wrote that "As a country, we have some very serious things to accomplish, some of them have a very short clock. We have 11 years, as of now, to radically shift the way our country does a whole lot of things like how we make energy, grow food, manage forests, build buildings and transport people and goods. It’s going to take a Congress with a can-do attitude and the guts to stand up to corporations, to tackle these issues."

But it was an e-mail he send to his supporters last January that made me redouble my efforts of his behalf:

What can we do to address the fact that the rich are getting richer and the middle class and poor are  struggling to keep up with the costs of living?

Many children in today’s America will be poorer than their parents.

We need to identify the systems allowing this to happen. Then we need to dismantle them.

There is absolutely no reason why income equality should be on the rise when we can see the catastrophic effects of it in recent history.

...I will work to pass legislation that takes on the business behemoths and stops them in their tracks. Together with other representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, I will hold corporate demagogues’ feet to the fire and demand accountability where inequity has previously reigned.

Income inequality is a systemic failing, not a personal one. To tackle it requires courage, persistence, and a national community standing shoulder to shoulder. I am proud to stand on the front lines with you and for you as we turn the tables and create economic freedom for ALL.

Can America Evolve Towards A Country With A Humanitarian Bottom Line Rather Than Just A Financial Bottom Line?

I was on the phone with Marianne Williamson this morning and she was talking to me about how we have to change our country's priorities and the need to go from an economic bottom line to a humanitarian bottom line. During her presidential campaign she said that "The first pillar of a season of moral repair has to do with economic justice-- has to do with recognizing that we have created a wealth inequality greater than anytime since 1929, we have decimated America's middle class, and we must take immediate action to fix this. We should repeal the 2017 $2 trillion tax cut, which gave 83 cents of every dollar to the very richest individuals and corporations; although, we should put back in the middle class tax cut."

She went on to advocate specific programs:

We should stop all the corporate subsidies, such as $26 billion that we gave to oil and gas alone last year. For what reason?

We also need to make the United States government able to negotiate with huge pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices. The US government cannot negotiate for lower drug prices, even though we have people in the United States even today who are dying because they cannot afford their insulin.

‍We should also say to those who have a billion dollars in assets that 3 percent tax on those assets is reasonable and 2 percent for those who have over $50 million-- that is reasonable as well.

As she said, "We have near 93 million people who live near poverty in the United States today. That means million upon millions of people, tens of millions of people who live, every single day, in chronic tension and economic anxiety, not knowing really what will happen if they get sick, not knowing what will happen if one of their children get sick, not knowing how they will send their children to college or not knowing how they themselves will get out from under the burden of their college loan. We need to change this. Bad public policy created all this and good public policy will make it right."





After Marianne ended her presidential campaign she decided to do what she could to help progressive congressional candidates who are running on platforms that she feels are about creating that good and reparative public policy. You may have noticed that this week centrist Democrat Amy Klobuchar, a top contender to be Biden's VP pick, followed Marianne's lead and announced that she is trying to help down-ballot candidates, what Politico referred to as kicking off her next act. The effort to raise funds, the snazzily dubbed "Win Big Project," began Friday by endorsing a slate of a dozen House and Senate candidates. All of them are centrists or candidates from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, like reactionary Blue Dogs Anthony Brindisi (D-NY) and Xochitl Torres Small (D-NM).

Klobuchar's are the kinds of candidates who have worked hand-in-hand with the Republicans to create the bad public policy Marianne has steadfastly derailed. And none of Klobuchar's endorsed candidates are anything like the dedicated progressives Marianne is helping raise funds for-- the list of which you can see by clicking on the thermometer on the right. I asked several of those candidates what makes their own campaigns different from the campaigns of conservative Democrats being supported by the corporate and political establishment.

The first response was from Liam O'Mara, a progressive congressional candidate in Riverside County who won his primary and is challenging right-wing crook and Trump enabler Ken Calvert. "Marianne is right to say that we need a moral renaissance in this country," he said. "All our great religious and philosophical traditions give us a sense of right and wrong which is rooted in justice and compassion for others. None of them could be used to justify the neofeudal outcome of Republican tax policy. The GOP claims the mantle of liberty while it strips that liberty from Americans by steadily lowering our living standards and reducing us to virtual paupers, dependent on the largesse of powerful special interests and the billionaire class. Americans should not have to live on their knees, begging for crumbs from the table of the super-rich. Our Founders fought a revolution motivated by the Enlightenment ideal that all human beings were born free and equal in dignity and rights. It is well past time we realised the promise of that revolution, and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is also the law of the land."

Mark Gamba's all-mail primary is 2 weeks from Tuesday. He told us he couldn’t agree more with Marianne on this. "I have long advocated that we should measure America’s success on a Gross National Happiness Index rather then the GDP which only measures outcomes for the wealthiest and has little relevance to the rest of us and certainly doesn’t measure economic justice. Concepts like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal which look to invest in the vast majority of people and the health of the nation, rather than the wealth of the 1% are exactly what we need to enact to bring our country out of the economic tragedy millions are suffering due to the pandemic. It will require a significant change in Congress however to make that a reality. The neo-liberals will use this crisis to further their agenda of concentrating wealth and power at the top. Everyone below the top 10% have been getting poorer, relative to the cost of living, since the Reagan era. It is critical that we raise the minimum wage to a living wage and tie it to the cost of housing so that it never stagnates again. It is beyond time to tax capital gains at the same rate we tax other income; to increase the tax rate on anyone making more than $10 million a year to at least 50% and to close the loopholes that allow companies like Amazon to pay nothing in taxes while creating another instant billionaire who treats his employees poorly. According to The Guardian: 'Some of the richest people in the U.S. (Bezos in particular) have been at the front of the queue as the government has handed out trillions of dollars to prop up an economy it shuttered amid the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the billionaire class has added $308 billion to its wealth in four weeks-- even as a record 26 million people lost their jobs.' This is why all the candidates in this post need the support of every American who hopes for progressive change, I for one do not take a penny of corporate money so that I can be free to fight for the changes Marianne and I have outlined."

Julie Oliver is the progressive Democrat running against a Trumpist crook in central Texas, Roger Williams. "Our economy was already in a slow-motion crisis that the coronavirus has hit the fast-forward button on so we must rebuild that economy to ensure that it prioritizes people first," she told me. "Rebuilding the American economy for the long term is going to take a massive WWII-style mobilization. We need to repeal the GOP tax cuts for multinational corporations, tax the rich and corporations, and invest in world-class, high quality healthcare, education, and clean energy infrastructure."

"As a country we need courageous leaders who can't be bought and who will put people first, not corporate interests. Marianne, wrote Arizona progressive Eva Putzova, "has been such a leader, which is evident from her dedication to help elect a brand-new Congress. Poverty in the United States is deep and widespread. People are living paycheck to paycheck, always one crisis away from a total financial collapse. In my congressional district, it is impossible to not focus on the tragic consequences of our government’s official policies of the past toward Native Americans: first policies of annihilation, then displacement and assimilation. To this day we treat Native lands as a national sacrifice area by enabling resource extraction that comes with environmental degradation and water contamination and neglect to invest in basic infrastructure that would be unacceptable elsewhere. We are talking about running water and paved roads. Our priorities must shift and this is why I’m challenging the incumbent whose timid leadership fails to address the greatest challenges of our times and to uplift the most vulnerable among us."

Tomas Ramos, the best of the candidates to to represent the open South Bronx seat that Jose Serrano is giving up, reminded us that "It's easy to blame Trump for the economic crisis that we're in but these series of events unfolded in the 1980s under Reagan. There was a redistribution of income from the have-nots to the haves. The Bush II administration made some enhancements, and under Tump we're continuing to see a redistribution of American capitalism, which has exhausted its ability to reproduce itself through tax cuts. The trickle down analogy is a farce, because all it did was the opposite, it manipulated the effect of wealth which rose to the top 0.1 percent. When Reagan applied this tax cut policy, the American economy was operating with the premise of global profits and surpluses. This helped fuel the demand for international exports, ultimately these surpluses helped spur on subsets such as the derivative economy. After 2008 recession it was clear that the American economy can no longer support these subsets economies. If these catastrophic economic policies continue, then it will further stagnate the incomes of the middle class and the working class. The COVID-19 crisis is a clear indication that we must reinvest in the human capital and not the on the future value of an economic indicator."

Michael Broihier is a progressive Democrat Marianne has endorsed for the Kentucky Senate seat held by Mitch McConnell. Mike told me that "Marianne is spot on; the great tragedy of this pandemic, after the loss of life, will be a rush back to the comfort of business as usual. As a farmer, I know how little a roaring stock market means to rural voters. In a state with the nation’s fifth worst economy and double the national average of people working at the minimum wage, the health of the Dow-Jones or S&P means little. And, the failure of a health care system tied to employment is self-evident when 30-million Americans become unemployed in a manner of weeks." He elaborated:

Sadly, those people who routinely had to chose between rationing their prescriptions or paying the rent were invisible to career politicians of both parties until Washington career politicians began to fear the Senate gym being looted for hand-sanitizer and toilet paper. But even with a mounting death toll their first instinct was to bail out their rich and corporate donors and that tone deafness is not lost on working America. Even the paltry, one-time payment to citizens smacks of desperation-- not leadership-- as they fail to grasp the enormity of the challenges ahead.

In my race, I face the DNC’s handpicked candidate, who has refashioned herself as a pro-Trump moderate who thinks the Senate Majority Leader is stopping the president from draining the swamp. A candidate who said she would have voted to elevate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. This is what Washington establishment Dems think is what is needed-- another a get-along Democrat absent of vision or the moral courage to lead the country towards a more just and equitable future.

Queens progressive Shan Chowdhury is exactly the kind of young, working class leader who would make Congress a vehicle for the aspirations of American families rather than for sleazy corporate interests. This morning he said that "My race is critical in having to choose what is economically feasible vs. what moral is morally feasible. My opponent, Gregory Meeks is a corrupt corporate Democrat from the Republican wing of the party. He is the chair of subcommittee for House Financial Services of Consumer Protection and Financial Institutions. Time and time again since he’s even in office, he’s bailed out the big banks when working people needed help the most. I on the other hand, am fighting for progressive policies built on moral imperatives to protect working people from corporate harm. Homes and jobs should not be lost because of how irresponsible my opponent’s donors are with handling money."

Robin Wilt, a former Bernie DNC delegate, is fighting for a better Rochester and Monroe County. She and Marianne see eye to eye on shifting societal priorities and this morning shared that "Our campaign is all about elevating the voices of and empowering the 99%. For far too long, the establishment has cynically ignored anyone who wasn’t a corporate donor or political elite, and developed policies that cater to the interests of the monied few, as opposed to the interests of all of the people that they serve. As a result, our society was left vulnerable to collapse amid the current crisis. My opponent, as part of the neoliberal power structure in Albany for over thirty years, has not only been complicit, he has been an architect of these failed policies."

By contrast, the policy centerpieces and priorities of our campaign are those issues that have been far too long subverted by lickspittle corporate appeasers-- like my opponent-- who do not have the backbone to fight on behalf of the communities they represent: We proudly support healthcare and housing as human rights and champion Expanded and Improved Medicare for All, regardless of immigration status, and a Federal Homes Guarantee. We recognize that our existence on this planet is at grave risk and will fight for a Green New Deal that centers the communities that have been at the mercy of polluters and promises a future free from carbon dependence while bolstering our economy. We understand that everyone deserves a quality education, regardless of their zip code, and we support tripling Title I funding, tuition-free pre K- 16 public education, and eliminating student debt. We support a path toward citizenship for the millions of undocumented residents of our country, restoration of DACA, and economic justice for migrant and farm workers. We recognize that endless war, mass incarceration, and mass detention are all sustainable symptoms of our prison and military industrial complex, and will dismantle the systems that engender this injustice. We understand that there is an electoral industrial complex that disenfranchises our most vulnerable communities and will champion a new Voting Rights Act that ensures equal access to the ballot box, and we will remove money from politics by overturning Citizens United.

In short, we are running a people-centered campaign that recognizes that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable communities and that there is no moving forward when we continue to leave people behind.

Why Do Trump And The GOP Oppose Vote By Mail-- Even During A Deadly Pandemic?

That was a Tweet from Señor Trumpanzee yesterday. It would be paranoid to say he opposes vote by mail because the GOP has put so much effort into being able to rig electronic voting machines. But paranoia doesn't always mean you're wrong, does it? I asked some of the progressive candidates we've been talking with how they felt about Trump's attempts to vilify and block vote by mail proposals. I start with the two progressives in the Kentucky primary that will determine who takes on Trump's most repulsive enabler in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Charles Booker, endorsed by Blue America, was the first candidate to respond. "The Republican position against vote-by-mail-- even in the midst of this pandemic-- is galling," he told me. "To force people to choose between their health and exercising the right to vote is horrifying. But it isn't surprising. " But he went on from there:

I'm black, and I'm a Type 1 diabetic--- two groups of people who have been shown to be more likely to die from the coronavirus. Republican leaders who stand against vote-by-mail in this pandemic are telling me I have a choice: participate in our democracy, or drop dead.

In Kentucky, I have long fought for increased access to the ballot box by breaking down barriers to voting. I've sponsored legislation to automatically restore voting rights to people who have completed their sentences for felony convictions; I've supported our Governor as he has made that policy law with an executive order. And I've railed against Republican efforts to suppress the vote, most recently with a photo voter ID bill that our Governor vetoed just days ago. And I have called on our leaders in Washington to support states in implementing vote-by-mail for all 2020 elections.

When I was a little boy, my granddad told me about being forced to guess the number of beans in a jar before he was allowed to vote. That was 30 years ago. I spent a lot of my adult life thinking things had gotten better, and that such blatant voter suppression was in America's past. Now, in 2020, I know better, as the President and Republicans across the country tell people like me that we can vote, but we might die. Our choice.

Moments later, Mike Broihier, who was endorsed by Marianne Williamson yesterday, weighed in as well. Like Charles, Kentucky Democrats know how fast and loose McConnell's GOP plays with election security. "I used to agree with the saying that Democracy isn't a suicide pact, but seeing the lines of Wisconsin voters sent out  en masse during the pandemic by conservative state and US Supreme courts makes me wonder. The right's vision of voter suppression as a path to success was later made clearer in a presidential tweet, when, as usual, President Trump was unable to focus on a single message, even for 280 characters. If he'd just stuck with the canard that mail-in voting is rife with fraud-- it isn't-- he might have successfully dog-whistled his base. But he had to add "...and for whatever reason, (it)doesn't work out well for Republicans. Exactly, if you don't suppress the vote and disenfranchise people the arc of history bends more quickly towards justice and that is what entrenched politicians fear. Trump even previewed this thinking last week, speaking about the House COVID19 relief bill, saying, 'They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.' The take away, for me, is that this is the time to double down on voter registration efforts and grassroots turn-out-the-vote operations. Here in Kentucky in 2019 the work of Indivisible and other organizations flipped several solid red counties and moved the needle far enough to eject a cretinous Republican governor. On the ground, from what I have seen in my campaign, those same people, having tasted their influence, are not resting on their laurels but are ready to continue the fight, mail in ballots or not."

I also spoke to several House candidates who still have primaries coming up against Republican-lite fake Democrats. Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba is running for the Oregon seat occupied by GOP-friendly Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. "It's amazing how easy it is to make Republicans afraid of a thing," he told me soon after Trump's tweet. "Now they are going to be afraid of the mail. What the wealthy puppet masters fear is an actual democracy, where the person who represents the actual people, the person with the better ideas, the person with the proven track record of causing positive change gets elected, rather than the person who has the most wealthy supporters. The great American experiment is collapsing under the weight of all of that wealth. We watched it play out this morning in the democratic primary, no thinking person can imagine that Joe Biden will make a better president, a better leader, a better inspirer to greatness than Bernie Sanders will.  But Joe will kowtow to the rich, Joe will maintain the status quo that is killing our democracy and our very future on this planet.  But he won't tax the rich, by god. He won't stop the fossil fuel industry from continuing this headlong suicide cult they have created and maintained. It is now more critical than ever that we replace every bad senator and congressperson we can with a thinking, progressive champion for the people and the planet."

Boston progressive Brianna Wu is running for a seat occupied by anti-healthcare reactionary Stephen Lynch. Today she asked "What is Trump talking about? The problem is, and continues to be, that even he doesn’t know. What 'voter fraud' is he speaking of? None. Of course he doesn’t support voting by mail. If more people were able to vote, he would lose, and he knows it. And more importantly, it’s sickening that he is more concerned with perpetuating lies for his own political purposes than coordinating a real federal response to COVID-19, which is killing thousands of Americans. We need voting by mail, and we need to save lives."

Tom Guild is running for the Oklahoma City seat occupied by another Blue Dog, Kendra Horn, who's even further right than Schrader. He told me that Senor Trumpanzee fights every battle "with a view towards what’s good for him, but not necessarily for most Americans. In the current national emergency, people may literally be risking their lives to go to the polls on election day, so it makes sense to have prudent alternatives, where ordinary Americans can both exercise the right to vote and also remain healthy and alive. Several states have relied mainly or exclusively on mailed ballots for some time now and have not only increased participation, but have had few, if any, reports of fraud or abuse. As in many areas of law and public policy, we may have to bring the current POTUS kicking and screaming into the current century. When it comes to the fundamental right to vote, while maintaining the health and safety of voters, mailed ballots are a promising way to protect and preserve both. Come on Mr. President, don’t lead from behind!"

Arizona progressive Eva Putzova is also taking on a reactionary Blue Dog, Tom O'Halleran, this one an "ex"-Republican legislator with a horrifying conservative record. O'Halleran may not recognize what a liar Trump is, but Eva sure does. "There is no voter fraud connected to mail-in ballots or in-person voting anywhere in the country," she told me, "and numerous studies show that. Trump, and his Republican enablers, want to suppress the vote generally, and with youth and people of color in particular. Trump himself said high levels of voting hurt Republicans. So, DEMOCRACY hurts Republicans according to the leader of the Republican Party. We need to carry on the fight to expand democracy and the right to vote at every level in this country. This is the fight of our lifetime. If we lose, and voting becomes a privilege rather than a right, we will live in a quasi-fascist society where rights are not inherent but accrue only to those favored few. I will oppose such an outcome with every breath in my body."

Queens progressive Shaniyat Chowdhury-- replying to Trump's lies-- summed it up for virtually all the candidates Blue America has endorsed: "Voter fraud is when you work with Cambridge Analytics to manipulate emotions of voters without their knowledge. He should know all about it. We should be able to vote without any suppression. It’s a guaranteed right but also a privilege that many tax paying Americans do not have."

Trump vs Democracy

Our heroic jefe, Señor Trumpanzee, is not just a war-time president, he's fighting a war on two fronts-- one against the COVID-19 pandemic-- who could have known?-- and one against democracy. Yesterday, Alex Isenstadt reported from the front lines in Trumpanzee's war against democracy. As you can see on the chart above, 65% of registered voters support the idea of vote by mail-- including 93% of Democrats, 70% of independents and even 32% of Republicans.

It is notable that 68% of Republicans oppose vote by mail. Makes no sense. Actually it does. Historically, conservatives have always done everything they could to keep the franchise as small as possible. They year for their glory days when only older white males with property were allowed to vote. Progressives have slowly but surely chipped away at that. This week David Ralston, the Republican Speaker of the Georgia House explained it as well as any conservative: "The president said it best. This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia." Yep, larger numbers of people voting usually is "extremely devastating" to conservatives.

Isenstadt wrote that "Trump's political operation is launching a multimillion-dollar legal campaign aimed at blocking Democrats from drastically changing voting rules in response to the coronavirus outbreak. In the past several weeks, the reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee have helped to oversee maneuvering in a handful of battleground states with an eye toward stopping some Democratic efforts to alter voting laws, and to bolster Trump. The mobilization is being closely coordinated with Republicans at the state and local levels.

The Trump campaign and RNC are actively engaged in litigation in Wisconsin, where the parties are at loggerheads over an array of issues including voter identification, and in New Mexico, where the battle involves vote-by-mail. The skirmishing has also spread across key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, where the well-organized Trump apparatus has fought over changes that could sway the outcome of the election.

The enterprise-- which includes more than two dozen GOP officials, including lawyers dedicated entirely to litigation-- shows how completely the pandemic has upended the 2020 election. While litigation over voting issues is not uncommon, the coronavirus-- and the likely obstacles it will create for voting in November-- has brought the issue to the forefront of the campaign.

The public health crisis is already injecting a huge X-factor into the election, with impossible-to-predict effects on voter turnout, and officials in both parties acknowledge the fights over voting laws could affect the outcome of the election.

Democrats-- who typically benefit from high turnout elections because their voters cast ballots less reliably-- are plowing ahead with initiatives to make it easier to vote.

...Trump advisers say they are open to certain changes, such as automatically sending absentee ballot applications to voters over age 65. But they’re opposed to other moves Democrats are pushing, such as sending every voter a ballot regardless of whether they ask for one, which Republicans argue would open the door to fraud.

Trump has long been fixated on voter fraud. He has repeatedly claimed without evidence that he lost New Hampshire in 2016 because out-of-staters cast ballots, and after the election the president set up a since-disbanded voter fraud commission. Following the disastrous 2018 midterms, Trump said that after voting, some people “go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”

During an appearance on Fox News this week, Trump pushed back against an effort by House Democrats to secure billions of dollars for election assistance in the coronavirus relief package. The bill Trump ultimately signed included $400 million, a fraction of what Democrats had been seeking.

“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said.

Federal funding to help states ease voting barriers in response to coronavirus is just one front in the battle. Trump's political apparatus is taking a state-by-state approach.

In Pennsylvania, where Democrats proposed an entirely vote-by-mail system, Trump advisers worked with the Republican-controlled Legislature to push through more circumscribed rules. They include a limited expansion of absentee voting and changes to the handling and counting of those ballots.

In Georgia, some officials are recommending sending everyone a ballot, also a no-go for Trump's team. The president’s advisers instead advocated mailing people applications they would need to fill out and return in order to receive a ballot. The idea was approved by Georgia’s Democratic Party and Republican secretary of state.

Republicans see an advantage in the change in Georgia. They say they will be able to use their financial advantage over Democrats to reach their Georgia supporters to ensure they're returning ballot request forms.

The Democratic offensive is being led by Marc Elias, a veteran election attorney who is currently involved in litigation in more than a dozen states. He has advocated a handful of changes in the wake of the outbreak, including providing pre-paid postage for mail-in ballots and extending the postmark deadline to Election Day.

"If states are not able or willing to rise to the occasion of the challenges that Covid-19 poses, we’re going to continue looking very seriously to the courts to protect the rights of voters and to ensure that ballots don’t go uncounted that should be counted,” Elias said.

Trump advisers say they are trying to prevent overreach on the part of Democrats, who have long sought to ease voting restrictions.

“It is beyond disgusting that the Democrats are using this crisis to try to dismantle the integrity of our voting system,” said Justin Clark, a senior Trump campaign counsel who is helping to spearhead the legal fight. “The American people won’t stand for this, and the campaign and the party intend to fight with them for a free, fair, and open vote in November."

Clark pointed to so-called community ballot collection-- an idea embraced by some Democrats that would allow local organizations and individuals to collect ballots from voters at their homes-- as something the Trump campaign would fight.

The pandemic is expected to increase the amount of funding the Republican Party devotes to lawsuits. The cash-flush Trump machine announced in February it was directing $10 million toward legal battles, but people involved in the effort say that figure is now likely to climb much higher.

You know how you always see photos of presidents and their wives early on election day voting at the polls? You won't see one of those this Friday for the Florida primary; Trump has requested absentee ballots for himself and the former Slovenian sex worker he married-- just as some 160,000 other Palm Beach County residents have. Yesterday at his daily shit show, he said "I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting. People should vote with ID, voter ID, I think voter ID is very important. The reason they don’t want voter ID is because they intend to cheat. It shouldn’t be mail-in voting. It should be you go to booth and you proudly display yourself, you send it in the mail… all sorts of bad things can happen… by the time it gets in and is tabulated."

Some think that the conservative plot to demolish the U.S. Post Office-- which happens to be constitutionally-mandated-- is now, because of the pandemic-- in high gear. No post office, no trustworthy mail-in-voting? Kara Eastman, in the progressive Democrat running to replace Trumpist toady Don Bacon in Omaha. "Republicans are afraid of high turnout so they are afraid of universal vote by mail," she told us. "We need to push to ensure that our democracy doesn’t fall victim to this virus like our economy has." Texas progressive Mike Siegel noted that "In one fell swoop, we see that the Republicans are both a death cult and fundamentally anti-democratic. They’d rather us risk infection than increase voter participation. I understand that creating national vote-by-mail is a monumental task, but with resources and commitment it is certainly achievable. It’s the right thing for public health and it’s the right thing for our democracy." Please consider supporting the campaigns being run by Kara, Mike Siegel, Mark Gamba and Liam O'Mara by clicking on the thermometer below and contributing what you can in these tough times.

Mark Gamba, the mayor of Mikwaukie, is running for Oregon's 5th congressional district against Blue Dog Kurt Schrader, who finds himself voting with Republicans far more than an actual Democrat. Gamba is a progressive with every instinct and every action. This morning he told us that "Oregon has been 100% vote by mail for over 20 years. It’s super convenient, we have two weeks with our ballots and can vote at our kitchen tables. We get some of the best turnouts in the country especially since we have one of the highest levels of voter registration in the country. What’s more, there’s a paper trail. It can’t be cheated. That last one in particular is what worries the Republicans. They know that in totally fair elections they lose. In this Pandemic moment, we are one of the few states that can safely vote. Our primary will continue as scheduled. I think the Republicans know that these last 3+ years have been some of the worst in American history for a significant part of the population. In a fair election, with a big turnout, they will lose the presidency, the Senate and the House will move further to the left. If we hope to stop climate change and create a universal health care system so that these pandemics don’t become a regular part of our lives then moving to a nationwide, Oregon style, vote by mail will be a powerful first step."

A Riverside County congressional candidate for a seat help by Trump-lockstepper Ken Calvert, progressive Liam O'Mara is also a history professor. "It is one of the most poorly-kept secrets in American politics that not everyone involved in it likes democracy," he said today. "There is a vocal subset of Republican officials who scream about Democrats wanting to take our freedoms, while they quietly do the job themselves-- authoring and passing surveillance legislation, expanding police powers, eroding civil rights legislation through the courts, and engaging in active voter-suppression. This has long since moved past hypocrisy and into farce, and if we cannot find a way to reach the voters who enable these figures, we will find ourselves living under permanent minority rule as the kind of "managed democracy" we see in places like Russia. If we're not willing to fight back for basic liberties like voting, then the act could lose meaning, becoming a rubber-stamp for a minority party, and our freedom be stamped out with it. We need to extend and secure voting rights, not let them be stripped from more each year. Enough is enough. Are we to be a republic or a party dictatorship? Talk to your Republican friends. Help them to understand that partisan divisions are being exploited to undermine what it means to be an American. If we can't talk to each other again, we may lose those values to which we pledged our allegiance."

The Most Important Video You Can Watch Today

Yesterday, the Dow Jones closed down 12.94%. The worst day in 1929-- the harbinger of the Great Depression (which is different from a recession)-- was 12.82%. Yes, anyone who thought Donald Trump would make America great again should lose their right to vote until taking a year of good, solid civics courses.

In the video above, Naomi Klein explains how predators and their shameless political enablers-- whether a Bush or a Biden-- try to use emergencies and profound shocks to the system to push their selfish, toxic agendas forward.

"After a shocking event-- a war, coup, terrorist attack, market crash, or natural disaster-- they exploit the public's disorientation. Suspend democracy. Push through radical 'free market' policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class."

"But," she continued, "here is what my research has taught me: Shocks and crises don't always go the shock doctrine path. In fact, it's possible for crisis to catalyze a kind of evolutionary leap. Think of the 1930s, when the Great Depression led to the New Deal."

That's because the Democratic Party nominated Franklin Roosevelt-- it took 4 convention ballots to do so-- instead of the Joe Biden of the day, Al Smith, an ardent conservative. Roosevelt went on to defeat Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover 22,821,277 (57.4%) to 15,761,254 (39.7%), winning 472 to 59 electoral college votes. Hoover won only 6 states. I should mention that two years earlier-- just after the market crash-- the Democrats managed to wrest control of the House, winning 52 Republican seats and a tenuous majority-- 218 to 216. Although the Republicans lost 6 Senate seats, they still managed to retain control of that body (50-45) but Roosevelt's coattails changed all that. In 1932, as the Great Depression raged, the GOP lost another 11 Senate seats-- including that of nutcase conservative Majority Leader James Watson (R-IN)-- and winning a 58-37 majority. In the House, as the Republicans continued to screech "Socialism!!!," the Democrats grew their majority by 97 seats as the Republicans were punished by the voters with a loss of 101 seats, leaving the Democrats with a 313-117 majority. Two years later, the Republicans, still screaming "socialism" as the Democrats implemented the New Deal, lost another 14 seats-- and then 2 years after that another 15 seats! By 1936, the GOP minority-- still babbling incoherently about "socialism"-- was the shitty end of a 334-88 split in the House. In the Senate, the Republicans lost another 5 seats, leaving them with just 17 to the Democrats' 74.

That's how we got a social safety net in this country. Can we do it again? Will this shock be enough to elect Bernie and not hapless status quo establishment conservative Joe Biden? And will it see progressives like Marie Newman, McKayla Wilkes and Eva Putzova replace conservatives like Dan Lipinski (D-IL), Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Tom O'Halleran (D-AZ) and progressives like Mike Siegel, Kara Eastman, J.D. Scholten, Jon Hoadley and Liam O'Mara replace conservatives like Michael McCaul (R-TX), Donald Bacon (R-NE), Steve King (R-IA), Fred Upton (R-MI) and Ken Calvert (R-CA)? You can help-- we all need to if we are going to win this thing. That's why I've included the Blue America 2020 congressional thermometer on the right. Please contribute what you can. As Naomi concluded, "With Washington suddenly in the giant stimulus business, this is precisely the time for the stimulus that many of us have been talking about for years. It's called the Green New Deal. Instead of rescuing the dirty industries of the last century, we should be boosting the clean ones that will lead us into safety in the coming century. If there is one thing history teaches us, it's that moments of shock are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerve. The future will be determined by whoever is willing to fight harder for the ideas they have lying around.

For me, I'd rather solve the crisis and the society's structural faults by handing leadership over to someone like progressive Milwaukie mayor Mark Gamba than reactionary Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. A few minutes ago, Mark, a fan of Naomi Klein's book, told me that "Times of great upheaval do indeed create an opening for dramatic change. That can cut either way. If we give into fear, that change could lead to the end of democracy as we know It (Trump cancelling elections and staying in office), or at least a strong steepening of the curve towards the plutocracy that the neo-liberals have been striving towards for decades (Biden winning and putting a pretty face on the continued destruction of the middle class). If, however, we choose hope; if we choose to believe that the world can indeed be a better place, then the opportunity to quickly transform our economy and way of life into one that serves the common man and heals our planet is ours for the taking." He continued:

A hard swing to the left with the election of Sanders to the presidency, a senate flip and the election of a raft of congress people unbeholden to the corporatocracy, could not only save our democracy and our economy-- it could literally save the future of life on this planet.

With the passing of the Green New Deal, millions would be put to work in family wage jobs: building out the infrastructure to transition to 100% renewable energy, electrified transportations systems, transformed agricultural systems, restoration of our great forest and much more.

Nearly half of America would have new found access to world class health care with the passing of Jayapal’s Medicare for All bill. Hospitals and clinics would return to rural areas, long term care wouldn’t bankrupt families, and pandemics like the one we are currently just beginning to experience would be far less lethal. Millions would be employed providing health care rather than being employed denying health care so that insurance companies can maximize their profits.

We would also be prioritizing education and making sure that the full potential of every American can be realized, so that the brightest minds have the opportunity to solve future disasters. Right now, many of them don’t choose to continue to higher education, many don’t even finish our radically underfunded k-12 system. Because our federal government has chosen profits for a few over optimizing the potential of every child, we are becoming less competitive in the world market and destroying the middle class.

We could end the cradle to prison pipeline and the prison for profit system. We could reduce our massive spending on the military industrial complex and finally stop the endless wars that kill and maim our young people and wreak havoc on civilians all over the world.

Imagine an America where everyone makes a good living, where no one dies of curable diseases, where homelessness is dark memory of our recent past, where the natural world is restored and food is not poisoned in the fields. All of that is possible. The only thing we have to give up to get it is our fear and the unlimited enrichment of the billionaires.