Take A Look At The Future Of American Political Leadership: Mondaire Jones

 

This year, Mondaire Jones started to climb a hill most people thought was impossible. He began a primary campaign against one of Pelosi's most powerful allies in Congress, Nita Lowey, who was first elected to Congress when Mondaire was 2 years old, and had since risen to the position of chair of the House Appropriations Committee. NY-17 consists of northern and western Westchester County and all of Rockland County across the Hudson. It's a D+7 district that even Hillary was able to win easily against Trump (58.6% to 38.4%). But the district is mostly white and mostly rich (nearly a $100,000 media family income). Mondaire ran on working class issues, that have a lot of appeal to the upper middle class as well, the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-All, racial justice and police reform...

Soon after he declared his candidacy, Lowey announced she was retiring, setting off a flood of candidates who wanted the safe Democratic seat for themselves. And, after all, how hard would it be to defeat Jones, a black, gay progressive? Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas, state Assemblyman David Buchwald, right-wing state Senate "Democrat" David Carlucci and son-of-a-billionaire Adam Schleifer, each thought the seat should belong to them. Schleifer spent $5,197,000 of his inheritance on the race and Buchwald threw $612,342 of his own money in. Mondaire, who eschews corporate money, won and won big with 41.7% in an 8 person race-- more votes than the second and third place finishers combined:

So next question... what is Mondaire likely to be like when he's sitting in Congress? He's a natural-born reformer-- and he's eager to get started. One of his targets sits in the middle of a field of landmines: the Supreme Court. I had asked him about the danger of Trump's nominee abolishing women's Choice. "Unfortunately, the Trump Administration and the Republican Party have systematically undermined women’s reproductive freedom," he said. "The federal government must step in to protect civil rights-- and it cannot leave those rights up to the extreme conservative majority on the Supreme Court. As a member of Congress, I will work to codify Roe v. Wade by statute, repeal the Hyde Amendment, and ensure that any Medicare for All legislation includes coverage for the full range of reproductive services." (His GOP opponent is an anti-choice nut, completely out of step with the values of NY-17.)

But then he got into something related, but not specifically about Choice: He reminded me that McConnell "is poised to ram through a replacement of Justice Ginsburg before the November election, flagrantly breaking with the precedent he set just four years ago. That should confirm for the American people what many of us already knew: the Republican Party sees the Supreme Court as a partisan tool meant to serve its own political ends and further entrench the power of right-wing plutocrats. I refuse to stand by and let them. The constitution gives Congress the authority to add or subtract seats from the Supreme Court, and I fully intend to fight to expand our Court, if elected."

Addy Baird, writing for BuzzFeed News last week, hit the nail on the head about what kind of a congress member Jones is going to be: His Victory Was Major For Progressives. Now He Wants To Keep It Going By Expanding The Supreme Court. And not just by 2 justices; Jones wants to add 4. Jones told Baird that "in 2021, when Democrats have unified control of the federal government, that we will still have as a major obstacle having the progressive legislation that we enact upheld when it is challenged in the Supreme Court. If democracy is to be preserved, we have to expand the size of the Supreme Court and restore balance. … Roe v. Wade, the civil rights of LGBTQ people like myself, [and] the civil rights of racial minorities like myself are all at risk of being abridged by what may end up being a 6–3 conservative bloc on the Supreme Court."

That puts him at loggerheads with Biden who opposes expanding the Court. Last year Biden said that "We’ll live to rue that day." Baird wrote that "Jones says his party is already living that reality. 'Democrats are already ruing the day,' he said. 'I think Democrats rue every day… I disagree with those words by Vice President Biden over a year ago. And my expectation is that he will change his opinion now.'" YES! That's the kind of leadership we need in Congress in 2021.

And what originally caused Jones to win the Blue America endorsement during the primary, wasn't the Court. it was his stands on the other issues powering his campaign. "It's frankly absurd that, in the midst of a pandemic that has claimed the lives of 200,000 Americans, the debate over our predatory healthcare system has been completely shunted aside," he reiterated on Friday.  

This fight is personal for me. After my grandfather died of cancer, I watched helplessly as my grandmother worked well past the age of retirement just to pay for the high cost of prescription drugs and medical procedures not fully covered by Medicare. When I quit my job to try to better my community by running for Congress, I lost my health insurance. That is not a rational system.

I believe health care should be a human right in a nation as wealthy as our own, not tied to employment status or economic means. It has never been clearer to me, and to millions of Americans across this country, that we need Medicare for All. 

I have every confidence that Mondaire Jones will be working alongside AOC, Ed Markey and other climate hawks to fill in the details of the Green New Deal. He told us last week that "In the past month, America has watched in horror as the West Coast was engulfed in flames, and the Gulf Coast was inundated with hurricanes. It is beyond debate at this point that climate change is real, it is here already, and it is disproportionately impacting our most vulnerable communities. The question is, what are we going to do about it? I know where I stand. We absolutely must mobilize our collective resources to confront the challenge of climate change with the urgency required. We must invest in sustainable infrastructure with a particular eye on our Black and brown communities that have experienced generations of environmental racism. Anything less is tantamount to climate denial."

If you're talking about the future of leadership in the Democratic Party and in Congress and in this country, you're talking about Mondaire Jones. "This week, like so many weeks," he said, "it is so difficult to be Black in America. To be reminded that property is worth more than Black life. People protesting the murder of Breonna Taylor are being punished more harshly than the people who actually killed Breonna Taylor. That's absurd, and, people all across this country have had it. I may let myself feel the pain of injustice, but I do not despair. I remain deeply committed to the fight for a more just America. The fact is, our criminal legal system is working exactly as its designers intended. That’s why we need to reimagine that system."

Let's reimagine a system where it's men and women like Mondaire Jones leading out party instead of representatives of special interests who have long ago lost touch with the spirit of fairness and reform that have, in the past, made the Democratic Party worthwhile.

Blue America Endorsement Alert: Mondaire Jones (NY-17) For Congress

New York’s 17th congressional district-- northern and western Westchester County plus, across the Hudson, Rockland County-- represents one of the best chance in the country to send a true progressive to Congress. After 16 terms, Nit Lowey is retiring in this D+7 district where Trump got only 38.4% of the vote. A recent poll released by Data for Progress shows a statistical dead heat among four candidates.

One of those is attorney and activist Mondaire Jones. Mondaire is a progressive champion running on a platform of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and student loan forgiveness. In fact, he is the only candidate in his race running on these issues. If elected, he would be the first openly gay, black member of Congress in U.S. history.

Mondaire’s chief rivals in the campaign are David Carlucci, Adam Schleifer, and Evelyn Farkas. Carlucci is infamous for being a founding member of the reactionary Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a group of state senators in New York who were elected as Democrats but caucused with Republicans, denying Democrats a majority in the State Senate. Carlucci was just endorsed by the very right-wing NYC police union, which also endorsed the make-believe Democrat running against AOC. Schleifer is the son of a pharmaceutical billionaire and has spent millions of dollars of his family wealth on the campaign. Evelyn Farkas is a former Defense Department official who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the defense lobby and prominent Republicans, including Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and George W. Bush’s Director of National Intelligence.

Mondaire’s campaign has enormous momentum. Without accepting corporate PAC money, he has raised well over a million dollars and has been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, Working Families Party, United Auto Workers, and many more, including, today, Blue America. Additionally, the poll taken by Data for Progress was conducted just as Mondaire was beginning his advertising campaign, showing that Mondaire has significantly more room to grow than his opponents.

This is a safely blue district where the Republicans have not run a candidate in the past two cycles. If Democrats want to form a true progressive majority, it is essential we elect progressive candidates in safely blue seats like this one. This election could come down to only a few hundred votes and every bit of support helps immensely. Please help Mondaire win on June 23rd by making a contribution at the Blue America thermometer on the right.



A Chance To Make History
-by Mondaire Jones





Growing up poor, black, and gay, I never imagined that someone like me could make it to the halls of Congress. I grew up in Section 8 housing and on food stamps, raised by a young, single mom who still had to work multiple jobs for us to get by.

Thanks to the support of a community and a quality public school education that is unavailable to students in that same school district today, I was able to make it to Stanford University, work in the Obama administration, and graduate from Harvard Law School. But stories like mine are the exception, not the rule. I’m running for Congress to change that.

I’m fighting for bold, structural solutions that will ensure we can build a future that works for everyone, not just a subset of the American population. I know what it’s like to feel left behind and to not see yourself represented. In fact, if elected, I would be the first openly gay, black member of Congress in United States history.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen just how precarious our economy is for millions of people. I don’t think any American should lose their health insurance just because they’ve lost their job. I don’t think anyone should have to go into work sick because they can’t afford to stay home. I don’t think we should let an entire generation be crippled by massive student loan debt, preventing young people from meaningfully participating in our economy.

This is a message that resonates not just with people here in New York’s 17th Congressional District, covering parts of Westchester and Rockland Counties, but all across the country. Our campaign has been endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, Working Families Party, United Auto Workers, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, Equality PAC, the LGBT Victory Fund, and so many more.

Our campaign is a grassroots, people-powered movement. Unlike many of our opponents, we’re not taking money from corporations and we’re not self-funding with millions of dollars. We rely on contributions from everyday people, like delivery drivers, nurses, and teachers who chip in $10 or $25 when they can. We’ve been outraising most of our competition, but we’ve got to pick up the pace.

Right now, our election is less than 3 weeks away. We’re fighting for real change for working people, but we’re up against the pharmaceutical industry and the defense lobby and we need your help. Join us.

Two State Legislators-- A Progressive In Montana And A Reactionary In New York-- Are Both Running For Congress

Winter (left) and Carlucci (right-wing... very)

How about we start with the good news first for a change? A few weeks ago Montana state Rep Tom Winter penned a guest post and shot an iPhone video for this blog. Soon after he was the featured guest on the Montana Lowdown, the podcast of the Montana Free Press. "Democratic state Rep. Tom Winter says his 2018 win in a historically conservative Montana House district resulted not from partisan appeals, but from knocking on doors, listening to constituents’ concerns, and promising to represent those concerns in the state Legislature." Alex McKenzie wrote that "Winter now hopes to ride that same strategy all the way to Washington, D.C., where he wants to serve as Montana’s lone voice in the U.S. House of Representatives. Winter recently interviewed on the Montana Lowdown podcast, where the candidate spoke with host John S. Adams about his belief that attempts to categorize Montana voters as urban or rural, liberal or conservative, serve only to benefit the powerful. Winter says his 2018 election suggests that Montana voters care more about issues than about ideology, asking Adams, 'Does anyone think that the government’s doing very well right now? Do we feel that we’re in a position of strength as a state, or as Americans? Because I certainly don’t feel that way.'"

Winter unseated incumbent Republican Rep. Adam Hertz by 39 votes in the 2018 race for House District 96, which covers most of the Frenchtown area west of Missoula. Winter went on to introduce a relatively large list of 23 bills during his freshman session, addressing a variety of issues including health care, minimum wage, mobile home tenancy, and marijuana legalization, among others.

He’s now set his sights on Montana’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and he makes it clear that while he’s eager to weigh in on issues including public lands, corporate tax breaks, and the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, he sees the most pressing need for his voice in Congress in the formation of a plan to deliver health care to all Americans.

“We need to have a champion for rural and underserved communities and make sure that they are involved in the health care decisions coming up,” Winter says.

And now for the bad news-- from bright blue New York-- courtesy of Alexander Sammon and the American Prospect: The Republican-in-Democrat’s-Clothing Trying to Win a Seat in Congress. With former New York state Senator Anthony Brindisi currently stinking up the halls of Congress-- worst voting record of any Democrat in the House-- another pile of dung pretending to be a Democrat from that body, David Carlucci wants to join him in the U.S. House of Representatives. The seat in question is the Westchester-Rockland County district Nita Lowey is giving up.

For the first time in three decades, Lowey was facing a progressive primary challenger of her own: Mondaire Jones, a 32-year-old lawyer who set up his campaign distinctly to Lowey’s left, advocating for a Green New Deal, among other issues. Like many other challengers in New York, Jones had positioned himself for a replay of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory last year.

There was much speculation that Lowey’s resignation would open the door for a high-profile challenger. Chelsea Clinton, for one, had been floated as a possible candidate for NY-17, which encompasses Westchester and Rockland Counties, the suburbs north of New York City. But Clinton declined to enter the race. Instead, into the fray has jumped David Carlucci, a founder and foremost member of the loathed Independent Democratic Conference, who built his political reputation by spending the better part of the decade working to keep the GOP in control of the New York State Senate, despite a Democratic majority. Carlucci’s record as a Democratic Party turncoat is enough to make Joe Lieberman blush.

In 2010, Carlucci, a registered Democrat, secured his first term in a New York Senate seat centered around Rockland County. He promptly went to work thwarting Democratic control of the chamber, in open contempt of party leadership and the state’s voters. During Carlucci’s very first week in office in January 2011, he and three other Democratic senators announced that they would be abandoning the Senate Democratic Conference and forming their own group, the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC). At that point, Republicans had control of the state Senate, but the IDC boosted their numbers and their legislative mandate.

In 2012, despite gerrymandered electoral maps that weighted the scales in favor of Republicans, Democrats won 33 of the 63 seats in the Senate. Even with conservative Democrat Simcha Felder caucusing with the GOP, New York Democrats reasonably expected to enjoy a 32-31 majority in the chamber, which represented a major development in the state’s shifting politics. That majority would have given them control for only the third time since World War II.

However, thanks to the brinkmanship of Carlucci and the rest of the IDC, which had by 2012 swelled to five members, a deal was brokered to keep the minority GOP in control. The IDC firmed up a power-sharing accord with the state’s Republicans, allowing them to block the Democratic legislative agenda at every turn. And as thanks for providing political support to shore up Republicans’ minority rule, IDC members like Carlucci got committee chairmanships and vice chairmanships, which came with not-insignificant financial perks like increased salaries.

The IDC held on for seven years, thwarting Democratic governance in Albany and stirring a civil war within the party. They helped stymie bills on everything from gun control to voting rights. It took until 2018 to dispatch Carlucci and Company’s insurgency, which was finally vanquished last September, when six of the eight IDC senators went down to defeat in Democratic primaries (earlier that year, in April, Governor Cuomo announced a reconciliation plan to effectively disband the IDC and re-incorporate its members into the Democratic Party).

By the time Carlucci rejoined the Democratic caucus, his vote was no longer needed to pass any of the issue items on the agenda. Carlucci managed to hang on to his seat in September, besting his primary challenger Julie Goldberg by 8 percent, though Goldberg joined the race late, without political connections, and Carlucci out-fundraised her by a ratio of 24 to 1. Perhaps chastened, or just aware of the changing political climate, Carlucci played nice with Democrats in the most recent session, helping to pass numerous bills, including a voter pre-registration program for 16- and 17-year-olds.

New York’s 17th Congressional District is extremely safe Democratic turf: In 2016, it went 59-38 for Hillary Clinton. When considering Democrats’ improved lot in suburban districts, and Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in nearby NY-14, it’s exactly the sort of district that would be ripe for a progressive takeover. Mondaire Jones, who raised $218,000 in donations in the last fundraising quarter, even before the announcement of Lowey’s impending retirement, comfortably fits that description.

Jones, who would be the first openly gay black member of Congress, has pledged not to accept PAC money, and has signed the “no fossil fuel money” pledge, while stumping for student debt forgiveness and Green New Deal legislation. He’s also, it should be noted, advocating for a reinstitution of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction repealed in the Trump tax plan. In effect, the SALT deduction saves homeowners and rich people a lot of money, though in a heavily suburban district in a high-tax state, advocating for its reinstatement is probably a political fact of life.

“For 8 years, [Carlucci] helped to block a woman’s right to choose, civil rights for the LGBTQ community, public education funding, criminal justice reform, and so much more that could have improved the lives of millions of New Yorkers,” Jones said in a statement. “As someone who is gay, black, and a graduate of East Ramapo public schools, Senator Carlucci’s betrayal of New Yorkers and the Democratic Party is personal for me.”

Activist groups are similarly seething about Carlucci’s ingress. They’ve identified recent mailers, circulated by the Carlucci campaign, in which he takes credit for a number of bills he worked to stymie for the bulk of his time in the New York Senate. Carlucci has predictably downplayed his role in the IDC.

While it remains to be seen whether Carlucci can convincingly launder his own reputation in the eyes of voters, the possibility of a Trump-friendly Democrat swooping in to secure a seat in a deep-blue district would be deeply troubling as Democrats look to grow their advantage in the House to help advance the policy goals of a possible Democratic president. “David Carlucci spent years propping up Republicans in the state Senate, allowing the GOP to block every major progressive priority even though a majority of New Yorkers support Democrats,” David Nir, political director of Daily Kos told me; the site raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for candidates. “The last thing we need in Congress is someone who puts his personal thirst for power ahead of his constituents’ needs.”

Will The Clintons Try To Get Their Daughter A Congressional Seat?

Nita and Hillary

Don't we all really hate nepotism and political dynasties? If we didn't before, the advent of the Trump family should have put that in everyone's minds. And that Liz Cheney thing in Congress! Yeccchh. The Clintons have been wanting Nita Lowey to retire so their daughter Chelsea could take her House seat (NY-17) in northern and western Westchester County and all of Rockland County. The Clinton home-- which isn't where Chelsea lives-- is in Chappaqa in the center of the district. The district which has a PVI of D+7 and was won by Hillary 58.6% to 38.4% (slightly better than Obama had done against McCain and Romney) starts in Port Chester on the Connecticut border and heads west through White Plains and Dobbs Ferry and then north through Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Mount Kisco, as far north as Yorktown and Peekskill and west across the Hudson into Rockland County, which borders on New Jersey.

She's been in Congress for 3 decades. Last year the Republicans didn't bother running a candidate against Lowey, who beat Reform Party candidate Joseph Ciardullo, after outspending him $1,349,828 too $16,942.

Lowey, a Pelosi crony who heads the Appropriations Committee, is 82 years old and a garden variety moderate Democrat. ProgressivePunch has rated her voting record a disappointing "C," so it is likely a more progressive candidate will be elected with her out of the picture. She already had three primary challengers including Mondaire Jones, a 32 year-old former Obama Justice Department staffer who currently works as an attorney for Westchester County. He decided to run against her because she refused to back the Green New Deal and other policies he backs. He's running on an across-the-board progressive platform. The other two candidates already in the race are Johnny Jabbour, a progressive Arab-American singer-songwriter and progressive school teacher Lola Osoria.

Chelsea, another McKinsey consulting alum like Mayo Pete, works at the Clinton Foundation today and is married to sketchy investment bankster Marc Mezvinsky. They live in a $10.5 million Manhattan condo. She hasn't announced yet whether she's running or not. If Chelsea doesn't run, expect a whole slew of establishment types to jump in, like Assemblyman David Buchwald, right wing asshole and terrible state Senator David Carlucci, and White Plains Mayor Thomas Roach.

Is There A George P. Bush vs Chelsea Clinton Coming Up At Some Point?

Nita Lowey is 79 and has been in Congress since 1988. The Clintons are among her constituents and she has easy reelection races in this D+5 district. This cycle the Republicans didn't bother putting up an opponent. The district spans northern and western Westchester County and all of Rockland County (40% of the district population-wise). Hillary beat Trump 2 to 1 in Westchester-- 64.9-32.1% and beat him in Rockland County 51.2% to 46.1%, which wasn't quite as well as Obama did in Rockland Co. in 2012, when he beat Romney 53-46%.

Friday the NY Post reported that Chelsea is being "groomed" to run for Lowey's seat when she retires.

A source told us, “While it is true the Clintons need some time to regroup after Hillary’s crushing loss, they will not give up. Chelsea would be the next extension of the Clinton brand. In the past few years, she has taken a very visible role in the Clinton Foundation and on the campaign trail. While politics isn’t the life Hillary wanted for Chelsea, she chose to go on the campaign trail for her mother and has turned out to be very poised, articulate and comfortable with the visibility.”

The source continued, “There has been a lot of speculation within New York Democratic circles about Lowey’s retirement and Chelsea running for the seat. There is a belief that Chappaqua is a logical place for Chelsea to run, because it would be straightforward for her to raise money and build a powerful base.”

I didn't puke. I put up a Twitter poll. Not many people thought it was a good idea:

Her father's old friend and ex-Secretary of the Department of Labor, Robert Reich did an OpEd for The Guardian yesterday-- Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more. His point was that the election was "a repudiation of the American power structure" brought about in charge part because Bill Clinton and Obama "helped shift power away from the people towards corporations. It was this that created an opening for Donald Trump." That can't come as a surprise to anyone who reads DWT with any frequency.

Hillary Clinton’s defeat is all the more remarkable in that her campaign vastly outspent the Trump campaign on television and radio advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the top executives of America’s largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW Bush. Her campaign team was run by seasoned professionals who knew the ropes. She had the visible and forceful backing of Barack Obama, whose popularity has soared in recent months, and his popular wife. And, of course, she had her husband.

Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, actively worked against Trump’s nomination. Many senior Republicans refused to endorse him, or even give him their support. The Republican National Committee did not raise money for Trump to the extent it had for other Republican candidates for president.

What happened?

There had been hints of the political earthquake to come. Trump had won the Republican primaries, after all. More tellingly, Clinton had been challenged in the Democratic primaries by the unlikeliest of candidates-- a 74-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and who was not even a Democrat. Bernie Sanders went on to win 22 states and 47% of the vote in those primaries. Sanders’ major theme was that the country’s political and economic system was rigged in favor of big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.

The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn’t take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with the status quo. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years.”

Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.

Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees-- the old working class-- have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement-- all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.

Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.

The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.

Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify-- with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination-- more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration-- has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.

Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump’s isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn’t care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

In the same issue of The Guardian Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), warned these kinds of Democratic Party elites that "middle-of-the-road thinking has overstayed its welcome" and that "the future of the Democratic party begins with cleaning house at the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Without a dynamic progressive committed to a year-round 50-state strategy leading our party-- and a DNC staff committed to humble outreach and genuine advocacy for peoples’ needs-- we are doomed to repeats of 8 November.

We cannot rely on the same tired, inside-the-Beltway social media messages and stale talking points that got us here. Nor can we fall for the dangerous notion that if only she’d talked more about privatizing social security, Hillary Clinton might have won over more moderate voters. There is no evidence that such triangulation has any credibility with the American people, and our party needs to recognize that once and for all.

If Donald Trump’s unusual ideology has taught us anything, it’s that many of the political fights ahead of us have nothing to do with the arguments of the past 20 years. Party leaders need to recruit candidates with a genuine understanding of the issues that matter today, from economic insecurity to the future of rural America to social justice to education affordability.

We need to work with grassroots organizations to build a fresh party for the future. Just putting fresh paint on the party that lost the White House is not an option.

In the NY Times yesterday, Gretchen Morgenson, wrote that there were people who voted for Trump because the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party (i.e., the Establishment) let the banksters off the hook. I didn't vote for Trump, of course, but that's very much part of the reason why I didn't vote for Clinton.

There are many facets to the populist, anti-establishment anger that swept Donald J. Trump into the White House in Tuesday’s election. A crucial element fueling the rage, in my view, was this: Not one high-ranking executive at a major financial firm was held to account for the crisis of 2008.

As millions of foreclosures and job losses followed, the failure to go after fraudsters confirmed the suspicion that the powerful got protection while those on Main Street were kicked to the curb. When Mr. Trump asserted that the system was rigged, he tapped directly into such misgivings.

Many readers of the New York Times, particularly if you live in Manhattan, San Francisco or another affluent enclave, may not see how an accountability failure of years ago could still resonate. But the failure to prosecute even one or two high-profile bankers-- or force them simply to pay fines and penalties out of their own pockets-- left millions of Americans believing that our justice system was unjust.

Recall that more than 800 bankers went to jail after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. And that mess wreaked nowhere near the devastation that the housing debacle did on the overall United States economy.

Embarrassed, perhaps, by their passivity, Justice Department officials recently pledged to take a more aggressive approach to white-collar crime. But the memo issued last September by Sally Quillian Yates, deputy attorney general, outlining new ways the department would hold individuals to account, has not translated into results.

So Chelsea Clinton for Congress? I don't think so. People just want the Clintons to go the fuck away. Like the Bushes.