Reforming The Police, Part II-- No More Bully-Boy Brutality Towards Citizens

The Tipping Point by Nancy Ohanian

Part I of this series on police reform is here. It was somewhat ironic yesterday when a GOP flack for the NRCC, Michael McAdams, put out a statement for Tom Emmer (R-WI) oil response for Democrats looking at ways to reform out of control police departments. He said "No industry is safe from the Democrats’ abolish culture. First they wanted to abolish private health insurance, then it was capitalism and now it’s the police. What’s next, the fire department?" The irony, of course, that the only party trying to abolish the fire department is the GOP, which has tried in several jurisdictions to privatize it, the same way they're trying to abolish the post office and privatize that.

Politico began their coverage of the bill with a somewhat startling headline: "Black Americans want to stop being killed": Democrats unveil sweeping police reform bill". The bill-- the Justice in Policing Act-- was unveiled by Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with Hoyer and Pelosi. Bass, an L.A. congresswoman and former Speaker of the California Assembly told the media that "The world is witnessing the birth of a new movement in our country. A profession where you have the power to kill should be a profession where you have highly trained officers accountable to the public." As of now, what the bill does is:

• Ban no-knock warrants
• Ban chokeholds
• Require body-cams
• Mandate a national police misconduct database
• Demilitarize police
• End racial profiling
• Limit qualified immunity, making it easier to sue cops who unjustly injure, brutalize or kill citizens
• Make lynching a federal crime (something that has passed both chambers but is being blocking by racist Kentucky Senator Rand Paul)

Just to give you an idea of how hard this is going to be to get to Trump's desk, let's remember that Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went from this:

to this tweet yesterday:

and is now a puffed-up, liveried Trump butt boy. The clossest any Republican got to helping with writing the bill was ex-Republican Justin Amash (now an independent) who co-wrote a section with Ayanna Pressley that partially repeals qualified immunity but my sources on Capitol Hill tell me not even Amash will vote fo it.

By Washington standards, this is a pretty progressive bill and it will be hard enough to get the Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party to get onboard without trying to gut it, let alone any Republicans. Pelosi and Hoyer appear-- at least for now-- to be on the side of progressives here so who knows? Maybe they can turn it into a freight train that the Blue Dogs and New Dems will either hop on or get splattered by. Still, it's hard to imagine hard core conservative Democrats like Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ), Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT) or Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK) backing this bill.


Robin Wilt is running for the seat representing Monroe County, New York and she's firmly on the side of reform-- very firmly. Last night she told me that we're in "a pivotal moment in history where those in the future will ask if you were with the dissenters-- who took to the street to unequivocally assert that Black Lives Matter-- or on the sidelines tacitly supporting an unjust status quo. My opponent, Joe Morelle, has chosen to be on the wrong side of history. Despite this transformative legislation being supported by 166 members of the House of Representatives and 35 Senators, as well as a broad coalition of civil rights organizations including: Demand Progress; Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; National Action Network; National African American Clergy Network; NAACP; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; the National Coaliton on Black Civic Participation; Black Millennial Convention; and the National Urban League-- my opponent has remained silent. As Desmond Tutu famously opined: 'If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.' Over the past two weeks, the people of Rochester and Monroe County have taken to the streets to protest by the thousands. Joe Morelle had the nerve to show up at those protests for a photo opportunity. It is craven to be in a position to do something to help address the practices that lead to the unjust taking of Black lives, but then stand idly by when the opportunity is presented to take action. It is particularly cynical to do nothing after signing a toothless resolution that mouths the words that you support police accountability and reform. The people of the 25th Congressional District can’t endure any more of Joe Morelle’s empty promises and self-serving, performative allyship. We need courageous leadership that will allow us all to breathe."

Tomas Ramos is the best suited of all the candidates running in NY-15 to represent the South Bronx. Last night he told me that "'Defund the police’ or 'abolish the police' does not mean that when we wake up tomorrow and there are no law enforcement mechanisms there to protect the population. Rather, defunding the police is a concept which involves community led initiatives and ideas of what 'law enforcement' should look like rather than punitive racist policing measures. It is a multi-tiered plan that involves all community stakeholders and to reinvest police funding into community based entities. These progressive policies are a far cry from where modern American policing is derived from-- the slave patrols of the antebellum period, which ultimately sought to apprehend, and return runaway slaves and to maintain a form of discipline for the enslaved population. These efforts are important because it will lead to community based solutions rather than the traditional bureaucratic gridlock which does not effectively benefit the community and does not tear down the essence of systemic racism. Ruben Diaz Sr. an opponent of mine in this race has been endorsed by the NYPD’s strongest police union the PBA. Needless to say, my opponent does not share the same views as I do when it comes to this concept."

UPDATE: FLORIDA



Adam Christensen is the progressive Democrat running for the open seat in north central Florida in the Gainesville area. Early this morning he told me that he and his volunteers stand with the Black Lives Matter movement "and we want our actions to show that, not just our words. The Republican Party of Florida, including opponent Judson Sapp, have been completely silent on the issue of police brutality and refuse to even have the conversation about any changes we can make in the police system. People in this district and the entire country deserve better, because right now they have Congressman Ted Yoho representing them, who just voted against making lynching a federal crime. The entire system must have a complete overhaul. We first must require demilitarization of the police. Officers do not need to be armed with military-grade equipment for civilian issues. The next necessary task is reallocating funds from police departments to social programs meant to act as first responders rather than police. These social programs would include mental health experts and others meant to de-escalate situations. Police are trained to use a firearm and make an arrest, while also being forced to respond to every call. Imagine calling for help with a mental health issue, and instead of getting help, someone shows up, slaps handcuffs on you and takes you to jail. This could further damage someone’s mental state, rather than help fix the issue. We also must require police training  to expand de-escalation and inclusivity training. There are currently 34 states that do not require this training. The last thing we must do is hold police accountable. 99% of cases of police shootings end with no charges being filed. The majority of police who get fired as punishment for their actions later get re-hired by a different police force. The reason these tragedies keep occurring is because there is no accountability for police officers. It’s time we police the police."

"Don't Shoot!" by Nancy Ohanian

If You Want Congress To Address The Climate Crisis Seriously, You Should Help Elect Candidates Who Take It As Seriously As You Do

If you've been following DWT since 2012, you probably remember when we endorsed then-state Senator Al Lowenthal of Long Beach for Congress. He had a great record in the state legislature, so it was an easy pick. And-- guess what... he's been a great member of Congress as well. His ProgressivePunch rank has consistently been an "A" and he's always up there with Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee, Judy Chu and Ted Lieu in fighting for the core progressive agenda.

Much of his campaign back in '12 revolved-- as much of his work in Sacramento had-- around the environment so it was no surprise that that's where he's directed much of his energy since going to DC. And now, a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, he is the chairman of the subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Rights.

In a note to his supporters over the weekend he reiterated that "The Trump Administration is no friend of our environment. In the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic, this administration has used the crisis as cover to continue rolling back environmental regulations and pushing through controversial policy changes that threaten not only our environment, but the health of many Americans."

Furthermore, he wrote, "These actions are being quietly slipped under the radar as many public health officials who would have serious concerns over the policy change are busy in efforts to fight coronavirus. Americans are getting sick, and the Trump Administration's cruel environmental policies, all in the name of a pro-polluter agenda, will only make them sicker. People across the nation are suffering from the impacts of these misguided environmental policies, and each additional action by this administration only adds to the harm. As a chairman of a key subcommittee on the Natural Resources Committee, I remain committed to protecting and preserving our environment.

Basically, Lowenthal and other progressives like him are fighting to make sure the Trump regime doesn't destroy our environment in the name of saving our health when they really mean saving the investments of the top 1%.

"The Trump Administration has spent years rolling back decades of hard-fought environmental progress. The White House has worked to undermine science, accelerate climate change, undo decades of work to protect our air, water, and health, and compromise the health of our planet." Lowenthal is doing the hard work it takes to protect the environment by working to stop Trump and protect the future of our planet-- something Trump doesn't spent a second thinking about, beyond claiming the Climate Crisis is a "Chinese hoax."

Here we are, 8 years later and we're still trying to help elect enough progressives to break down the corrupt establishment walls-- transpartisan-- that are holding back progress on the environment and Climate Change. I asked progressive challenger Robin Wilt where these issues are for voters in Monroe County, New York and how she will persuade them she's going to do more than establishment New Dem Joe Morelle.

She told me that "Although the urgency of the environmental crisis has seemingly taken a backseat to the COVID-19 pandemic, those on the frontlines of the struggle are painfully cognizant that the climate change crisis has always been intimately connected to the propagation and spread of global pandemic diseases like COVID-19. Not only does our deforestation and removal of habitat create more opportunity for cross-species spread of viruses not native to the human species, but the susceptibility to illness of certain groups (disproportionately our urban Black and Brown communities) is increased by prolonged exposure to pollutants. That is why it is so important that we have policy like the Green New Deal that focuses on environmental justice. When our representatives, like Joe Morelle, stubbornly ignore not only science, but also our most vulnerable communities, it creates recipes for disaster like the COVID-19 conflagration. We must hold our representation accountable for the circumstances that they have created…and for our future. With the clock ticking on our ability to avoid species-threatening massive casualties from climate crises, we must now, more than ever, vote like our lives depend on it and remove the do-nothing representatives that present a barrier to our collective progress."

Tom Guild is running for the Oklahoma City seat, currently held by a very conservative, utterly worthless Blue Dog, Kendra Horn, who has refused to sign onto the Green New Deal proposal. Earlier today Guild told me that one of his "main goals when elected to the U.S. House is to initiate bold action to fight climate change. The principles of the Green New Deal will be a good guidepost to help us reverse the damage done by excessive use of fossil fuels. We will create tens of millions of good paying green jobs as we transition to an environmentally friendly renewable energy policy. According to a consensus of the scientific community, time is running short to effectively deal with climate change. We must not set in motion an irreversible situation that leads to the destruction of our environment that scientists say will likely render planet earth unsustainable for human life in the foreseeable future."

Audrey Denney is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in a sprawling rural district in northeastern California. When Bernie decided to announce his own climate plank, he did it at an event with Audrey in her district. Few candidates are as serious as she is about Climate. This morning she told me that "Climate change is the single most important issue facing the planet. We are already living through its effects. In 2018, 93 people died in our district in two devastating and historic wildfires-- where climate change was a contributing factor. My commitment to moving forward policy that help us mitigate and adapt to climate change was the reason I was the first congressional candidate to be endorsed by the Sunrise Movement this cycle. I’m running against a far-right extremist climate change denier-- who is also a rice farmer. Every single farmer I know and work with knows that climatic patterns are changing. Except Congressman LaMalfa."

Riverside County progressive Liam O'Mara is practically a neighbor of Al Lowenthal's and he's just as gung-ho on the environment and climate change as Lowenthal is. Liam made this minute-long video for us today. He says when it comes to the Climate Crisis, Congress should "stop listening to lobbyists and start listening to scientists... We are falling behind Europe and east Asia in the technologies of to-morrow, and ought instead to set American ingenuity free to create the jobs that will make us competitive for generations. Infrastructure investment pays itself back 3-to-1, so let's put Americans back to work building a modern power grid, battery storage, and renewable generating capacity." He also noted that the CA-42 incumbent, "Crooked Ken Calvert, has a lifetime score of 7% from the League of Conservation Voters and a 0% from the Sierra Club. He wants to pillage the earth for short-term corporate profit and hand taxpayer money to polluters."

Maybe This Time?

New York magazine contributor Alex Carp asked Frank Rich if American democracy is at a crossroads. Frank responded with another question: "Before the murder of George Floyd, the nation’s prevailing political question was, Can Trump be beaten in November? It has now been supplanted by an existential question: Can this country even hold itself together and limp through a long hot summer to Election Day?

But you could also say that likening this year to any other is to miss the larger point about the perilous state of the American experiment. The intractable issue of race in this country has been a festering cancer each and every year of its existence, even when it seems to go into remission-- whether the “victory” over America’s original sin be marked by the Emancipation Proclamation, the legislative triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, or the election of the first African-American president. It’s only human to want to believe that history moves forward in our own lifetimes, and that we can cite milestones we’ve witnessed with our own eyes to measure that progress. But history is bigger than all of us, and from the perspective of its wide lens, America is still a young country, perennially stuck in a nightmarish Groundhog Day since its birth.

Take a small example from 1967. After urban riots left 43 dead in Detroit and 26 in Newark. Lyndon Johnson, the president who fought tirelessly to redress the nation’s racial and economic inequities, created a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate what had happened. The Kerner Commission, named after the Illinois governor who chaired it, produced a voluminous report that was published and promptly ignored as the country melted-down in 1968. Its 600-plus pages in my old paperback edition can be reduced to a single finding on page eight: The No. 1 cause of the unrest was “Police Practices,” which resulted in “a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a ‘double standard’ of justice and protection – one for Negroes and one for whites.”

It was late in 1967, as the Kerner commission was reaching this conclusion, that the police chief of Miami, Walter Headley, responded to his city’s unrest by declaring “war” on criminals, vowing to go after them with shotguns and dogs, killing them if need be: “I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he said. The coinage was echoed by the white supremacist third party candidate of 1968, the Alabama governor George Wallace, who would win five Southern states and come close to throwing the tight presidential election into the House of Representatives.

It was, of course, Headley’s message that Trump revived in his tweet last weekend-- though in Trump’s case, it turned out that he was willing to inflict violent punishment even on those who are not looting. He and his attorney general Bill Barr unleashed rubber bullets and gas on peaceful protestors, including clergy, to clear the stage for the photo op in which he held up an upside-down Bible that had been carried to St. John’s Church by his daughter in a $1,540 Max Mara handbag. This religious tableau was carried out by the President with an all-white cadre that included the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff. Soon the internet was flooded with photoshopped images of Hitler staging a similar Bible-toting photo op, and within 48 hours even Jim Mattis, the esteemed retired General and former Trump Secretary of Defense, released a statement likening his former boss’s divisive rhetoric to the Fuhrer’s.

Most Vichy Republicans in Washington are remaining silent even so-- unless you count the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who did his part to uphold Walter Headley’s legacy by calling for American troops to go to war against their own citizens to restore order. Unlike Trump, he took the trouble to pretty up Headley’s words a bit by fashioning them into an Op-Ed piece that The Times saw fit to publish-- on grounds redolent of Facebook-- despite its bloodthirsty tenor and its inclusion of a discredited Antifa conspiracy theory to justify its call for martial law.

No one should be surprised that the latest public lynching of a black American by the police-- and almost literally a lynching, with a cop’s knee substituting for the rope-- led to this conflagration. We’ve been there too many times before. Feckless liberals who did little or nothing as police abuses piled up on their watch, whether Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota or Bill de Blasio in New York, have zero excuse.

The legions of Republicans in public office who stand idly by as Trump and his MAGA claque of racists occupy the White House are indistinguishable from their forebears-- whether Democrats of the Jim Crow era, or their successors, the Republicans who took up the segregationist mantle from the Dixiecrats once Barry Goldwater ran for president in opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964. They can’t pretend now that they didn’t know Trump’s intentions from the start. Barely a month after his Inaugural address decrying “American carnage,” his attorney general, Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, started to dismantle Justice department programs monitoring rogue police departments. “We’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights,” he said in February 2017. Just five months later Trump gave an address to uniformed police in Long Island in which he asked that they “please don’t be too nice” when manhandling criminal suspects.

We’ve got American carnage now, all right. What happens next? In some ways, 2020 looks more like 1868 than 1968. That was the year when the racist president Andrew Johnson, who’d inherited the White House after Lincoln’s assassination, narrowly escaped conviction at his Impeachment trial. In the ensuing presidential race, the Republican party cleansed itself by nominating Ulysses Grant. The racial animus of the Democrats’ ticket was defined by the vice presidential candidate, Francis Blair. As the historian Richard White writes in The Republic for Which It Stands, he “promised to use the army to restore ‘white people’ to power in the South” by nulling the new state governments controlled by what he called the “semi-barbarous race of blacks” who had been empowered by the Reconstruction Act of a year earlier.

“The election of 1868 in the South was one of the most violent in American history,” White writes, a “reign of terror” targeting black voters. In Florida, for instance, bands of white men armed with guns kept blacks from voting. It was “the last presidential contest to center on white supremacy,” wrote the historian Eric Foner in his definitive account of the period, Reconstruction. The Democrats’ incendiary campaign raised “the specter of a second Civil War.”

Grant triumphed. America was spared that second Civil War, albeit without eradicating the systemic toxins that have deprived black citizens of their lives, their rights, and economic equality ever since. Now we have another election that is centered on white supremacy, with a president and a major political party, abetted by the John Roberts Supreme Court, determined to do anything possible to block what Trump calls “the black people” from access to the one peaceful method for going forward, the ballot box.

“There is no such thing as rock bottom,” wrote George Will this week. “So, assume the worst is yet to come.” What form will that take? We know by now that 40 percent of the public and, George Will notwithstanding, 99 percent of Republican leaders and financial backers will remain loyal to Trump no matter what. We know that none of them complained when their voters, who define “liberty” as their right to spread new lethal waves of COVID-19 with impunity, carried assault weapons into state capitols. We know that Trump pointedly vowed yet again to “protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights” in his brief Rose Garden address ostensibly deploring George Floyd’s murder before marching to St. John’s church on Monday.

You don’t need to be woke, only awake, to see what’s going on here and to ask once again, more desperately than ever, why Trump’s toadies in Washington continue to do nothing as our country teeters toward the abyss.

Robin Wilt is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in the Rochester, NY district. This morning, she told me that there has been " widespread unrest in Rochester and Monroe County as protesters take to the streets to assert that Black Lives Matter and protest the unjust slaying of George Floyd, and so many before him, at the hands of police. A local author made the connection between the most recent protests and the 1964 rebellion in Rochester to assert the civil rights of African Americans, driving through the same neighborhoods in which the ’64 unrest occurred and noting that poverty still plagues the area. Unfortunately, the disparities for which the ’64 freedom fighters sought redress persist, with the area ranking among the most impoverished in the nation, and the Congressional District ranking the second-worst place to live for Black Americans in the nation. Of note, it was in these blighted neighborhoods that police disproportionately focused their attention during the curfew and State of Emergency imposed by the Mayor and County Executive. Although racial segregation and generational systemic bias continue to produce disparate outcomes in the region, the tenor of the latest protests is decidedly different from the 1964 protests. The cry for change is multicultural and involves people from across the entirety of the district unified in the clamor for justice. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated for our communities in stark terms that we are only as strong as the most vulnerable among us. The silence of our leaders, like my opponent, is evidence of his complicity with the status quo, and this time, he cannot hide. Our movement for substantive change is taking over."




In her Slate column this week, Why This Time Is Different, Dahlia Lithwick noted that what's happening in the streets now might actually accomplish something. "It’s probably not a coincidence," she wrote, "that the legal words spiraling through the ether today are either in Latin or just plain archaic: posse comitatus, Insurrection Act, 'no quarter' orders. This is not the nomenclature of the Trump era, which has tended to coalesce around such concepts as 'Stupid Watergate' or 'Cheeto in Chief.' This is the language of the founding era, of the Civil War, of revolution and wartime. And that’s because, as much as President Donald Trump may believe that people have taken to the streets-- in the midst of a lethal pandemic-- to protest him and his policies, the very opposite is true. These protests we are seeing are not specific to Donald Trump. Yes, they are complicated and multifaceted, seeded in some cases with white supremacist agitators and gratuitous police violence that is enabled and cheered by Donald Trump. But these protests are at bottom about the original sin of slavery, inequality, and police powers used in their service.

For years now I have been asking what it would take to have Americans on the streets under Trump, and for years I have attended well-meaning marches, with ironic signs amid well-meaning, mostly white liberals, that received little attention and changed nothing. Those marches were important, they served as warnings and democratic markers, and they kept many of us sane. But I now see that I was wrong about why people take to the streets, because those were Trump protests, and Trump doesn’t matter.

The paradox of the Trump presidency is and has always been that Trump is tiny, far too tiny to matter, and also that he is at the epicenter of everything. The central koan of the Trump era was always How did someone so small come to matter so much? And because “don’t pay attention” doesn’t work when the guy you’re meant to be ignoring has the nuclear codes, it was a loop from which we couldn’t extricate ourselves. So long as we believed that Trump was the cause of the problem, we were doomed to our civil outings around Foley Square, as the police stood mildly by, and guys sold quirky anti-Trump buttons from pushcarts.

But Trump was never the cause of the problem; he is the result of the problem. As Bryan Stevenson explains (for the thousandth time), there is not one single thing about the death of George Floyd that is remarkable or new. Not the killing in plain sight, not the complicity of the officers on site, and not the fact that it was captured on video. “Everything we are seeing is a symptom of a larger disease,” Stevenson says. “We have never honestly addressed all the damage that was done during the two and a half centuries that we enslaved black people. The great evil of American slavery wasn’t the involuntary servitude; it was the fiction that black people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people, and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white people.” The killings of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery all could have happened in the Obama administration. Killings did happen then. The fact that the current president has praised Nazis and given succor to white supremacists didn’t cause this week’s mass protests; it merely coincides with them.

Because Donald Trump is so laugh-out-loud absurd, so vain and fussy and so lacking in substance, protesting him was never quite serious. It was important, yes, and the policies he has enacted do real harm to real people, harm that should be loudly denounced. But these protests always had a bit of a street festival quality to them: Look at the silly carnival barker and laugh at his bad spelling and his bad hair and his poor captive wife. Even as he was stealing migrant children from their parents and locking them in iceboxes, the fundamental stupidity of the president was still center stage. But even these protests, often featuring tens of thousands of protesters, didn’t break through precisely because the predominantly white people in them could fist-bump the cops as we politely and whimsically strolled by.

Most Americans intuitively understand that Donald Trump, with his failures of cognition or compassion and his incomplete theory of mind, was a symptom and not a cause of America’s original, founding sin. Protesting a symptom occupied us for a while. But protesting the sin itself is what has finally brought people to the streets, in a sustained and combustible way. Why bother protesting a reality show when reality itself is a daily nightmare? Long before the advent of the Donald Trump presidency, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues declared America “over” its racism problem. Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, police departments were hiding evidence of wrongdoing and exonerating and protecting the worst malefactors.

Now, law enforcement is armed with military weapons, military leaders are parading around D.C. in uniform, the free press is being punched, and protesters are being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by state actors who insist there was no tear gas or pepper spray. Just as the coronavirus again instructed us all on how America’s racism savages black lives and black livelihoods disproportionally, these protests are a master class in the same. The brokenness is centuries in the making.

Things are very bad, and they will get worse. They will get worse because Donald Trump’s weakness and vanity have made space for authoritarianism to creep in all around him, at a politicized Justice Department, and with a complicit GOP. The nation is shuddering to a crisis because Trump has enabled and allowed every single element of authoritarian rule to flower around him, and because even if you just play a strongman on TV, a compliant police state can happily comply to make it reality. This too was invisible to many of us, amid the preening and the clowning, but it has certainly happened.

Do you remember William Perry? Not "The Refrigerator-- the Pentagon guy who worked for Carter, Reagan and-- as Secretary of Defense-- Clinton. Today he teaches at Stanford and is a member in good standing of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. This was, in part, his statement on Thursday about Trump's attempted coup this week:

I support the right of protesters to demonstrate peacefully, and deplore the suggestion that our military should be used to suppress them. The U.S. military is a powerful force that has served our nation well, in war and in peace. But it was never intended to be used against American citizens, and it was never intended to be used for partisan political purposes.

It is both wrong and dangerous to threaten to deploy American soldiers against American citizens unless there is a complete breakdown of law and order in a state and the governor requests that assistance. And yet President Trump has repeatedly threatened to do just that against demonstrators, the vast majority of whom are peacefully exercising their constitutional rights for the redress of very real grievances. Worse, his defense secretary has suggested that our troops, in carrying out this threat, would “dominate the battlespace.” America is not a “battlespace.” And the people he threatens to dominate are American citizens, not enemy combatants.

When I was Secretary of Defense I made it a priority to avoid any suggestion of support for partisan political actions, and I assured that the president did not use any military facilities to support his political ends. But on Monday Secretary Esper walked with the president to St. John’s Church in an implicit show of support, after peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Park had been forcibly subdued and dispersed with tear gas under the orders of Attorney General Barr. With a Bible conspicuously in his hand, the president sought to establish himself as the “law and order” president in the upcoming political campaign.

This was wrong on so many levels, but the one I personally relate to is the blatant use of the Secretary of Defense as an implicit supporter of this reprehensible political act. Secretary Esper has said that he was not aware of what the president was about to do. But he was shamelessly exploited and his office degraded. He should speak out forthrightly that he will not support using the office of the Secretary of Defense to promote partisan political actions. President Trump demands that members of his administration swear their loyalty to him, and those who demur do not stay long. But in the United States, those who serve in the government and the military swear an oath to support the Constitution, not any individual. That is what makes our nation great.

Campaigning For Congress-- In The Midst Of The Pandemic

Asshole without a mask campaigns among men all wearing masks

Right before the shutdown, an unsymptomatic campaign volunteer gave everyone on a congressional campaign COVID-19-- as well as the candidate's entire family. No one died. But it sure screwed up the campaign. Yesterday, the Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel, said Señor Trumpanzee is no longer welcome in the state after he adamantly refused to wear a mask in public as part of a campaign stunt. "He is a petulant child who refuses to follow the rules. This is not a joke." Michigan has been a hard-hit state that is working very diligently to flatten the curve by encouraging-- not discouraging-- everyone to wear a mask. Michigan's 53,510 caseload increased by 501 cases while Trump was in the state yesterday and 69 more people died, bringing their total deaths to 5,129. (Yesterday there were 5,358 cases per million people, worse than every European country other than Spain.)

A political consultant friend of the blog, Eric Hogensen, wrote up some suggestions for campaigning during the pandemic for his clients and shared it with us. "The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting changes to our lives," he wrote earlier this week, "have altered politics. In addition to moving election dates, restrictions on the usual messaging tactics have changed campaigns, possibly for the rest of the year."

Digital

With canvassing is limited or unavailable, social media will become more important and valuable this year. Online videos, both planned and live, can be used by the candidate to get their message out. A candidate can also host question-and-answer sessions that connect a candidate to a voter. Organizing a virtual night based on any one of the main issues taking place in the district you are running in, is a great way to reach voters. Also, utilizing more apps with platforms such as Nextdoor to reach voters in your district directly will greatly benefit your campaign.

Branding

The typical political messages may seem less appropriate during these challenging times, so messages should be inspiring and hopeful. It’s important to remember not to change your brand as a candidate during these times. You can pivot with creative messaging and expanding your brand but don’t change who you are.

Field

Instead of canvassing door-to-door, phone banking will become more important. Use community mapping by starting with who you know and identifying who is influential (such as local leaders). Build a list of these individuals and then ask them to introduce you to their connections. Predictive dialer services should also be utilized even more during this cycle. Also, the targeting for different constituencies through phone calls should be looked at with a closer lens to evaluate your support as you begin your outreach. With volunteers making calls from home, it can actually be easier for calls to get made. Set up weekly goals and a leaderboard so volunteers can reach enough voters.

Although these are challenging times, candidates should recognize that there are still alternative ways to reach voters, and that it is important to spread the message of hope and unity during this crisis.

I asked some of the Blue America-endorsed candidates how they're coping with keeping a campaign moving forward during the pandemic. Indiana progressive Jim Harper was the first to respond: "Our campaign acted early to make sure that we were doing no harm. I haven't shaken a hand for months, and we quickly cancelled our in-person events even before stay-at-home orders were issued. We have switched our focus to phone calls and digital outreach, but also work to make sure that we as a campaign are giving back during a difficult time. Every week, we engage in multiple service activities. This is a good opportunity to remain connected with our community, while lending a helping hand."

If Jennifer Christie wins, she will have flipped an open red seat in the suburbs north of Indianapolis. There's a crowded field of Republican-lite Democrats and Jennifer is the only one running on a straight-up progressive platform. This morning she told us that "We started knocking doors right after the New Year. We were out several times per week long before any other campaigns had started canvassing. We knocked in thr sleet and snow. Then the pandemic hit. We stopped knocking with an abrupt halt to keep our team and constituents safe. We immediately switched over to phone-banking, text-banking, and zoom-events. We are on the phone daily and it’s going really well. Because people are home more, we talk to a lot of people. And we get overwhelmingly yes commitments with enthusiasm for our truly progressive campaign and the chance to send a scientist and a mom to Congress."

The Newark, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Hoboken, Weehawken, Jersey City district that Hector Oseguera is running in is very different from IN-05. For one thing, the district is as blue as it gets and the electorate is 65% Hispanic. The winner of the primary is the next member of Congress. Hector is campaigning hard against an entrenched, machine-backed incumbent, Albio Sires. Earlier today, Hector told us that "Incumbents normally hold a tremendous advantage over their challengers, having much better access to funding and to influential groups within their districts. This new reality has quickly leveled off this traditional power disparity, as both elected officials and their challengers adapt to life in lockdown. This campaign specifically, has shifted to online advertisements on platforms like Facebook, which can have as much impact and reach as traditional television and radio ads at a fraction of the cost. Letter writing campaigns offer remote outreach opportunities that give voters a personal, one-on-one experience, while maintaining social distancing. Even our activism need not grind to a halt. I've participated in a number of COVID-safe rallies at ICE detention centers, where activists drive around prisons, honking profusely, to let the inmates and staff know that we are aware of the unsafe conditions inside. All this chaos can provide creative, tech-savvy campaigns a much needed advantage on a traditionally skewed playing field. How campaigns adapt to this new world will vary depending on the contours of their districts; but the old Latin proverb, Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat, hold true today... fortune favors the bold!"

"In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic," said Rochester, NY candidate Robin Wilt, "our campaign first off transitioned to mutual aid efforts. We saw the communities that were most engaged in our campaign suffering, so we started making deliveries for a local food pantry, which turned out to be one of the few food pantries in the county that has continued to operate during the crisis. We also transitioned our phonebanks to include senior check-ins. In addition to mutual aid efforts, we knew that our original strategy would depend a lot on direct voter contact, so since we didn’t have that in our toolbox anymore, we transitioned our outreach to social media, and we began doing weekly COVID-19 community check-ins. These are updates where we highlight the issues facing our frontline and most vulnerable community members to raise awareness and build action around moving forward through this pandemic together, with no one left behind. We have now done these public forums and outreach to the arts and self care communities, for those that are housing insecure, the immigrant, migrant, and refugee community, the incarcerated community, the climate justice community, the mutual aid community, educators, voting rights advocacy, etc. Yesterday, we hosted a call with Medicare for All advocates. We promote them via Zoom on Facebook Live, and it’s a means to engage voters around the priorities that matter most to the electorate."

"So, basically," she concluded, "our team has shifted to a strong digital outreach effort through social media channels. The results have been terrific, reaching an average of 60,000 voters each week. We’ve also never strayed from our activist roots. What we’re finding during the pandemic is that raising awareness and taking action to support our frontline communities is the best mechanism to spread our message.

Mckayla Wilkes is taking on Pelosi's #2 (and K Street's #1)-- Steny Hoyer. "Prior to COVID-19," she told us today, "we were knocking on over 10,000 doors a weekend so when we had to suspend canvassing we were obviously a bit concerned as to how we would continue to get the word out about our campaign. But thankfully, we were able to transition fast due to our committed volunteers. Since we shut down canvassing, we’ve made hundreds of thousands of calls, seen an increase in volunteers by 1000%, raised over $300k and see no signs of slowing down. Just yesterday, we launched our first TV ad campaign throughout the district!"

There Really Is A Reason We Have Primaries-- Too Bad So Few People Use Them

Do you watch the Humanist Report much? If not, maybe you should. In the video above, host Mike Figueredo successfully explains why progressives need to show some spine when it comes to dealing with foot draggingly corporate careerist Democrats, especially in leadership. As you know, Marianne Williamson has endorsed Shahid Buttar, who's running against Nancy Pelosi, Mckayla Wilks, who is running against Pelosi's top lieutenant, Steney Hoyer, and Jen Perelman, who is taking on faded party leadership figure Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Look at Marianne's list of candidates; 14 of them are taking on entrenched Democratic incumbents.

One senior congressional Democrat, a progressive, didn't agree that anyone can lump Pelosi and Hoyer together. "It's like apples and hand grenades," he told me. "And to have this video come out within 24 hours of her calling Trump a "fat fuck" is bad timing. Would anyone else call Trump a "fat fuck!"

Yesterday Shahid Buttar told us that he's "incredibly grateful for Marianne Williamson's support. Having seen her as a voice encouraging empathy at the highest levels of our national politics, I'm eager to build a brighter future together with her-- finally putting people and communities, rather than corporations, at the center of our public policy. Often, it takes a voice like hers, from the outside of politics, to see so clearly what the root of the problem is in Washington-- entrenched Democratic so-called leaders like Nancy Pelosi who are our immediate hurdles to progress. I'm impressed by Marianne's courage in joining me to take on the top brass of political corruption, and I hope other figures in the Democratic Party have the strength to follow in her footsteps."

Well, one of those figures is Eva Putzova who served on the Flagstaff City Council and as a Bernie DNC delegate. Now she's running for Congress in a district (AZ-01) held by former Republican state legislator Tom O'Halleran, who now bills himself as a Blue Dog. He opposes everything the Democratic Party stands for. Eva told us that she "became a U.S. Citizen in 2007 and the day after the naturalization ceremony I registered to vote as a Democrat because I am a democrat. Then in 2016, I went to the DNC as a delegate for Bernie Sanders, which opened my eyes to how the party leadership at both national and state levels is enmeshed with corporate interests and how the only way we can reclaim Democratic Party for democrats is to replace those who are bought by corporations. So many young people we talk to on the campaign trail are turned off by conversations about policies because they are turned off by the corrupted politics. I'm challenging the most Republican Democrat in Arizona precisely for these reasons: his votes and inaction on the most enormous challenges we face, like climate change, are a direct reflection of his support of the corporate agenda. The top Democratic Party representatives in Congress lost their ability to lead with courage and to drive transformation because they are out of touch with the people of this country and because they accepted and institutionalized corruption. They have to go because they are no longer Democrats."

All the details are here: https://secure.ngpvan.com/DAR1YEp-bkWTNtpHzgUd7A2

Michael Owens is a former Democratic chairman for Cobb County, which went blue under his leadership. He knows the party inside and out and he's taking on one of the last of the Georgia Blue Dogs, David Scott. He was very happy to have received an endorsement from Marianne. "Her willingness to suppprt progressive candidates," he said, "is a breath of fresh air, in what can often be the caustic environment of primary politics where challengers are running against establishment Democrats. The true strength in moving the progressive movement forward is through down ballot candidates."

Jan Perelman is the progressive Democrat running for the south Florida seat that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is sitting in-- opposing everything remotely progressive other than gay rights and abortion. When it comes to working families' interests, she's a baby step from being a Republican. "I'm always so amazed that I'm considered the 'left,'" Jen told us last night. "I have been a Democrat since I registered to vote in 1989. I am pro-labor, pro-environment, and anti-war, which are not radical positions. It was the Democratic Party that 'left' me when it was taken over by corporate interests and stopped representing working people. We cannot move forward as a country as long as entrenched corporate Democrats remain beholden to special interests. As a primary challenger who takes zero corporate money, I am going to do everything in my power to bring the Democratic party back to its roots as the party of the people."

Robin Wilt is also challenging an old school corrupt political hack, Joe Morelle, in Monroe County, New York. Robin was very enthusiastic about Marianne endorsing Shahid and told me that "not only proved that her run for the Presidency was not borne of vanity, but of integrity; but she has also demonstrated the type of political leadership and courage that the left wing of the party has long been lacking. As Democrats, as long as we remain complicit in supporting leadership within the party that does not advance an agenda that centers those most impacted by the deleterious policies that have produced the massive inequities that we witness today, we can no more say that we care about marginalized communities and the plight of the disenfranchised than can Republicans make that claim."

Continuing, Robin said that "It is disingenuous and craven to claim that you support universal health care, and then support leadership that blocks Medicare for All at every turn. It is disingenuous and craven to claim that you care about wealth and income inequality, and then support leadership that preserves a tax structure that benefits only the top 1% and accepts massive amounts of money from corporate interests. It is disingenuous and craven to claim that you care about climate justice, and then support leadership that thwarts implementation of the Green New Deal. It is disingenuous to claim that you care about housing justice and then support leadership that will not advance a Federal Homes Guarantee. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King warned us about the well-meaning moderate that compromised his/her principles for the sake of pragmatism. King understood that whenever we compromise with a lie about who people are, and barter the human rights of the people we serve for our own comfort, we empower the political forces that have exploited our divisions to maintain power. The politicians who are blocking the expansion of healthcare to all Americans, abiding corporate polluters, increasing investment in the war and mass incarceration and detention economies, all while slashing our nation’s safety net and denying workers the right to earn a living wage are the selfsame politicians who are blocking a progressive agenda. Our silence is enabling their deceit. It is time that we follow Marianne Williamson’s courageous lead, give voice to the voiceless, and unabashedly support true progressives that adhere to the principles we hold dear."

Hector Oseguera, the New Jersey progressive running for a seat held by party hack Albio Sires, told us this morning that "It's an absolute honor to be part of Marianne Williamson's movement to bring the Democratic Party back to earth. This is a party that's supposed to represent the working-class people of this nation, but has gotten way too comfortable with their corporate sponsors. When you look at my race, you'll find that I'm the only Democratic candidate in this Democratic primary. The incumbent has an abysmal record on immigration, corporate welfare, and mass surveillance. Whether it's the environment, healthcare, or affordable housing, my opponent is to the far right of the average voter in my district, relying on a network of political cronies and corrupt big money interests to keep him in power. He's received dishonorable mentions in books like the Soprano State and the Jersey Sting, covering his history of corruption and ethics violations that have contributed to New Jersey's reputation as a politically corrupt state. This progressive movement, which owes a lot to Marianne's leadership, is working to dismantle the facade that corporate Democrats offer much substantive difference from their Republican colleagues."

In the Oklahoma City congressional district, Tom Guild is running against one of the most conservative Blue Dogs in the House, Kendra Horn. Tom noted yesterday that "Marianne Williamson is showing exemplary leadership in endorsing, raising money and fighting for progressive congressional candidates throughout America. My opponent opposes Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, raising the minimum wage to $15; she voted against labor’s major legislative initiative in Congress in 2020, voted against Sen. Tim Kaine’s and Ro Khanna's resolution to restrain Donald Trump from taking military actions that could start another endless war in Iran, and recently met remotely with lobbyists for Big Insurance Companies who were seeking money to bail out COBRA in the HEROES Act. That’s just a small sampling of her support for Republican-lite regressive policies. On the CARES Act she voted for the rule to let the bill proceed to the floor of the House to be debated and voted on, then she voted no on the bill. Go figure. Unless progressives oppose Nancy Pelosi’s DCCC gravy train and their support for Republican-lite members of the House running as Democrats, we essentially have two big corporate parties corrupted to the hilt by Wall Street and special interest campaign money. That may be one of the big untold stories as to why so many Americans choose to opt out and not vote every year. They see little structural and substantive difference between the two major parties on issues important to them. I thank Marianne for her support for our campaign and commend her for her integrity in grabbing the bull by the horns and supporting, Shahid, Pelosi’s primary challenger. Marianne has the guts of a government mule and that’s exactly what it will take for progressives to rule the roost. Progressives need to be tougher and stick out their necks to support fellow progressive candidates even when it’s hard to do and not convenient for them. I’m happy that I promoted Marianne to help her make the presidential debates and encouraged people on Facebook and Twitter to donate to her campaign. I was all in for Bernie, but saw that progressives needed all the help we could get in the primaries and in the debates. We need to GO BIG, GO BOLD, or GO HOME!"

Do You Trust Washington With Your Family's Well-Being?

Nabilah Islam, pictured above, is the most progressive candidate running for the open seat in the GA-07 seat in the suburbs and small towns north of Atlanta. This morning she shared an observation with us: "The House and Senate have had four opportunities to do what is right by the American people. At this point, I have faith in very few members in either chamber to put the American people first. We are on the brink of another great depression. We have 33 million Americans out of work. 90 million Americans uninsured or underinsured and those in the halls of Congress are debating on whether or not to expand COBRA. I've been saying for some time now that we need to be looking at policy proposals like FDR's New Deal. More immediately, we need emergency UBI, rent and mortgage cancellation, student debt cancellation, etc. Long term this is a great opportunity to implement a Green New Deal. It would create jobs with a federal jobs guarantee. Allow us to invest in ourselves and create an opportunity for working people to thrive not just survive. My biggest fear is ushering in the 117th Congress with people who would rather make austerity cuts that take on corporate special interests. That is why we need to fight to elect people like myself and other progressive candidates around the country who are committed to putting Americans first."

If he was a reader, I bet Catherine Rampell would trigger Trump every time the Washington Post published one of her columns. I'm sure that's already the case with Mitch McConnell. Yesterday's, Washington Shows Just Why The Country Shouldn’t Depend On It For Stimulus would have sent him into a screaming tirade. "Washington’s very Washingtonian behavior," she wrote, "has just underscored why a stimulus should not depend on Washington." Like many members of Congress, she thinks automatic economic triggers should determine aid to citizens, not DC finagling.

Last week, on the day the unemployment rate hot 14.7%, Don Beyer (D-VA), vice chair of Congress' Joint Economic Committee, issued a statement:

We have not seen horrible, history-making numbers like these since the Great Depression.

“In two months, almost a decade’s worth of job growth has been wiped out, the unemployment rate has more than quadrupled, and more than 75,000 Americans have died because President Trump did not take seriously multiple early warnings about the global threat of the coronavirus and failed to lead a competent fight against it. This is President Trump’s economic legacy-- cracks in the economy as a result of his trade wars and tax cuts have now split wide open as a result of his ignorance and incompetence.

It could be months before the tens of millions of Americans who have lost their jobs are able to return to work. If we expect them to stay home to stop the spread of the virus, then we need to make sure they can take care of themselves and their loved ones for as long as the public health and economic crises last.

A legislative proposal I introduced this week with Senators Reed and Bennet would extend unemployment benefits until states’ unemployment rates drop to acceptable levels. We should not penalize people for not having a job when there are no jobs to be had. I hope the legislation is included in the next coronavirus relief package.


In her column, Rampell went right to another statement on that same day, one from the White House-- "that those hoping for more help from the feds shouldn’t hold their breath. 'We're in no rush, we're in no rush,' President Trump said Friday. His economic advisers and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed this message. In other words, don’t plan on more aid to states, which are already so strapped for cash that they’re cutting Medicaid during a pandemic. Don’t expect extensions of financial lifelines for jobless workers."



She's speculated that "this is a negotiating ploy to extract concessions from Democrats-- even though red states would suffer from delaying federal aid, too. Whatever the reason, GOP dawdling is the latest reminder that Congress should stop leaving the fate of the economy to the whims of callous, dithering, dilettantish, hostage-taking charlatans, who see every crisis as an opportunity for a shakedown. Instead, build a stimulus system that triggers on (and off) automatically-- based on whatever the economy actually needs, using metrics agreed to in advance."



Economists are generally fans of policies known as “automatic stabilizers,” or programs that ramp up automatically when the economy tanks. For example, as people lose jobs, they become eligible for food stamps or unemployment benefits.



These forms of stimulus kick in without politicians having to debate, and they have huge bang for their buck. Both are useful features in a dysfunctional political system, especially when the country is struck by an unusually bad shock in which a speedy fiscal response is critical.



Unfortunately, our automatic stabilizers were never robust enough. Worse, the Trump administration and state governments have made automatic stabilizers much less automatic and stabilizing by adding red tape and reducing programs’ generosity in recent years.



This has left the country unusually reliant on Washington to devise a rescue program ad hoc during the worst economic crisis in nearly a century.



Congress has passed several rounds of relief, but more is undoubtedly necessary. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that without further stimulus, unemployment will be 9.5 percent at the end of 2021. Goldman Sachs estimates that even with another half-trillion dollars in yet-to-be-proposed fiscal stimulus, unemployment will average “only” 7.2 percent next year.



For now, most of Congress's existing measures are poised to sunset based on somewhat arbitrary deadlines unrelated to economic conditions. Enhanced unemployment benefits, for example, are set to expire July 31, even though the CBO expects the unemployment rate to average 16 percent that quarter.



Of course, nothing would stop Congress from renewing these emergency programs-- except, that is, Congress.

Each time measures come up for renewal, prolonged negotiation is more likely, with politicians exploiting “must-pass” legislation to make crazy, controversial demands. This already happens during debt-ceiling showdowns, the more common congressionally created opportunity for unnecessary crises.



If Trump’s “no rush” comments weren’t sufficient evidence of this risk now, recall that in the aftermath of the Great Recession, authorization for extended unemployment benefits lapsed five times. More recently, the small-business loan program ran out of funds for more than a week. And that was for a program virtually everyone supports, almost immediately after it began.



The next round of stimulus negotiations will be difficult and high-stakes. But it must include relief measures automatically linking stimulus to economic conditions, so that further rounds of negotiations can have lower stakes. Some Democratic lawmakers have proposed plans that would do this. Rep. Don Beyer (VA) and Senators Michael Bennet (CO) and Jack Reed (RI) recently offered a framework for linking enhanced jobless benefits to (duh) the joblessness rate. So did Sen. Ron Wyden (OR).

In these proposals, benefit extensions would automatically turn on while the economy is bad, and-- perhaps as important, at least to budget hawks-- automatically trigger “off” as the economy heals. Lawmakers, of course, can override their “autopilot” settings if they later change their minds.



Fair warning: Trigger-based programs are likely to have big up-front price tags. But they are no more expensive than the cumulative cost of multiple program extensions, such as those enacted after the Great Recession.


They could actually be less expensive, because they’d prevent costly program lapses and restarts. And they’d give states greater certainty around budgeting, and households greater confidence in their ability to pay bills. (Remember when Republicans used to complain about policy uncertainty?)



Most important, we need to minimize the number of desperate American families either party might take hostage. Especially when at least one party appears more than willing to actually destroy those hostages.

One senior Democratic congressman told me that he thinks Rampell's got it wrong. "If the GOP is going to act like callous jackasses," he said, "then you make them pay the price for it, just as Trump/McConnell tried to do with the Payroll Protection Program funding. Also, the trigger concept doesn’t really work here, because this may well be a once-in-a-century depression, not an unpleasant point in the business cycle. It also assumes that the Government has a limitless supply of funds, and in fact it doesn’t. Last month’s federal deficit is more than the annual GDP of Switzerland. Triggers make sense when you have only a demand problem; this is both a demand and a supply problem. Wendy’s is not running out of hamburgers because of a lack of demand, I assure you. At this point, even Keynes would not be a Keynesian. I’m not saying that I would vote against it, but I certainly don’t think that it’s a great idea."

Tom Guild is running for the Oklahoma City district, currently held by GOP-lite Blue Dog Kendra Horn. "No rush is the operative phrase with too many members of the permanent political class in Washington, DC. It took a month for me to receive my stimulus check. If my rent or house payment or my need to buy food had been dependent on receipt of that money, I would have been a prime candidate for eviction or foreclosure and a casualty of nutrition deprivation syndrome. Many people I visit with on social media and otherwise are still waiting for their stimulus payment. They needed their money to survive and keep their financial heads above water. No rush. How asinine. Oklahoma’s unemployment compensation system has been fairly roasted for having an unduly complicated filing system and many intentional roadblocks to delay or deny claims for desperate Sooners. They may soon seek shelter with other homeless Okies or stand on the side of the road pleading for money to help themselves and their desperate loved ones. As Marie Antoinette coldly proclaimed before being beheaded by French revolutionaries, 'Let them (the hungry and desperate if bread was unavailable to them) eat cake!' No hurry. How barbaric. The national government has been an epic failure in addressing the desperation in America during these terrible dark days. The Reed/Bennet/Beyer proposal to extend unemployment benefits until states’ unemployment rates drop to acceptable levels is a sensible idea. As they indicate, 'We should not penalize people for not having a job when there are no jobs to be had.' This practical idea should be considered and included in the next coronavirus relief package. The Trump tax cuts for the wealthy, Wall Street, and big corporations moved through Congress and was signed into law in short order. Bailing out the wealthy and the big corporations among the political ruling class always takes priority over the lives of ordinary hard working and beautiful yet beleaguered Americans. The greed of some very BIG small businesses in snapping up forgivable loans authorized and funded by Congress, before the real small businesses, who lacked connections with the well-heeled and the big banks, had a chance to participate before the money set aside for them was gone, is despicable. When I taught a course called Contemporary Workplace Issues that I pioneered at the University of Central Oklahoma, I used a book to enhance discussion of white collar crime in the business world. The book is entitled The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Graft, corporate welfare, and grifting has become a way of life for some privileged and entitled corporate citizens here in our country. Wealth and income inequality have reached critical mass and become one of the most serious systemic problems facing our country. The failure of the national government and many state governments to put the least among us first makes a tragic situation that much more horrific and intractable. No rush indeed. We better start addressing issues of poverty, privilege, inequality, and government incompetence now. The future viability and health of our republic hang in the balance."

Eva Putzova is the progressive running in AZ-01. The incumbent, a lifelong conservative Republican pretending to be an equally conservative Blue Dog, guarantees that voters have to real choice. Eva is ending that. "The failure of Congress and the White House to address the deteriorating conditions faced by American families," she told us this morning, "is disgraceful. I agree that there should be automatic triggers that guarantee increased unemployment benefits, food stamps and healthcoverage, until the economy recovers to full employment. However, that is not enough. With or without this current economic/public health crisis, we need universal healthcare, i.e, Medicare for All, a Green New Deal to completely retool the economy and invest in underserved areas, strong labor law reform and protections for workers rights to organize unions, a jobs guarantee, and much, much more. The Republican Party and its President are criminally negligent in failing to address the Covid-19 crisis as well the coming economic depression. But too many Democrats are willing to accept half-measures that don't address the social and economic problems that have gotten worse over the past 50 years-- well before Donald Trump became President."

Robin Wilt is a fully dedicated progressive running against a garden variety New Dem in Rochester, New York. She'll make a much better representative of Monroe County's working families, although not as much of a fighter to put corporate interests first, the way her opponent is! "Throughout March and April 2020, the U.S. government passed three main relief packages, and one supplemental one, totaling nearly $2.8 trillion. The overwhelming majority of that money-- over $2 trillion-- went directly to Wall Street. I want that to sink in. In the middle of a pandemic, the main spending priority of the Federal government was not to ramp up infectious disease testing, increase manufacturing of needed medical goods and PPE, or to provide health care coverage or a basic income for the tens of millions of people who would eventually be unemployed as a result of the health crisis. Once again, the first priority of those in Washington was to bail out Wall Street, not Main Street.

"The first COVID-19 relief bill passed on March 6, 2020, and rightfully went to response efforts to fund research for a vaccine and provide money to help with efforts to fight the spread of the virus. It totaled only $8.3 billion. On March 12, 2020, however, the Fed enormously expanded its repo operations to banks by a whopping $1.5 trillion dollars, then adding another $500 billion on March 16, 'to ensure there was enough liquidity in the money markets.' Yes, you read that correctly. That’s $2 trillion to banks within ten days of the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while only some $8 billion went to fighting the health crisis.

"Meanwhile, the second relief package for people-- the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (which, ironically, came after the Wall Street bail out packages)-- passed on March 18, and again, in comparison to the spending on the financial sector, allocated a paltry $3.4 Billion to: 1) provide money for families who rely on free school lunches in light of widespread school closures; 2) mandate companies with fewer than 500 employees provide paid sick leave for these suffering from COVID-19, as well as providing a tax credit to help employers cover those costs; 3) nearly $1 billion in additional unemployment insurance money for states, as well as loans to states to fund unemployment insurance; 4) Funding and cost waivers to make COVID-19 testing free for all.

"It was not until almost a month later, on April 9, 2020, that the Federal government got around to passing any direct aid to families in the form of cash payments through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

"I am fond of the saying: Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me your budget. Our representatives who demonstrate that their priorities and loyalties are first and foremost to the financial sector-- as opposed to the people who are the engines of it-- should be voted out. We need new, bold, representatives who are not afraid to truly put people first in their spending priorities."

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.