The NeoCon Wing Of The Democratic Party Is Beginning To Grapple With The Reality That They May No Longer Be In Charge

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that billionaire class avatar Michael Bloomberg "did not rule out" spending a billion dollars of his own to defeat Trump-- even when its clear he's not going to be the nominee-- and even if Bernie or Elizabeth is the nominee.

"Bloomberg’s plans would effectively create a shadow campaign operation for the general election, complete with hundreds of organizers in key battleground states and a robust digital operation, ready to be inherited by the party nominee-- regardless of who that nominee may be.

Already, Mr. Bloomberg has spent more than $200 million on advertising, putting him on pace to spend by early March about the same as what President Barack Obama’s campaign spent on advertising over the course of the entire 2012 general election. If Mr. Bloomberg fails to win the nomination, future spending would be redirected toward attacking Mr. Trump.

And in an interview with Reuter's Jason Lange in Texas, Bloomberg rejected the attacks that he's trying to buy the election: "Number one priority is to get rid of Donald Trump. I’m spending all my money to get rid of Trump. Do you want me to spend more or less? End of story."

Sounds personal-- more than ideological... and maybe a little ego-driven. Also-- Bloomberg, a moderate #NeverTrump Republican masquerading as a Democrat-- detests Trump, who isn't nearly as rich as he is-- for beating him to the presidency... and because Trump derisively refers to him as "Little Michael." And, in fact, on Saturday Bloomberg was interviewed by CBS News' Tim Perry to whom he reiterated that "the number one thing is to replace Donald Trump... While I certainly would disagree with Bernie on an awful lot of things, if it's Donald Trump vs. Bernie, I would support Bernie.

Last week, Reuters released a poll Ipsos did for them about one of those places where Bloomberg disagrees with Bernie-- a wealth tax on the super-rich. Billionaires-- like Trump and Bloomberg-- and their toadies son't like the whole idea of a wealth tax and call it "socialism!!!!" The Ipsos poll shows that 64% of Americans like the idea-- including even 53% of Republicans.

A wealth tax is levied on an individual’s net worth, such as stocks, bonds and real estate, as well as cash holdings, similar in concept to property taxes. It is separate from an income tax, which applies to wages, interest and dividends, among other sources.

...The Reuters/Ipsos results suggested even stronger support for an annual levy on total wealth, not just income. Warren and Sanders have touted the idea as a way to help pay for major social programs like Medicare for All and to reverse a stark rise in the share of wealth owned by the very richest Americans, known as the “1 percent.”

The poll also points to changing attitudes toward basic ideas such as “keeping what you earn.”

That notion, central to a winner-take-all brand of capitalism, got mixed reviews. While 56% of Republicans agreed the very rich should keep what they have regardless of the impact on inequality, 35% of Republicans disagreed with the statement, as did 71% of Democrats.

Republican survey respondents interviewed by Reuters said they did not see their support for a wealth tax conflicting with their party ideals or their support for Trump.

Kathy Herron, 56, a Republican who lives in Santa Rosa, California, said her support for Trump-- a self-proclaimed billionaire-- stems from his hardline policies on illegal immigration. In her view, the president would do well to support higher taxes on rich Americans. “We’re taxed from one end to the other, and it just seems the rich don’t pay their share,” she said.

In recent years in particular, mainstream economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve have taken seriously the possibility that high levels of wealth and income inequality may be not just politically corrosive, but bad for economic growth.

At the most recent Fed policy meeting, staff members presented research on how families’ differing access to credit might make a recession worse-- the sort of exercise that shows how unequal starting points among households can influence national outcomes.

Economic and market trends have likely reinforced doubts about who gets ahead, and how fast. Since the start in 2009 of a now-decade-long recovery, the top 1 percent’s share of national net worth has grown from 27.8% to 32.2%, driven by a record-setting boom in the stock market, according to Fed data.

Trump has cited the rise in equity markets as a selling point in his campaign, which is centered on taking credit for historically low unemployment, and a tariff-heavy trade policy that he says will restore manufacturing jobs.

But that has not changed the country’s wealth picture. While the share of wealth held by the bottom 50% of Americans has increased since the crisis, to 1.5% percent, longterm the trend is down, with their share at less than half what it was in 1989. The shares of wealth held by the middle and upper middle classes-- or all other Americans save for the richest 1 percent-- have all fallen since the crisis.

The key questions:

1. How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? - The very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs

• Strongly agree- 36% (49% among Democrats)
• Somewhat agree- 28% (28% among Dems)
• Somewhat disagree- 15% (12% among Dems)
• Strongly disagree- 11% (6% among Dems)

2. How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements? - The very rich should be allowed to keep the money they have, even if that means increasing inequality

• Strongly agree- 13% (7% among Dems)
• Somewhat agree- 20% (14% among Dems)
• Somewhat disagree- 23% (26% among Dems)
• Strongly disagree- 31% (45% among Dems)

Politico reported that at a campaign event for white collar Democrats-- lawyers and insurance executives-- in Des Moines last week, "A young voter stood up and asked Biden 'How could we trust your judgment?' After all, the voter said, he’d gotten two of the biggest questions in recent years wrong: the 2002 Iraq War vote when he was a senator and the 2011 Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which Biden, then vice president, counseled Obama against... On Iraq, Biden gave a familiar answer that Democratic senators who voted for the invasion have been making for 17 years: It was a vote to give President George W. Bush leverage at the United Nations to bolster a weapons inspection regime, not to greenlight an imminent attack. (This is historically accurate, but a bit like arguing you let a college-aged friend borrow your credit card only for buying books for his fraternity and then being surprised about all the pot and booze he added to the bill.)"

Biden boasted that he "will put my record against anyone in public life in terms of foreign policy." Bernie, noted Politico, is the only rival who seemed to welcome that challenge.

Earlier on the same day Biden spoke, Sanders stumped in Grundy Center, about 90 minutes northeast of Des Moines. It was a small working-class audience and Sanders, after blasting Biden on Iran for the cameras, returned to health care.

Though the term is not often used nowadays, the Sanders town hall format is what sixties-era activists used to call “consciousness raising.” He prods ordinary people to stand up and describe for their fellow citizens the depravities they’ve experienced in the American health care system. Older radicals used the method to make working people aware that they were oppressed, that they weren’t the only ones, and that they could do something about it.

These sessions usually surface so many sad stories that Sanders has a regular joke about how his wife, Jane, complains that his events are too depressing. He then points to an aide who will be handing out Prozac on the way out.

The Sanders view is that, quite literally, this is how the revolution starts. Raise enough consciousness among regular people about the vagaries of the health insurance industry and eventually people will be organizing together and clamoring to trade in their own insurance plans in favor of “Medicare for All.” This is not just how Sanders sees health care, but it’s how he sees almost every issue, including foreign policy.

“I was mayor of the city of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was our enemy,” he said in a 2017 address at Westminster College, in Missouri. “We established a sister city program with the Russian city of Yaroslavl, a program which still exists today. I will never forget seeing Russian boys and girls visiting Vermont, getting to know American kids, and becoming good friends. Hatred and wars are often based on fear and ignorance. The way to defeat this ignorance and diminish this fear is through meeting with others and understanding the way they see the world. Good foreign policy means building people-to-people relationships.”

...Sanders’ allies describe Biden as a bloodthirsty neoliberal warmonger who will return to militarism once elected... Progressives have also changed the politics of foreign policy. Democrats across the spectrum no longer believe that a reflexive toughness to international crises is a prerequisite for victory. In 2004, Kerry, who in his youth was most famous for his opposition to the Vietnam War, reinvented himself as a war fighter for the general election. (He lost.)

The Biden campaign attempted to bullshit the media that they would match Bernie's Iowa rallies with AOC by rolling out Biden's A-team: Kerry and little known Iowa conservative freshman Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer. Bernie and AOC are drawing thousands, Biden, Kerry and Finkenauer are drawing dozens-- sometimes not even.

Biden supporters and staffers waiting for surrogate John Kerry

And Bernie leads in Iowa polling now. He's number one-- with 21.3%-- in the Real Clear Politics polling average (with Biden at 17.7%). And in the latest poll-- the Iowa Poll for Des Moines Register and CNN-- Not only is Bernie # 1, but Biden is barely hanging on with 15%, the number needed to move on to the second round.

Let's look at a perspective-- a missive to shocked neocon GenXerss-- on all this from Cleveland-based attorney and blogger Tim Russo, an unwavering, unflinching Bernie supporter: Now that you’re in Bernie panic….

It’s happening. As polls one by one put Bernie Sanders the front runner to win Iowa, then New Hampshire, the Great Bernie Panic of 2020 has begun. Relax! Shock is always the first stage of grief, is it not? Grief at the death of your dear, departed worldview needn’t be too long. After all, it’s served you so poorly you couldn’t see Bernie Sanders (let alone Trump) happening. Duh!! The good news? There is no zeal like that of the recently converted; a nirvana of endless energy awaits you. The shock is natural. Here are some steps to help you along, as the inevitability sets in. Enjoy the ride!

1. Unplug. Turn off the TV, the podcasts, the talking heads. Very little mass media existing in the early 21st century will help you navigate a road you must walk yourself. In fact, media today is purpose built to oppose precisely that. If silence is too much for your brain, (too many ghosts! second thoughts! regrets! shame MY GOD the SHAME) listen to your favorite music. Find new music. Go back to vinyl, get those god damn plugs out your fucking ears and immerse in the tactile experience of placing needle onto LP to conjure the angels of your soul. I find watching classic movies on TCM is just the ticket-- no commercials!

2. Read Marx. Did you know Marx wrote about America? A lot? No, you didn’t. Now you do! Get the 2016 edition of those works, and study them closely. I realize the letters of the alphabet “M” and “a” and “r” and “x” are not permitted to pass your lips in pronounced succession, but that shit’s over bitch. Educate yourself on what’s been denied to your brain your whole life. Your brain is just sitting there, waiting. It will thank you.

3. Talk to strangers. Run with scissors, even! Yes, the world order needs to be reversed. All of it. Up needs to be down, right must become (literally) left. You are shocked that Bernie Sanders is even an option, let alone about to win. Guess what? That means you got it all wrong, your whole life, and now you need to go in the opposite direction, in everything you do. Literally everything. It’ll be fun!

4. Get drunk. Your dead worldview deserves to go out with a bang, so raise a glass (or 6) to your deluded former self, how stupid you were, and have a laugh. Spark up a fatty. Let that freak flag fly that you buried your whole life, and enjoy the world around you, because it’s changing, fast.

Guest Post By Tim Russo: How To Fght Anti-Semitism Smears Against Bernie-- Scorched Earth

I’m probably the only American on earth, quite literally, who’s followed every single deployment of the antisemitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party, and the radical left since the day Corbyn decided to run for Labour leader in 2015. All of them-- click around my site. Fight me. As such, I’ve been waiting for the now building tsunami of these same smears against Bernie Sanders like a kitty kat tapping my wee wittle feeties for a few years. Now that this tsunami has begun to arrive, and will never stop, here’s my advice for whenever you hear someone claim, or insinuate, or wonder (just wondering!) that Bernie Sanders, a Jew, is antisemitic. This advice is for anyone, Jew or Gentile. Equally useful.

1. Fuck. You. The only way this smear works is to assume that a Jew must hate themselves so much as to hate all Jews, an assumption which itself is of course antisemitism to its stinking core. Bernie must hate himself, a Jew, because everyone hates Jews, riiiiggghhhtttt?????? Thus, the person confronting you with the smear that Bernie Sanders is somehow antisemitic hates Jews themselves, deeply, whether they know it or not. Thus, you are staring vicious hate straight in the face. What an opportunity, then, to fight the best of fights. If it is a close friend bringing this hideous pile of shit to you, be strong, and be prepared to end that friendship in a blaze of glory, because you should not be friends with antisemites happy to prance around with it in public. Put your dukes up, for the Lord works in mysterious ways, and let them fucking have it. You’ve always wanted to burn a bridge or two, admit it, so, flame on! Channel Sherman marching to the sea through Atlanta. Burn it to dust.

2. No quarter. None. The gravest error the Labour Party made in the face of these endless smears was to take them seriously. Upon becoming Labour leader, Corbyn launched “investigations,” convened “committees,” created a “process” for “discipline,” thereby chaining Labour to the smear like a stone around their neck. MP after MP was hauled before these idiotic collections of brain dead apparatchiks to answer for every single coarse word they ever uttered about anything, but most of all, Israel, (we’ll get to that), and every person they ever so much as shared a bus stop with. It wasn’t just MPs-- random people online, children, grannies-- the whole internet was scoured for sacrificial lambs to tie to the stake, then lather rinse repeat. It remains ongoing and will never end. Never, ever, go down that road-- someone asks you for “proof” or demands anything at all, you tell them you will fuck their ass so hard they’ll shit the proof out their own mouths.

3. Unleash it all. You took notes in 2016, remember? You saw how every single concern troll bait and switch worked against Bernie. You took them all seriously, earnestly debating, playing nice. Remember where that got you? Nowhere. (then President Her lost to an orange billionaire shitting into golden toilets tossing babies in cages. Hear Her Roar!) This smear is your opportunity to stop playing nice, and let it all fly like the wind. Spread your wings, channel your anger into righteousness, and set phaser on blast, comrade. Rejoice in it. Revel in it. Shine on you crazy fucking diamond.

4. Fuck Israel. The paper trail of these smears leads directly to lobbyists literally on the Israeli government’s payroll, every single time (google Luke Akehurst). The point of the smear is to protect western military aid to Israel and perpetuate Palestinian oppression. FACT-- the state of Israel is not Judaism. To boot, for my entire lifetime, the state of Israel has jacked America up in more horseshit than any other nation state on earth, to the point that now they are inserting themselves into our political processes to smear an actual Jew. (election interference! oh bloody hell never mind) Thus, Israel can go fuck themselves. You’ve always wanted to let fly on Israel, now is your chance. Fuck them and the horse they fucking road in on, I am so sick of this piddly ass little country the size of god damned Rhode Fucking Island dragging us around by our short and curlies just so a bunch of Rapture Awaiting Holy Fucks can rub their AR-15 on their pencil dicks to jack off imagining every Jew incinerated by the end of days. Blow me.

5. Keep going. The good news is that deployment of this smear against Bernie Sanders means he’s winning. As the saying goes, you are seeing the whites of their eyes. Ready, aim, fire. At will. Delight in it. If you’re in public, make a scene. Wave your arms around wildly like you’re Groucho Marx or some shit. Leave an indelible warning that if you hear a single utterance of this type one more time, you will crawl up that person’s ass with a microscope and display their entrails across the interwebs for all to see, then put the kettle on, take a rest, and do it again. You’ll enjoy it tremendously. Trust me.

6. Magnify the backfire. Deploying this smear against an actual Jew is so disgusting, the bigger your blowback, the better. It will all benefit Bernie, and already is. Thank whatever god you pray to for this opportunity to be an instrument of his or her will. Then do it again.

New Polling: Good For Bernie, Good For Mayor Pete, Bad For Status Quo Joe

This morning, Emerson released new national polling of registered voters. Two headlines: Bernie is beating Biden and Mayor Pete is beating everyone else. It finally looks like Status Quo Joe's long ugly record in the public sphere is beginning to catch up with him-- the corporatism, the sexism, the virulently anti-progressive posture, the racism... everything that made Biden a nightmare until Obama came along and rehabilitated his image. The new poll shows Bernie ahead of him with Democrats 29-24%.

Ohio Democratic activist and attorney, Tim Russo, was all over it within minutes of the poll's release, his intent likely to make Neera Tanden, John Podesta and others from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party cry. "[T]he leftward swing toward Bernie is among likely Democratic primary voters and caucus goers-- those usually polled for such things. That is all gravy. By Iowa in 2020, those “likely Democrats” will be joined by a flood of new voters, nonvoters returning to voting, and infrequent voters overwhelming whatever rump of establishment Democrats will bother to turn up and split their votes among 2 dozen pointless centrists auctioning themselves off to MSNBC’s advertisers. As of this writing, it is my view the 2020 primary is over, Bernie Sanders is the nominee, and it’s about time y’all start callin’ him Daddy or be run over... Joe Biden’s still-birthed 2020 'frontrunner' attempt is already a #MeToo corpse, before anyone even takes the first gander at his ghoulish blood-covered billionaire-bloated neoliberal policy record. A parade of posers constantly hurl themselves onto MSNBC-- Tune In! A Very Special Maddow With Buttigieg-- the desperation of 'Anybody But Bernie' now inescapable. Meanwhile, daily, hourly, movement grows around Bernie, the futility in opposing it becoming ever more pathetic."

Spencer Kimball, Director of Emerson Polling, noted that "Biden has seen his support drop. In February, he led Sanders 27% to 17%, and in March the two were tied at 26%. Now, Sanders has a 5 point lead, 29% to 24%." Emerson also asked participants for their second choice and it looks likely that if If Biden decides not to run or drops out as quickly as he did all the other times he ran and voters saw what he is, Bernie will be the early beneficiary, picking up 31% of Bidens’ voters. Mayor Pete Buttigieg gets 17%, followed by Beto with 13%. Buttigieg, more the product of a successful p.r. effort than any other 2020 candidate, officially got into the race over the weekend-- dropping his "exploratory" status on Friday and making a big hometown speech on Sunday-- but he's been campaigning full time since January. Within 4 hours of his announcement, another million dollars flooded into his campaign coffers.

From what I've seen so far, Buttigieg, seems like-- at best-- a mediocre candidate who is likely to fade quickly. As part of his announcement roll-out, the p.r.-directed campaign made Mayor Pete available for one-on-one interviews all last week. John Harwood of CNBC asked Buttigieg, a former consultant for McKinsey, "what is right about American capitalism."

Mayor Pete by Nancy Ohanian

"American capitalism," he replied, "is one of the most productive forces ever known to man, and there’s so much that this country has been able to unlock, especially in the last century, in terms of technology, in terms of prosperity. Now where it goes wrong is when it’s only being experienced in certain parts of the country or by certain kinds of people, and I think it goes to show just how important it is for capitalism to work that it be backed by all of the other pieces that business alone can’t solve. But when it’s working right, there’s nothing like it. It’s extraordinary. You think about the changes that have happened, the advancements in health, in communications in every field that had been led by our country. What frightens me is it’s no longer obvious that our country will be the most important driver of advancements of humankind in the 21st century. Not unless we do some things differently."

Harwood: Is that because you think the system is in some way rigged?

Mayor Pete: Yeah. It’s pretty typical human behavior for people to try to make sure the rules work to their benefit. That’s why the U.S. is based on the idea of a robust legal system and constraints on the excesses of anybody, especially concentrated wealth. And yet we’re at this moment where concentrated wealth has begun to turn into concentrated power. More than begun. It’s well underway. The thing that makes capitalism capitalism is competition. But as you have more and more corporate agglomerations of power, you’re going to see less and less competition.

Harwood: "Is that the reason why you think we have expanding income inequality?"

Mayor Pete: I think it’s a vicious cycle. This didn’t just happen. The economy is not some creature that just lumbers along on its own. It’s an interaction between private sector and public sector. And public sector policies, for basically as long as I’ve been alive, have been skewed in a direction that’s increasing inequality. And a lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus. There was a period where even Democrats seemed to operate in this framework that assumes that the only thing you’d ever do with a tax is cut it. That those tax cuts were assumed to pay for themselves. The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period that we’re living through.

...Harwood: Jamie Dimon recently put out a letter to J.P. Morgan that said, “The social needs of too many citizens have not been met.” But he also says that tax cut that was enacted late 2017 was the irreducible minimum of what we needed to turn our economy around. What would you say to him?

Mayor Pete: The big problem in this country was not that it was too difficult to be wealthy. It just isn’t the big problem in our country right now. It’s not what led to the political instability we’re seeing. It’s not what’s leading to diminished life expectancy, or the prospect of my generation is going to be the first in history to be worse off economically than our parents. What we could’ve done, especially if we were going to create a trillion-dollar deficit, is make the kinds of investments in infrastructure and education and health that would have made this whole country better off. I also think that, no matter how educated or intelligent some of the people working in these industries are, they can quickly get out of touch with the reality on the ground. If you don’t understand just how much anger there is in, for example, my part of the industrial Midwest-- where it can be used in a very cynical political way to direct it against immigrants, or trade writ large, or against your fellow American, or even against Democrats, just because folks are mad and it’s got to go somewhere-- you’re going to continue to see these destabilizing political outcomes like what we’re living through right now.

Harwood: Others say that the kinds of things you’re talking about would be destructive of capitalism, that it’s a war on the wealthy, that it would bring socialism to the United States. How how do you respond to arguments like that?

Mayor Pete: The crazy thing about arguments like that is how uncoupled they are from evidence. We don’t have to speculate on what happens in a Western society that delivers health care to everybody, or that has more social mobility or that invests at a higher rate in infrastructure or education. We know exactly what happens. What happens is you’re better off. The American dream is slipping away. You’re much more likely to experience that if you’re a kid in Denmark right now than if you’re in America. And while people can think up all kinds of excuses why something that worked in other societies hasn’t worked here, the reality is, when we’ve tried it here in our history, it’s also served us pretty well.

Back to that Emerson poll for a moment. Head-to-head matchups show Trump narrowly beating Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren but losing to Biden, Bernie and Beto. Among these participants, Kamala Harris has a 50-50 shot of beating him. And one more question worth keeping in mind-- with Trump ginning up a military intervention against Venezuela, Emerson decided to poll voters on the topic. 43% do not support intervention to overthrow the Maduro government, 27% do support it and 31% were unsure.

Is Martin Shkreli The Son Trump Made With Ivanka? (Asking For A Friend)

Have you wondered lately why we haven't heard a peep out of one of America's most reviled media personalities, Martin Shkreli? That's easy; he was arrested in 2015, found guilty in 2017, bad his bail revoked a month later after he posted on Facebook that he would pay $5,000 for a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair and soon after that was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for three counts of securities fraud. (Aside from being thrown into prison, he was ordered to forfeit $7.4 million in assets and pay $388,000 in restitution.) He is federal inmate number 87850-053 and residing at a minimum security federal prison at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

So how has he been behaving in prison? Yesterday the NY Post announced he was thrown into solitary confinement a few week ago for using a cell phone illegally to run his company.

How did the prison find out he was using a contraband cell phone to run his pharma company, Phoenixus AG (a reincarnation of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG)? Someone bragged to the Wall Street Journal and they ran a piece on March 7 that someone in the prison system saw. The Journal reported that Shkreli fired the firm's interim CEO over the phone, though he let him stay on the board. He expects the firm to become a multibillion-dollar business while he directs it from cell phones that he presumably buys from corrupt guards. (The phones go for $1,000 each.)

And speaking of Pharma and healthcare and all,Tim Russo had an eye-opening post on how Bernie is looking at... well doing the opposite of what Shkreli and Trump do. They raise prices on drugs so only the rich can afford them. Bernie has a different plan and if it has to be "socialism," let it be socialism-- like Medicare. Russo wrote on Sunday that Bernie "launched the hardest leftward shot across any bow I’ve ever seen in presidential politics. This morning on Face the Nation Bernie promised to cut prescription drug prices by 50% if elected, which would be standard puffery from a presidential candidate, except of course, this is Bernie. Asked how he would do that, Bernie listed the litany of big pharma’s greed, then said about a 50% cut in drug prices, "if they don’t like that, then we’ll take a look at their patents.” Forward comrades!

An August 2018 poll by Data For Progress has suggested that despite the red scare tactics, a majority of Americans support seizing pharmaceutical patents, with huge net positives even among Trump voters. The poll question’s wording was, “Would you support or oppose having the government produce generic versions of life-saving drugs, even if it required revoking patents held by pharmaceutical companies?”

“Revoke” the means of production, “seize” the means of production, however you wanna phrase it, Bernie Sanders ain’t playin’.

And still speaking healthcare, the gaslighting asshole Putin installed in the White House who's pretending to be president, says his party is developing a "really great" health care plan that will be "far less expensive and much more usable" than Obamacare. The vote will come "right after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate and win back the House."

Most Republicans in Congress are just rolling their eyes and hoping he dies before 2020

Amy Klobuchar's Rocky Announcement Today

Despite Trumpanzee's racist spitballs from the sidelines, Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign launch yesterday went beautifully-- just in Lawrence, Massachusetts and then in Dover, New Hampshire. Her rally was a call to action against wealthy power brokers who "have been waging class warfare against hardworking people for decades"-- and against a political elite "bought off" and "bullied" by corporate giants, and a middle class squeezed so tight it "can barely breathe." This morning she started the day at the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, followed by a rally in Iowa City at the Iowa Memorial Union at the University of Iowa late this afternoon. And this evening she'll be at the Mississippi Fairgrounds in Davenport for a more intimate roundtable discussion. Tomorrow she's off to South Carolina, followed by Georgia, Nevada and California.

In a post handicapping the Iowa caucuses this morning, Tim Russo predicted she'd take 7% of the vote in the crowded field. Ouch! But, still much better than Amy Klobuchar, who he assigned 1%! "What a disgusting pig this pointless grandstanding police state-reliable Klobuchar is. Felony cover music? A crime to boycott Israel? What the living fuck. Klobuchar’s usefulness will be as an example of just how far establishment Dems will allow the correct genitalia to festoon themselves with authoritarian prostration before capital."

This morning, Politico's Elena Schneider wasn't quite as colorful in her description of Klobuchar's Iowa prospects... but she did use the word "horror" in the headline. If you're pitching yourself as "Minnesota nice," the whole shitshow gets derailed when Joe Biden's operative leak that you were brutally bullying your staff the day before the kick-off.

Biden, who has no reason to run for president other than naked ego and ultimate careerism-- and nothing whatsoever to offer America put pathetic and dangerous back to normalcy, has the most vicious operatives on the field, spreading more poison about the other Democratic candidates than everyone else combined.

The run-up to Klobuchar’s expected presidential campaign launch on Sunday has been sidetracked by former aides, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, who described a toxic office environment including demeaning emails, thrown office supplies and requests for staff to perform personal chores for the senator. It’s a sharp departure from the public brand that Klobuchar has built to get to this moment: a pragmatic, aw-shucks Minnesotan who gets things done and wins her state by landslide margins.

Before heading off to Iowa this afternoon, she spoke in Minneapolis, with the Interstate 35 bridge over the Mississippi as the backdrop, the bridge that replaced the one that collapsed in 2007 killing 13 people. Klobuchar is very proud that she worked with Republican then-Senator Norman Coleman to get the funding, calling it an example of achieving results through bipartisan cooperation. Today she crowed "We worked across the aisle to get the federal funding and we rebuilt that I-35W bridge-- in just over a year. That's community. That's a shared story. That's ordinary people doing extraordinary things. But that sense of community is fracturing across our nation right now, worn down by the petty and vicious nature of our politics. We are all tired of the shutdowns and the putdowns, the gridlock and the grandstanding. Our nation must be governed not from chaos but from opportunity. Not by wallowing over what's wrong, but my marching inexorably toward what's right."

Most reporters, though, were more interested in the charges against her for brutalizing and abusing her staff. Her "campaign has not denied any of the specific allegations detailed in recent news stories, and Democrats in the critical first caucus state of Iowa-- where Klobuchar hopes to make a splash in a crowded 2020 field-- say the senator’s treatment of staff has the potential to sideswipe her campaign."

“It’s a very unfortunate way to start a presidential campaign,” said Jerry Crawford, a longtime Democratic operative in Iowa. “It was well-known at the insider level, but now it’s becoming well-known to the general public at the time she’s announcing, which is problematic for her politically.”

Bryce Smith, the Democratic Party chairman in Dallas County, Iowa, said “I don’t see being a hard-ass as a boss as a bad thing.” Smith noted, however, that “having to take time away from stumping on why you would be the best candidate and playing defense on what happened in her past” could be a problem for Klobuchar. “A few candidates have to do that right now,” he added.

“I doubt it will [affect voters] much,” said one national Democratic consultant, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “But does it mar her rollout and her getting support from important people, like donors and elected officials? Yes. And in the long run, that’s a problem with getting voters.”

...Klobuchar’s Senate office clearly has cycled through staff at a higher rate than most others. LegiStorm, a database service tracking the congressional workforce, found that Klobuchar had the highest staff turnover rate in the Senate from 2001 to 2016. In 2017, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) surpassed Klobuchar on the list.

Those are not the numbers Klobuchar wants to bring into focus.

...In advance of her campaign launch, Klobuchar’s record in the heartland has won attention in Washington, Minnesota and Iowa, where one Republican-turned-independent state senator pledged to bring 700,000 other no-party Iowans to caucus for Klobuchar after he heard her speak in December.

“She’s Midwestern, she’s grounded,” said David Johnson, who switched his party affiliation during the 2016 campaign and retired in 2018. “She’s not one of those bombastic politicians.”

In the months leading up to her 2020 decision, Klobuchar frequently talked about the voters “left behind” in 2016, a playbook for Democrats focused on defeating the president in the Midwestern states that he flipped into the Republican column. Klobuchar’s family biography, as the granddaughter of an Iron Range miner, could also speak to some of the white, working-class voters that Democrats hope to regain from Trump.

But Klobuchar’s path out of a primary-- dominated by flashier candidates and a left-leaning electorate-- is far from clear.

She lags behind four of her Senate colleagues in campaign cash, and she’s unlikely to be the only 2020 candidate running as a solutions-oriented Midwest whisperer. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who won reelection in a Trump state in 2018, is considering a White House campaign, and he traveled to Iowa on his “Dignity of Work” tour last week. Biden, if he ultimately jumps into the race, would also likely appeal to moderate Democrats and independents.

That throng of other options in every lane of the Democratic primary is what could make Klobuchar’s staff issues so challenging. It “steps on the story she is trying to tell,” said Doug Thornell, a national Democratic strategist.

HuffPost reported that three staffers withdrew from consideration to lead Klobuchar’s campaign, in part because of her work history with staff.

“The big danger with a story like this is that it festers and potentially undermines one of her core strengths-- that she can bring people together and that she’s got a good temperament, ‘Minnesota nice’ thing,” Thornell said. “if she picks up steam in Iowa over the next few months, that’ll help her change the narrative for her.”

Under pressure from the other candidates' actions, way-too-centrist Klobuchar endorsed the Green New Deal this week. I'm going to bet that her campaign ends when she's unable to explain it sufficiently and sell it to her dead armadillo supporters (like David Johnson). And by the way, today, Klobuchar, who has been credibly accused of things like taking off a shoe and throwing it at a staffer and-- by a 23 male intern-- of making him clean up blood on a seat, waited until after her announcement to tell the media that "Yes, I can be tough, and yes I can push people. I have high expectations for myself, I have high expectations for the people that work for me, but I have high expectations for this country." Another presidential candidate, like the Starbucks Guy and Gillibrand, who needs a thorough psychological evaluation.

Amy Klobuchar And Sherrod Brown Want To Be President Too

I've tried to make it clear that the Worst Democraps Who Want To Be President series is not just for any candidate I don't like, but really for the very worst of the worst, like Gillibrand and Bloomberg. So... I may not want to see Amy Klobuchar get the nomination, nor Sherrod Brown, Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, but none of them belongs in that series. Still all fair game for criticism of course, but not as a "Worst Democraps." For example, reporting for BuzzFeed News yesterday, Molly Hensley-Clancy wrote that there's more to Klobuchar than Minnesota Nice. "[B]ehind the doors of her Washington, DC, office, the Minnesota Democrat ran a workplace controlled by fear, anger, and shame, according to interviews with eight former staffers, one that many employees found intolerably cruel. She demeaned and berated her staff almost daily, subjecting them to bouts of explosive rage and regular humiliation within the office, according to interviews and dozens of emails."

Dead Armadillo by Nancy Ohanian

It looks like two of the next announcements will be from the Midwest: Amy Klobuchar on Sunday and Sherrod Brown... soon. Since first being elected to the Senate in 2006, Klobuchar has rarely been a topic for DWT. The last time she was involved with anything controversial was when she got into a mud-wrestling match with Justin Bieber as she spearheaded an effort-- for which she was well-paid-- to make it a felony to stream certain content online. She introduced a Luddite "illegal streaming bill" (SB 978) for Hollywood, co-sponsored by 2 corporate whores, John Cornyn and Chris Coons, meant to make the streaming of any copyrighted material on the Internet a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. At the time, the nonprofit, Fight for the Future, was particularly concerned and launched a campaign called "Free Bieber," using the example of Justin Bieber’s rise to fame, doing cover songs, as a way to get out the message. (Ironically, Bieber’s camp issued a cease-and-desist over using his name in the campaign.) The implications were far broader than a Bieber, though. When Rufus Wainwright and Sean Lennon covered Madonna’s "Material Girl" at Occupy Wall Street, if someone had uploaded a video of the performance to YouTube, Madonna (or whomever owns any part of her music or publishing) could sue the uploader if it’s deemed a "public performance." October 23, 2011:



In the end, the Senate was just embarrassed by the bill and it didn't get a vote. She introduced it again a year later and the Senate basically told her to just stop wasting everyone's time. This week she made a spectacle of herself again-- the only serious candidate for the Democratic nomination to vote in favor of making it a crime to boycott Israel. Voting against the bill were Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Sherrod Brown, even Kirsten Gillibrand, while Klobuchar joined all the Republicans and the AIPAC-Dems to vote for another clearly unconstitutional bill that appeals to her (or her donors).

The only other time we thought about her this year was when she was blandly and ineptly questioning Brett Kavanaugh. Justin, a sharp lawyer friend of mine told me her performance would have flunked her out of Duke, where he had graduated.

NBC News began its day yesterday with a report from Chuck Todd and Co. about how geography-- ie, the Midwest-- is destiny in presidential races. A stretch, at best. "People," they wrote, "often forget this about Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign: One of his strengths-- in both the primaries and general election-- was geography. Obama’s Illinois borders Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin and Indiana, and Obama won all of these states in either the primaries/caucuses (Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin) or the general election in 2008 (Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana). And part of the POTENTIAL that Klobuchar brings to the 2020 Democratic field is the ability to replicate this Obama strength from 2008. Minnesota, after all, borders Iowa (whose caucuses could be more important than ever this cycle), as well as Wisconsin (which could be 2020’s all-important battleground state in the general election)." Most of Minnesota borders North and South Dakota, Manitoba and Ontario, although I guess in theory you can see across Lake Superior from Grand Marais to Isle Royale, which is part of Michigan but has no inhabitants. I doubt Klobuchar is hanging her hat on the geography theory.

Daniel Straus and Holly Otterbein had a more salient theory for what Sherrod Brown could be hanging his hat on-- being Biden without the baggage. That Biden is nothing at all-- except the name recognition from having been a part of Obama-- other than the baggage isn't occurring to anyone yet. His lane is largely discredited neo-liberal corporatism and I doubt Brown really wants to identify with that, at least not in a primary. None-the-less, they insist that Biden and Brown "are on an early collision course in the initial days of the 2020 presidential race. They’re chasing the same potential supporters, touting the same themes and even using some of the same language to go after President Donald Trump. And Brown, kicking off a pre-campaign tour of key presidential voting states last week, made clear that if he gets into the race he intends to run, essentially, as Biden without the baggage."

Chris Schwartz, a Black Hawk county supervisor who hosted an event for Brown in Iowa, introduced him by ticking off a list of votes-- including opposing NAFTA, opposing the Defense of Marriage Act and voting against authorization of the war in Iraq-- that had featured Biden on the other side.

"All those things that I said that Sherrod Brown got right, Joe Biden got every single one of those things wrong." Schwartz said. He said that the congressional record might not come to mind immediately for other caucus-goers. But "we've seen Biden on the campaign trail many times already so we already know what to expect,” Schwartz continued. “He certainly has done great things for the country [quick-- name one] but I just don't think that’s what folks are looking for."

Brown’s “Dignity of Work” tour introduced himself as a progressive who can “talk to workers” and railed against the distractions of Trump’s “phony populism”-- echoing a memorable Biden line from the midterm campaign trail. Brown’s political pitch is that he can win back the Midwest for Democrats after winning reelection in Ohio in 2018-- a version of the rationale that the Scranton-born former VP can reconnect Democrats with the working-class white voters who have left the party in recent years.

...Brown himself is more diplomatic. When asked whether he and Biden are trying to make the same appeal to voters, Brown pivoted to his campaign slogan. "I'm not going to make the comparison to anybody, but my whole career has been about the dignity of work," Brown said.

As Brown and Biden both consider the presidential race, they and their respective supporters have both tried to frame themselves in a specific light: progressive Democrats with long lists of liberal policy positions who can nevertheless reach out to voters across the partisan divide.

Brown will also face questions from the left-- he has firmly refused to endorse Medicare for all, for example, saying he first wants to see more incremental changes like lowering the Medicare eligibility age. But at each stop in his early pre-campaign tour, Brown has laid out his background of winning elections in an increasingly Republican-leaning state [Democrats just won 3 of the 4 House seats and came within a hair of winning the 4th] while also staying a champion of major liberal issues like fighting for same sex marriage and voting against the war in Iraq.

"I think Democratic primary voters want somebody that’s going to be on the side of workers and will not compromise on civil rights and workers’ rights and LGBT rights," Brown said during a stop in Cresco.

Ohio attorney, activist and blogger Tim Russo knows Brown up close and personal-- and is no fan. Friday he was writing about the beginning of revolution: When The Boots Wear Out, Will Anyone Be Ready To Listen. Russo wrote that in the clip from Doctor Zhivago, "Alec Guiness plays a Russian Bolshevik joining the czar’s final army with the sole purpose of being in place when World War I grinds the working class soldiers to dust, predicting, 'when the boots wore out they’d be ready to listen.' As a new presidential campaign begins to reveal to America that hindsight is indeed 2020, American boots are beginning to wearing out."

Ohio voted for Obama twice, then Trump in 2016. To establishment media, and establishment Democrats, this somehow means Ohio is irrevocably a Republican state. To Alec Guiness’ character in Doctor Zhivago, it means quite something else. Ohio has been voting for radical change three presidential elections in a row now, but change never comes. In a hopelessly rigged game, both political parties’ establishments now shamelessly plundering America before our eyes, Ohioans know to the bones in their weary feet the boots are indeed wearing out.

The Obama-Obama-Trump voter of Ohio may just stop voting altogether in 2020. If the choice for Ohio in 2020 remains an abusive, insulting, pointless D vs. R, why subject oneself to ever more self humiliation? I used to seethe in anger at nonvoters. How dare you? Now, I’m close to giving up voting myself. My own personal story of endless exile imposed by the very Democrats I helped elect myself would be enough justification.

Boy, did I help, swallowing hook line and sinker every fraudulent con designed to excise every coming generation’s security into some repugnant oligarch’s third yacht, fourth home, tax haven hedge fund on an island with a private jet strip built solely to escape the reckoning they know is coming. That is my Generation X’s responsibility-- we bought it. Such fools we were. Turns out, we weren’t temporarily embarrassed millionaires in waiting. We were suckers.

Americans aren’t yet 1931 hobos begging brother, can you spare a dime; yet. But we know our road is cut off before us. The 2020 presidential election may be the last chance America has to avoid the hell the characters in Doctor Zhivago would soon endure, as the boots slowly wear out.

This morning, Tim, no doubt fired up by Alex Guiness, was still waxing poetic-- if a little more pointedly so: "As we march back from the fake front to face our real enemies in our worn out boots, snakes like Sherrod Brown will wave their canary logo at us, but we will all know his bird is kept in a golden cage gilded by Wall Street. Rotted boots tend to cleanse the soul and open the eyes."

That Time In 2005 Paul Hackett Got Sherrod Brown To Let His Mask Slip-- Here We Go Again

-by Tim Russo

Word on the street here in Ohio is that Sherrod Brown has reverted to factory settings as he prepares to run for president in 2020. What are Sherrod Brown’s factory settings? Sherrod don’t like primaries, that’s what.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The last (and first) time Sherrod Brown ever faced a serious primary challenge (albeit briefly) was in fall, 2005, as Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett tapped the fervent anti-Bush sentiment across the Democratic Party to launch a campaign for the open US Senate seat up in 2006. Remember him? Hackett was the first manifestation of early 21st century online Democratic activism in Ohio. Hackett's online mojo blew him up out of nowhere to challenge and nearly defeat Jean Schmidt in the deep red OH-02 special election in August, 2005. Riding that wave, Hackett’s grassroots support for US Senate in 2006 mobilized as Hackett entered an at the time empty primary which, sadly, Sherrod Brown was planning to rig for himself.

It all came to a head at the December 19, 2005, Ohio Democratic Party Christmas Party, scheduled to occur immediately after ODP “voted” on its new chairman, Chris Redfern. After the comically rigged “election” for chair, attendees shuffled to the adjoining room for holiday "cheer". There, Sherrod Brown and wife Connie Schultz went on an extended person to person tirade, targeting anyone they believed supported Hackett.

It was ugly. Reaction in the room varied from shock to resigned acceptance that it was primary season. It all would have been forgotten until Sherrod & Connie descended their rage upon an 84-year-old WWII veteran of the Women's Army Corps, who then blogged an account of the incident which survives to this day.

At the Christmas Party, when I found Sherrod Brown giving a friend of mine a heated lecture on why he should not support Paul Hackett, I naturally joined the conversation. But, in no way did I attack, assault, or even touch the Congressman, as was erroneously reported on the blogs. And, I definitely did not have any picture taken with him.

The only thing I did was remind him of the warning “to not split the party,” which he had received at the Upper Arlington Progressive Action fall meeting, and now it had happened. Over and over, he angrily declared that he did not split the party, and I replied “Yes, you did because Hackett was in first!” Needless to say, our encounter was very brief.

As already stated, Brown had numerous chances to run for DeWine’s senate seat before Paul Hackett was recruited, and turned them all down until Hackett said he would run. Then Brown suddenly jumped in. Now we are faced with an unnecessary, costly, and damaging primary.

The above linked account of the incident quotes Russell Hughlock, at the time a Hackett supporter blogging as “Pounder” at Buckeye Senate Blog (now long gone), who described the Sherrod & Connie Rage Routine thus, “I’ve never seen a candidate lose it like this in a public setting, let alone a Christmas Party.” All the while, Hackett was in the same room,

"While Brown was berating people, just across the room, Paul Hackett was constantly surrounded by admiring fans wanting to shake his hand, and described in Buckeye Politics, as being “something of a rock star.”

Stupid me, I made an attempt to calm things down, by going over to say hello to Sherrod, who immediately mistook me for Hackett supporter Hughlock. "HEY CONNIE HERE'S THAT POUNDER GUY!" Sherrod dragged Connie over who launched into the same unhinged attack she'd just unloaded on an 84-year-old woman. Multiple blogs (most of which are now gone, including mine at the time, BuckeyePolitics.net) reported on Sherrod & Connie's behavior.

Guess what happened next?

The Brown campaign immediately launched a two month online scorched earth war against Hackett supporters, combined with a primary rig job against Hackett within the ODP. It all ended with Hackett's withdrawal from the primary he was actually first to enter, and carnage across the Ohio blogosphere, featuring the now all too familiar troll attacks which would one day evolve like protozoan ooze into today's David Brock Peter Daou million dollar online destruction ops. Before we were all smeared as Bernie Bros in 2016, we were all smeared as Hackett Bros in 2005.

Brown Now Raging Across Ohio for 2020

Since Brown benefitted from his bad behavior in 2005-2006, instead of facing a cost, he is repeating it. I can report that today, Sherrod is not content with rigging the Ohio Democratic Party; Brown is now actually attempting to rig processes outside the Democratic Party, in progressive groups naturally leaning toward Bernie Sanders in 2020. Brown is reaching into the internal decision making of every Ohio progressive group he can, to stunt and halt any organizing for anyone who isn't Sherrod Brown. Brown's 2019 efforts seem based entirely on geography-- that everyone in Ohio simply must support fellow Buckeye Sherrod. In short, it's Paul Hackett all over again.

Thus, it is highly likely that every establishment Democrat 2020 prospect is repeating this same approach with their own geographic base. Perhaps not with the same...er...fervor that Sherrod displayed in 2005 (and is no doubt unleashing today), but certainly the same intent. Democrats simply cannot stop attempting to rig primaries. They have learned precisely nothing from 2016.

How Would A President Sherrod Brown Run The Democratic Party? Like A Corporate Clown Act

-by Tim Russo

Let me tell you about one of my favorite hangovers.

As one of the landed gentry of the Ohio blogosphere’s glory days, my weakness (and finest work) was always internal Ohio Democratic Party coverage, especially the selection of state chair. I made something of a career covering the Ohio Democratic Party’s two most recent elections of a state chair; in 2005, and 2014, plus all the mind blowing corrupt buffoonery in between. Ohio Democratic Party is a gift that never stops giving.

My experience with Sherrod Brown during the 2005 chair “election” that made Chris Redfern ODP chairman is still legendary, preserved here in a 2008 James Renner front page feature for Cleveland’s local alt weekly. Let’s leave it there, shall we? Let’s talk the next one.

The 2014 ODP Chair "election" was precipitated by a comically catastrophic statewide ODP meltdown, led by Ed FitzGerald, for whom ODP cleared the primary for governor (as usual). That summer, it emerged FBI lawman Ed FitzGerald had been driving his car without a license for 10 years. The ensuing wave against Ohio Democrats (which I covered for the now defunct Cleveland Leader) even took out then ODP chair Chris Redfern, who lost his own house seat. Redfern resigned as ODP chair election night, November 4.

By the next day, Sherrod Brown had decided who would be the next ODP chair. So on Nov. 5, I wrote my first Leader piece on Brown’s choice, Dave Wojtanowski. I am 100% certain my Leader piece on Wojtanowski was the only coverage that day that went beyond "Sherrod endorses Woj". Not one single media outlet in Ohio bothered to report that, SURPRISE turns out Wojtanowski was a “both sides” statehouse lobbyist in Columbus for 20 years who donated money to as many Republicans as Democrats. Cherry on top, Wojtanowski owned some two bit rinky dink "online organizing" consulting firm, no doubt created as a vessel for that sweet bipartisan "consulting" cash. After I disgustedly hit "pubish," I could almost hear every Democrat in Ohio start googling "David Wojtanowski."

Then, I got a good drunk on. I’d begun diving into the CSU masters program I’d fought like hell to get into, and was feeling pretty self actualized. But like any good drunk, alas... melancholy. I could not believe I was still writing, for no pay, about yet another scandal at the Ohio Democratic Party, after yet another electoral meltdown, and no one would give a flying fuck. Passed out on my friend’s couch after a bar crawl, during which I'm sure I let fly like Mussolini from the balcony at various Wednesday night revelers, waving my arms like an embryonic hipster Lenin. Bring me a shot!

The next morning, hungover like a dog, roaming the streets of Collinwood on Cleveland’s east side with my friend hunting for coffee, a text hit my pocket.

"woj is out"-- my Leader piece had scared Wojtanowski into oblivion. Woj ran like a terrified rabbit out of the race. Sherrod was on the hunt for a new chair!

"…THEY PULL ME BACK IN…" I kept muttering over the coffee. Over the next month or so, I went straight back to full overdrive ODP coverage. By the end of 2014, Sherrod Brown had gone through another endorsement/pullout cycle, with yet another corporate tool. This time, it was Cleveland law firm Thompson Hine’s featured "outsourcing attorney" Sharen Neuhardt, who clung to Sherrod’s endorsement for a couple weeks (but I ran for Congress! As a Dem!) as she went down like the Hindenburg.

All of which is how heir to a Proctor & Gamble fortune David Pepper became the current ODP chair. I suppose I could have hounded Pepper into oblivion too for the Leader, and some other corporate stooge could be ODP chair today! But quite frankly, it became too much work, too much blowback, for too little money, which has always been zero, just to uncover what should be reported anyway by the people who are paid to report it.

Bottom line-- Sherrod Brown as a political party leader is a buffoon of such comic proportion, it almost doesn't matter that Brown reversed his position on Glass Steagall the week before the 2018 midterms. Sherrod's presidential campaign will look precisely like his dalliances the last 25 years in ODP's cess pit of rigged game oligarchy, which means it will go nowhere, slowly.

Brexit Bullet Points for the American Left in 2020

-by Tim Russo

Bernie Sanders in 2020 will face much the same headwinds in the Democratic Primary as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has faced since spring, 2015. As an American Clintonista who worked on all three of Tony Blair’s Labour victories, I found my radical lefty zeal of the recently converted during Corbyn’s rise. As I converted, I wrote about my Saul Off His Horse moment a lot, here, and here. So pick up a chair.

Like most Americans, I myself had been reflexively Remain. The dying embers of the Third Way yet glowed in my heart as the Brexit referendum approached in Corbyn’s first year as Labour leader. For some strange reason, the “EU” still seemed a comforting blanket of the status quo I used to thrive in. I’ve stayed in touch with a few British friends, and without fail, the Blairite dead ender Corbyn haters were for Remain. As were the Hillary 2016 people.

I became Brexit Curious.

Corbyn has personally opposed the EU his whole life, as a manifestation of neoliberal wealth extraction for capital, among many other such socialist reasons. Corbyn’s 1992 quote on the Maastricht Treaty, which created the EU, is remarkably prescient. “It's the establishment of a central bank which is staffed by bankers, independent of national Governments & national economic policies. That will undermine any social objective that any Labour Government-- or any other government-- would wish to carry out.” There is indeed a strong, sound, socialist argument for Brexit (Lexit-- Learn it here).

Yet, Corbyn instead campaigned in 2016 for Remain as leader of a Labour Party deeply split over the issue. Core Labour voters outside London largely delivered Brexit, who had first fled Labour to UKIP (read-- Reagan Democrats, now Obama-Obama-Trump voters). But London Labour voters (read-- US coastal elites), those most likely to somehow benefit financially from EU membership, went heavily Remain. Remainers were just as shocked by Brexit as Hillary was by Trump; neoliberalism’s transatlantic blind spots are predictable.

Labour’s position today is a compromise, as it must certainly be-- to respect the result of the 2016 referendum, vote down Theresa May’s deal, then fight for a general election to win government and negotiate a good Brexit, then if all else fails all options are on the table, including a second referendum. But Corbyn’s own position is to respect the result of the referendum if at all possible, rather than try to reverse it. As recently as Dec. 21, Corbyn emphasized respect for the Brexit result to The Guardian, creating howls of horror among his Blairite enemies.

No, Virginia, Brexit won't be reversed

A second referendum is total folly, and the push for it is no doubt part of the Third Way’s death throes desperation to destroy Corbyn. First, a second referendum would inevitably be more Brexity, not less, largely due to an entirely predictable backlash against ignoring a referendum result. No campaign on earth will stop a Brexit repeat, and one run by the likes of Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, and Jim Messina will merely throw fire on the backlash flame. Personally, I think Corbyn should campaign for Brexit if there is a second referendum, solely on the basis of respecting the result of the first one. Socialism means nothing if the people can’t decide a question by referendum unless the “correct” result occurs.

Second, and more importantly, for at least the last 30 years, any fool should have known that if the EU went to referendum in the UK, it would lose. It's why David Cameron had to be forced into promising a referendum, and this still holds. Long forgotten is Peter Mandelson’s “Britain in Europe,” Labour's "non-partisan" campaign with Thatcherite Tories for joining the single currency. Launched early on in the Cool Britannia heights of late 90’s New Labour, Blair’s promise to hold a referendum on the single currency never happened, largely because other EU countries who put an EU constitution to a referendum rejected the EU (France and the Netherlands in 2005 in particular). The EU does not have a winning streak in national referenda, quite the opposite.

Like so many transatlantic woes of the early 21st century, centrist neoliberal policy of the late 20th spawned it. Blair’s single currency referendum promise not only went nowhere, it gave rise to Nigel Farage’s UKIP (the UK Independence Party), which is why UKIP’s logo is the pound. Mandelson & Blair's stupidity over the single currency birthed UKIP just as the collapse of generational security was given rocket fuel by Bill Clinton’s dismantling of the New Deal. Brexit’s forces are quite historical, complex, and with centrist fingerprints all over them, just as with Trump; fascism doesn’t just fall off the turnip truck, folks.

For the American left, Brexit is thus a window into the political, ideological, and historical forces that will gather against Bernie 2020. In that spirit, I leave you with some quick bullet points of commonality between Bernie and Corbyn which Brexit illuminates.

• Russia didn’t do Brexit.  Please. Just, don't. Brexit has been brewing for decades. The EU is not popular guys! Just because Putin can read the tea leaves of neoliberal collapse better than brainless capitalists doesn’t mean he can turn up the day it all predictably comes to naught, toss some memes around, and take the credit. If you think Britain will change its mind, just ask the French gillets jaunes how they’d vote on EU membership. You know how it pisses you off when someone claims Bernie is a Russian op? That’s how much it pisses off Brexit voters. Doesn’t work, backfires, and wastes time. Enough.

• Know the rules. The most delicious irony of Corbyn’s rise is that New Labour reforms of party leadership elections opened the door for hundreds of thousands of brand new members to join and elect Corbyn over the hoots and howls of centrists. Instead of MPs, electoral colleges, and other assorted smoke filled rooms, Ed Miliband as Labour leader instituted the “one member one vote” (OMOV) system of membership voting for the Labour leader. In this same way, Bernie Sanders can take over the Democratic Party one state at a time during the 2020 primary. To repeat Corbyn’s takeover of Labour stateside, Bernie will need to blast the doors wide open to nonvoters, infrequent voters, new voters, just as Corbyn did, in a massive campaign of voter registration, state by state.

• The smears will never stop. Any socialist as close to power as Corbyn is today will get the kitchen sink emptied at them in perpetuity. Bernie Sanders will be no different. In particular, Corbyn’s enemies love to smear him, and Labour, as hopelessly anti-semitic, based almost solely in conflating anti-Zionism and support for Palestinians with the ovens of Auschwitz. Centrists in America will do the same to Bernie and his movement, even though Bernie himself is Jewish. Since these attacks are always baseless and ugly, they always backfire, but also always repeat, despite their ineffectiveness.

• Media isn't your friend. Corbyn's Brexit position illustrates British media's Pavlovian dog hatred very well. He is uniformly reviled by every single mainstream media outlet in British politics, especially the BBC. Even The Guardian, once seen as a bastion of the left, has been in constant Corbyn meltdown mode since 2015, which Brexit is aggravating. Stateside, this manifests on MSNBC daily, hourly. MSNBC has been teeing itself up to kneecap Bernie Sanders in 2020 ever since he nearly won Iowa in 2016. Online, this dymamic is far worse, with the likes of DailyKos and its assorted DNC loyalist grifters joining every anti-Bernie paid troll op Peter Daou and David Brock will ever dream up to pay their mortgages. Once Bernie wins Iowa in January 2020, just as when Corbyn won leadership in 2015, the attacks will explode into a viciousness previously unimagined. They will all backfire.

• Finally-- stop shying away from Marx. Both Brexit and Trump are symptoms of the collapse of neoliberal capitalism, as its failures continue piling up, unaddressed and ignored. You are hopelessly ill equipped to understand those forces if you haven’t at least become familiar with a Marxist interpretation of capital. The good news is, you don’t need to read Marx’s work on any other country. Just read what Marx wrote about us. Oh? You didn’t know Marx wrote about our Civil War? Now ya do. Read it. Spoiler-- the Confederacy isn't dead yet.

That’s enough homework. Now get to it! Brexit is a helpful lens through which to see all these forces at work. In early 21st century America, there is so much room to run left, and it’s just growing. A movement has been rising to seize that political ground since the Greens in Iran, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and now, Corbyn and Bernie are the vessels. Be a part of that movement. Don’t be such a fool to stand in its way.






UPDATE: From Wales

Novara Media Co-Founder Aaron Bastani's twitter feed alerted me to a growing phenomenon-- Labour members who voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum and who are turning to voting Leave if there is a second referendum, largely based on who is arguing for a second referendum most-- Blairites. Bastani retweeted the lament of a Welsh Labour member, which clearly makes the argument for Lexit-- a left Brexit.