Progressives (Liberals)

They choose to lose.

(R)evolution

I can't provide a link unfortunately but ... a July 4th article in LA Times has some excellent editorial coverage. Also, here's a link that discusses it in The Nation:

https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-kevin-de-leon-the-next-senator-from-california/

In my opinion, I know it is unwelcome, but, it's a free country...

This progressive war within the democrat party is a distraction. Form your own party to push such all or nothing views. Right now, in my opinion, the only thing of importance is stop Trump from confirming any more conservative right wing judges. If we don't stop him, then future elections are not going to matter much because the whole system will rigged for republicans to always win. Voter purges will soon be copied after Ohio won their supreme court case. Republicans will be allowed to further draw their elections maps to their advantage. It will be next to impossible to control of house and senate and the white house for years to come. Not to mention Trump's outlandish policies will impossible to sue to change at the Supreme Court.

I wish I didn't agree. Sad state of affairs BOTH parties and the country is/are in.

This isn't a Republican/Democrat issue as much as it is an issue of dysfunctional government. The fact is that an amoral and mentally incompetent individual is in charge of a government which is fatally flawed enough to allow gerrymandering voting districts to be a tool of the trade and the law of the land.

So the Russian (or Putin) election-tampering effectively created a bloodless Coupe dismantling our government without firing a shot.

As Pogo aptly stated, "We have met the enemy and he are US!"

But it's okay when we do it?

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/violent-coup-fails-in-nicaragua-u-s-continues-regime-change-efforts/
Violent Coup Fails in Nicaragua, U.S. Continues Regime Change Efforts

The violent coup in Nicaragua has failed. This does not mean the United States and oligarchs are giving up, but this phase of their effort to remove the government did not succeed. The coup exposed the alliances who are working with the United States to put in place a neoliberal government that is controlled by the United States and serves the interests of the wealthy. People celebrated the failure of the coup but realize work needs to be done to protect the gains of the Sandinista revolution.

People Celebrate Revolution, Call For Peace, Show Support for Government

The people of Nicaragua showed their support for the democratically elected government of Daniel Ortega with a massive outpouring in Managua in a celebration of the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. In addition to the mass protest in Managua, various cities had their own, in some cases very sizeable. ones.

People have wanted peace to return to Nicaragua. They have also wanted the roadblocks removed, which have resulted in closed businesses, job loss and loss of mobility. Roadblocks have been removed, even in the opposition stronghold of Masaya. There were two opposition deaths and one police officer killed in the removal. There was also an earlier death of a policeman in Masaya, captured when he was off-duty, tortured and burnt to death. This brings the total of police killed since April up to at least 21 with hundreds injured. With the opening of the main road on the east side of Masaya, all Nicaragua’s main routes are open to traffic and buses etc are operating normally.


At the rally, President Ortega called on the people of Nicaragua to defend peace and reinstate the unity that existed in the nation before the violent opposition protests. He described how the violent coup attempted to destabilize the country and ended the peace that has existed through the eleven years of his time in office. He said, “Peace must be defended every day to avoid situations like these being repeated.”

He also criticized the Catholic Bishops for their role in the failed violent coup. Ortega described the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua as “coup leaders” for collaborating with the opposition during the protests. Not only did the Catholic leadership side with the opposition during the national dialogue, but priests were involved in kidnapping and torture. Pope Francis has a lot of work to do to reign in the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. If their role in these violent protests and opposition to an economy for the people is not stopped, this will become a scandal for the Catholic Church.



Other Latin American leaders spoke out against involvement in the coup. Bolivian President Evo Morales condemned US “interference” in Nicaragua, denouncing the “criminal strategies” used against the government of Daniel Ortega. Morales accused the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of “openly supporting violence” in Nicaragua. Also at the celebration were the foreign ministers of Cuba and Venezuela, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, and Jorge Arreza, all supporting Nicaragua over the violent coup of the United States and oligarchs.

The United States is Escalating Economic War and Support for Opposition

The United States is not giving up. Also on the anniversary of the revolution, the NICA Act, designed to escalate the economic war against Nicaragua, was introduced in the Senate. It has already been passed by the US House of Representatives. The Senate bill, called the Nicaragua Human Rights and Anti-corruption Act of 2018, imposes sanctions, calls for early elections and escalates US intelligence involvement in Nicaragua. It is a law that ensures continued US efforts to remove the democratically-elected government.

At the same time, USAID announced an additional $1.5 million for Nicaragua to build opposition to the government. This will fund the NGOs that participated in the protests, human rights groups that falsely reported the situation, media to produce the regime change narrative and other support for the opposition.

The coordination between Nicaraguan opposition and the United States was shown by Max Blumenthal’s attempted visit to an organization that funnels USAID and NED money to the opposition. He visited the Managua offices of the Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policies (IEEPP in Spanish), but it was closed because its director, Felix Maradiaga, who was at the heart of the violent unrest, was in Washington, DC seeking more funding from USAID.


Max Blumenthal
✔
@MaxBlumenthal
· 20 Jul
Replying to @MaxBlumenthal
The day after the OAS voted to condemn Ortega, a sign at today’s rally dismissing it as a tool of Washington. Speakers lashed out at Mike Pence and “Narco Rubio” all day. Following a US backed soft coup, Sandinista anti-imperial rhetoric is sharper than in the past few years. pic.twitter.com/GlLUX8nwc9

and the zealots on both sides are more interested in demonstrating points that "See I told you that Im right" rather than fixing the problem.

Isn't that the truth?!

Wash DC politicians are more interested in getting elected than actually fixing problems.

My great concern is the survival of humans in an increasingly dystopian scenario. Certain of big money interests have taken control of most politicians at the expense of the entire human race. Democratic socialism can counteract the spreading sickness, but the time frame to do so is urgent. I refuse to settle for anything else.

I wish that the democratic socialists on this board would spend ANY amount of time explaining why their policies are so good and why heir solutions are the ONLY ones that are good for America and not just attacking whomever they perceive their enemies to be at any given moment.

What do you think you gain by pretending like that hasn’t been done 50 times?

Lumpenproletariat has feelings too, ya know.

When I was ten years old, I wrote a school paper about the Sandinista revolution. I wrote to the Nicaraguan embassy for info and everything. It was full of flowery language about how people power won out over a brutal dictatorship, and how the US-funded Contras used terror tactics to sow panic and suffering in Nicaragua.

I remember being quite upset when my teacher wrote to my mother to say that it was all very good, but could Nimh write his own paper next time? I did! I had written it all myself. It was my paper on guinea pigs that my mother had worked on...

I am obviously a little embarrassed about the rhetorical excess and the copious quotes from government propaganda, but on the fundamental substance, I still think my paper was right. :-) Somoza's dictatorship was a bottomless pit of brutality and corruption, not to mention the exploitation of an impoverished population by a narrow, wealthy ruling elite.

The Sandinistas brought mass literacy campaigns, great strides in healthcare, and liberation from the Somoza clique. Meanwhile, whatever partial roots they had among home-grown dissidents, the Contras soon devolved into nihilist brutality, amply funded and armed by the USA's intelligence services.

But there were warning signs even then. There were excesses on the Sandinista side too. An initial outpouring of newly-established, freely organized associations, media etc were soon restrained. Stories of corruption, perhaps inevitably, appeared. An indigenous minority in the East suffered.

Then, a decade and a half or so later, there were free elections, and the Sandinistas lost. To their credit, they relinquished power.

They have long since returned to power. But the mass apparatus of an aging Daniel Ortega is far from the revolutionary movement it once was. Corruption is rife. So are authoritarian impulses.

What people like Blumenthal, truly a waste of a "journalist" who's been mostly busy whitewashing Assad's mass murder in Syria, won't tell you is that the protest movement against Ortega this year was to a significant extent a left-wing, grassroots movement.

We can't rely on 40-year old muscle memory when observing what is happening now in countries like Nicaragua. The story then was indeed one of a popular revolution vs the US propping up brutal dictators and nihilist guerrillas - though even then, more went wrong than we were willing to acknowledge (especially next door in El Salvador, where a dictatorship propped up by the US engaged in mass murder but the FMLN guerrillas were guilty of plenty of their own horrible crimes). But that was then.

Just because the FSLN still waves a red and black flag doesn't mean they're still the good guys, just like Mugabe in 2010 was not the anti-colonialist hero of 1980, and today's Russia has nothing to do with the Soviet Union of yore (leaving aside that state's own mass crimes).

Socialist internationalism means standing in international solidarity with protest movements against corruption-fuelled inequality and authoritarian rule, even if they're targeting people who were once upon a time our heroes. It means we should eye governments we once thought a breath of fresh air, which have since become rife with corruption and authoritarianism, with distrust - also in Venezuela, also in Nicaragua.

Also, find better sources than Max friggin Blumenthal.

I did some reading after seeing your reply. Turns out I was mistaken. But I still stand against the US going into Latin American countries to impose their will.

Even Fox is giving Bernie and Alexandria airtime.

We might just turn some of those people.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/07/20/ocasio-cortez-and-sanders-in-joint-rally-say-their-agenda-is-now-democratic-mainstream.amp.html

https://splinternews.com/you-have-to-understand-that-this-is-all-an-investment-1827541688
Here is who ultimately wields power in our political system: Rich people. And here is what they care about above all else: Tax cuts. Politics is an investment that pays off. The proof is in the numbers.

The Republican party is, in essence, a firm wholly owned by and run for the benefit of the rich, that cynically grabs ahold of social issues and the flag and anything else it can wave around to attract sufficient votes to enable it to successfully undertake its central mission of cutting taxes for the rich and cutting regulations on business and generally using the government as a tool to funnel wealth towards the wealthy. The Democratic party is a firm that does the same thing half the time and the other half of the time argues with itself over whether or not it can be allowed to do it. The root of the problem is that we have designed a system in which money can directly purchase political power. It is therefore completely unsurprising that moneyed interests will use politics as just another tool to make them money. That is pure, basic capitalist logic. Unfortunately in America it has the process of making a mockery of our stated democratic ideals in the process. But for corporations and those who derive great wealth from business activity, this is all just common sense. The sooner everyone understands this, the sooner we can have an honest conversation about how to change it—a conversation not cloaked in tedious bullshit about American Values and Protecting Our Families.

It’s about money.

In general rich people’s long-term capture of the government has paid off handsomely. The most obvious evidence is the extreme post-Reagan increase in economic inequality, which can be read as an indication that rich people are successfully pulling more of our national wealth for themselves, and doing a better and better job of protecting that wealth from taxation.


Graphic: EPI
Since the turn of the century, a succession of federal tax cuts have directly rewarded political donors for their support of our presidents. A new report from ITEP shows that “From 2001 through 2018, significant federal tax changes have reduced revenue by $5.1 trillion, with nearly two-thirds of that flowing to the richest fifth of Americans... By the end of 2025, the tally of tax cuts will grow to $10.6 trillion. Nearly $2 trillion of this amount will have gone to the richest 1 percent.”


Even in an age when presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars a pop, they are still a bargain considering the return on investment.

If the public would understand our national politics in these terms, it would be a lot easier for them to understand why their problems never seem to get fixed, even though politicians say all the right things. The answer is that they are not rich. If they were rich, they would find that their investment in politics provided them with enough money to fix their own problems. Since they are not individually rich, the solutions to their problems involve socializing costs to support everyone, and “socialism” has been turned into a bad word by rich people, because it would cost them money.

It would, at minimum, be nice to be able to conduct the public dialogue about American politics honestly, without having it drenched in lies as a matter of course.

I really liked how near the end they made fun of Fox News, after spending 10 minutes proving Fox New’s point correct.

These guys are part of the problem and are actively trying to divide the left.