Progressives (Liberals)

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/corporate-democrats-are-already-punching-left-ahead-of-2020/

Corporate Democrats are already turning on the cheat machine.

Well-informed public discussion is a major hazard for Democratic Party elites now eager to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2020 presidential nomination. A clear focus on key issues can bring to light the big political differences between Sanders and the party’s corporate-friendly candidates. One way to muddy the waters is to condemn people for pointing out facts that make those candidates look bad.

National polling shows that the U.S. public strongly favors bold policy proposals that Sanders has been championing for a long time. On issues ranging from climate change to Medicare for All to tuition-free public college to Wall Street power, the party’s base has been moving leftward, largely propelled by an upsurge of engagement from progressive young people. This momentum is a threat to the forces accustomed to dominating the Democratic Party.

In recent weeks, Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke has become a lightning rod in a
gathering political storm—largely because of the vast hype about him from mass media and Democratic power brokers. At such times, when spin goes into overdrive, we need incisive factual information. Investigative journalist David Sirota provided it in a deeply researched Dec. 20 article, which The Guardian published under the headline, “Beto O’Rourke Frequently Voted for Republican Legislation, Analysis Reveals.”

Originating from the nonprofit Capital & Main news organization, the piece reported that “even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities.”

Progressives have good reasons to like some of O’Rourke’s positions. But Sirota’s reporting drilled down into his voting record, reviewing “the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.”

Bernie is the only potential candidate who will actually change the course of unfolding disaster. There are a few other progressives who possibly could, but they lack either the necessary age or the following. People happy with the people's needs getting plowed under will go with Beto, Biden or Republicans.

Cenk Uygur
✔
@cenkuygur
For Bernie Sanders, Holding Onto Support May Be Hard in a 2020 Bid https://nyti.ms/2RfuaCd Has the @nytimes ever done a positive story about @SenSanders? Every article is a hit piece, especially from @jmartNYT. They might not even realize it but they can't stand progressives.

Bernie Sanders is a self-identified socialist. Do you really expect the Democratic party to continue to pursue socialism when it is clearly so problematic in so many ways?

The GOP protects the right of the people to make and keep what they make, but there are problems that result from that. At what point will Democrats advance candidates who have actual ideas about how to solve the problems of free markets without turning every solution into a fiscal-stimulus spending project?

All the fiscal stimulus does is invigorate the economic growth that causes the problems they are trying to solve. If you really want to solve those problems, you have to find ways to address them without stimulating the economy that's causing them in the first place.

It's either go progressive, with a person like Bernie, or back to the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama morass that gave the country to Republicans like Trump.

I don't understand the true rage establishment oriented Dems feel for progressives. Since when is Roosevelt's New Deal a radical concept for non Republicans?

Edgar,

Did you get the email from Bernie today?

It’s a little rougher than I’ve heard him speak before. I’ll send you a copy if you didn’t get one.

Didn't get it.

(My name),

Let me take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful new year.

Whenever I am asked about running for president in 2020, I answer that if I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run. That is the truth.

If that happens, the political, financial and media elite of this country will stop at nothing to defeat us. You know that. We’ve lived through it together once before. Our ideas terrify them. So what they will do is try to divide us up with attacks — some old, some new — and our political opponents will spend obscene sums of money on ads to defeat us.

I just did not expect the attack ads to begin before I even made a decision. But they have…

Right now, a group of Wall Street Democrats known as the Third Way is running ads in early primary states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — calling me out by name and saying our ideas, like Medicare for all, are a path to defeat in 2020.

They not only want to discourage or defeat a Sanders candidacy, they want to make sure that the progressive agenda is not advanced by anyone. They want us to go back to their failed corporate approach which has led to a massive level of income and wealth inequality, a bloated military budget and a failure to address the crises of climate change, a broken criminal justice system and inhumane immigration policies.

Last time we ran, we made the financial elite pay a price for their attacks on our progressive agenda. It is just as important we do it again today:

Make a $3 donation to our campaign to help us fight back and send a message that we will NOT let the political and financial elite of this country buy this election and scare candidates from supporting a progressive agenda.

Our agenda terrifies the political and financial establishment of this country.

But the truth is, their agenda should terrify all of us.

Our ideas will lift people out of poverty, they will guarantee health care as a right for every man, woman and child, and they will make certain that every person in this country with the ability and the desire can get the education they need, regardless of the income of their family.

Ours is not a radical agenda. It's the agenda the American people want.

Their agenda, paid for by wealthy campaign contributors, has led to record levels of inequality, a health care system that costs more per capita than any other developed nation while leaving millions uninsured and underinsured, and grotesque amounts of student debt that rob many of our young people of their futures.

Theirs is the agenda that made Donald Trump possible. Ours is the agenda that will defeat him.

And that’s why it’s so important progressives stand up to their attacks today:

Make a $3 donation to our campaign as a way of saying we will NOT let the political and financial elite scare candidates from supporting a progressive agenda. Make them pay a price for their attacks.

In 2016 we faced the kitchen sink. If we run again, you should expect no less. But the political revolution is stronger and larger than ever, and they will be no match for us if we’re in this fight together.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

Paid for by Friends of Bernie Sanders
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Truthfully, when I saw other people posting their emails on Twitter, I felt that they’d embellished Bernie’s words, but I can see they didn’t.

Bernie has never, in my knowledge, called out the Democrats, or a major wing like The Third Way—the Establishment—the Clinton wing—in such a public, visceral way. I’m at least glad to see he won’t ignore it, but this is going to be evil—and I dread it. If he offers himself up to the progressives counting on him for change in government, it will be the most disgusting attack by the Establishment we’ve seen.

If it goes badly for him, expect strikes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/12/bernie-sanders-america-is-controlled-by-a-few-multi-billionaires.html

While the degree of income inequality differs across the country, the underlying forces are clear. It's the result of intentional policy decisions to shift bargaining power away from working people and towards the top 1 percent," said Mark Price, an economist at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg, Penn., in a written statement released with the report. "To reverse this, we should enact policies that boost workers' ability to bargain for higher wages, rein in the salaries of CEOs and the financial sector, and implement a progressive tax system."
The influence wielded by the ultra-wealthy is visible in politics and the media, according to Sanders.
"They don't put their wealth under neath their mattresses, right. They use that wealth to perpetrate, perpetuate their power. And they do that politically," Sanders said. "So you have the Koch brothers and a handful of billionaires who pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elections, because their Supreme Court gutted the campaign finance laws that were in existence, and now allow billionaires quite openly to buy elections."
Charles and David Koch are each worth more than $48 billion, according to Forbes. Their wealth comes from their family business, Koch Industries, the second largest private company in the United States, according to Forbes. Though their PAC does reportedly spend hundreds of millions on elections, that includes funds raised by a network of about 300 donors, according to The Washington Post.

Billionaire Warren Buffett says 'the real problem' with the US economy is people like him. Still, "Their influence as political financiers and political organizers cannot be discounted," Robert Maguire, a political nonprofits investigator at the Center for Responsive Politics told The Washington Post in 2015. "[T]he brothers — and the members of their donor network — have an outsized influence on the who gets nominated for our country's highest offices. Most GOP presidential hopefuls, for example, have auditioned for Koch seal of approval at their donor retreats."
As for the media, the richest person in the world, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post and Salesforce CEO and billionaire Marc Benioff recently bought Time.

"If I am a billionaire, it is likely that I will have control over media, as well," Sanders said. "So you have a handful of media conglomerates owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country and in the world determining what the news is; what is appropriate for the American people to discuss and not to discuss."

Thanks, lash. Bernie's letter is a great document that I plan to bookmark to read over a few times.

That was you Edgar, and other entitled and priveledged Stein voters.

It’s not progressive candidates like AOC I have a problem with.

It’s her supporters, like you.

Mike drop. And the crowd goes wild!!!!

You can tell how hard it will be for corporate shills and stooges to give up the fantasy of getting ahead with Biden or Beto or whoever, just by viewing the outrage they express on a thread as mild as this one. They may have to experience a few more cycles of getting plowed under by the machine before turning to the progressive side. As badly as the fabric of democracy is getting frayed, it's hard to understand that they can't see it already. Their criticisms of Sanders amount more to character assassination than any actual reasonable arguments against what he stands for. ("Attack my candidate will you? Well, yours is ****") That he made his career outside of the Democratic Party is no big deal. Lieberman was an independent. Eisenhower never joined a political party before running for office. It seems likely I could unearth more examples, but nothing you say will be acceptable to those mired in entrenched tribalism. The old status quo is good enough for them, despite its losing the entire political spectrum to Republican dolts.

Oh please, it's not as though a lynch mob has come after you. People come in here and criticize that carpetbagger Sanders, and you and Lash go off the deep end, assuming they support Clinton, O'Rourke or Dog knows who else. I have consistently called for new blood, and have consistently said that taking Congress is more important than taking the White House. Now you assume that that means that those who don't agree with you are members of some Democratic old guard--so old, in fact, that they don't really even support the New Deal? Thank you, though, for branding those who don't support Sanders and his pie-in-the-sky promises as corporate shills and stooges. That will unify the party, eh?

It may be the agenda the American people need but it's the agenda that only some of the American people currently want. Unfortunately our method of selection doesn't yield candidates with policies that the "American people" want and I'd be very skeptical of any politician who confuses the adulation of his activist followers with widespread support among the electorate as a whole. Trump does this all the time. There is no candidate who espouses policies favored by the "American people" and there hasn't been since the first term of the last decent president, George Washington.

You, personally, I don't know which candidates you support, or your rationale. Certain other people here sit on my posts and vote me down within five minutes, 24 hours per day. I frankly don't understand why you are so vehement in condemning Sanders, but these others defend the corporate shills and I feel comfortable trashing them right back.