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RSN | Corporate Team of Rivals: Harris Now in Top Tier With Biden to Prevent a Progressive Nominee |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 08 July 2019 10:54 |
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Solomon writes: "Among the Democratic presidential candidates, the viable alternatives to the Biden and Harris corporatist duo are the progressive candidate Elizabeth Warren and the more progressive candidate Bernie Sanders."
Former Vice President Joe Biden speaking at a press conference in New Castle, DE on May 30, 2019. (photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Corporate Team of Rivals: Harris Now in Top Tier With Biden to Prevent a Progressive Nominee
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
08 July 19
 he odds are now very strong that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic presidential nominee. New polling averages say they account for almost 70 percent of support nationwide, while no other candidate is anywhere near. For progressives who want to affect the news instead of just consume it, active engagement will be essential.
Biden is the most regressive Democrat with a real chance to head the ticket. After amassing a five-decade record littered with odious actions and statements, he now insists that the 2020 campaign “shouldn’t be about the past” — an evasive and ridiculous plea, coming from someone who proclaims himself to be “an Obama-Biden Democrat” and goes to absurd lengths to fasten himself onto Obama’s coattails, while also boasting of his past ability to get legislation through Congress.
As he campaigns, Biden persists with disingenuous denials. During the June 27 debate, he flatly — and falsely — declared: “I did not oppose busing in America.” On July 6, speaking to a mostly black audience in South Carolina, he said: “I didn’t support more money to build state prisons. I was against it.” But under the headline “Fact Check: Joe Biden Falsely Claims He Opposed Spending More Money to Build State Prisons,” CNN reported that “he was misrepresenting his own record.”
Biden used the Fourth of July weekend to dig himself deeper into a centrist, status-quo trench for his war on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. During a repeatedly cringeworthy interview, Biden told CNN that what can’t be done includes Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, and student debt cancelation. Bernie Sanders quickly responded with a tweet calling Medicare for All, debt-free college, and a Green New Deal “the agenda American needs — and that will energize voters to defeat Donald Trump.”
No one has summed up Biden’s political stance better than Elizabeth Warren, who told the California Democratic Party convention five weeks ago: “Some Democrats in Washington believe the only changes we can get are tweaks and nudges. If they dream, they dream small. Some say if we all just calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses.” She added: “When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren't possible, about how political calculations come first … they’re telling you something very important — they are telling you that they will not fight for you.”
Being preferable to Joe Biden is a low bar, and Kamala Harris clears it. But, like Biden, she stands to lose potential support from many self-described liberals and progressives to the extent they learn more about her actual record.
Overall, Harris’s work as San Francisco’s DA and the California attorney general was not progressive. Lara Bazelon, former director of the LA-based Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, wrote in a New York Times column early this year: “Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”
Last week, Bazelon said: “Kamala Harris claims to be a champion of criminal justice reform. But as a prosecutor … she was anything but. She needs to make the case to the voters that her change of heart is genuine. Crucial to that case is reckoning with her past.”
That past needs scrutiny, especially since Harris has refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with it.
“As the top law enforcement official” of San Francisco and then California, The New York Times reported in a February news article, “she developed a reputation for caution, protecting the status quo and shrinking from decisions on contentious issues.” Reporter Kate Zernike wrote:
- “Years before ending mass incarceration became a bipartisan cause, she started programs to steer low-level drug offenders away from prison and into school and jobs. At the same time, she touted her success in increasing conviction rates, and as attorney general remained largely on the sidelines as California scrambled to meet a federal court order to reduce its swollen prison populations. She also repeatedly sided with prosecutors accused of misconduct, challenging judges who ruled against them.”
- When Harris first ran statewide, for California attorney general in 2010, “she had campaigned to the right of her Republican opponent on the question of easing the state’s tough three-strikes law. Once in office, she declined to take positions on ultimately successful ballot initiatives intended to reduce prison populations — one expanding opportunities for parole, the other reducing many nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.”
- “After the Supreme Court upheld the judges’ overcrowding order, the state promised to ‘promptly’ release a significant number of nonviolent prisoners, giving credit for time served. A delay in meeting that promise drew a judicial scolding in 2014. The state’s response proved embarrassing, and unsuccessful: Reducing the prison population, Ms. Harris’s office maintained, would hurt California’s ability to fight wildfires by shrinking the pool of forced labor.”
- “Ms. Harris won praise for releasing statewide data in a way that informed rather than inflamed the brutality debate: It included numbers on the use of police force but also on use of force against officers. She instituted body cameras for police agents who worked in her office, and offered implicit-bias training for police statewide. But she declined to support statewide regulations for the use of body cameras, agreeing with local departments that they should set their own standards. And she did not support a bill that would have required the attorney general to investigate police shootings.”
- Early in this decade, responding to the house foreclosure crisis, “the banks agreed to $18 billion in debt reduction that Ms. Harris said would allow California homeowners to stay in their homes, and the national agreement included $2.5 billion for a fund to provide educational counseling and other services for those in danger of foreclosure. But critics, especially on the left, have long said that the settlement was no grand bargain. It did not require banks to pay much out of pocket; $4.7 billion of the $18 billion in relief came from forgiving second mortgages, many of which the banks would have written off anyway because they were so severely underwater, and $9 billion came from homeowners selling their homes for less than the value of their mortgages, meaning that homeowners did not stay in their homes.”
The New Republic recently summed up: “From her role in a California prison labor debate to her prosecutions of sex workers,” Kamala Harris “has a past of her own to defend.”
It's sometimes difficult to gauge what Harris really believes in, especially in light of her tactical backsliding and flip-flops. Longtime observers had no reason to be surprised last week when she walked back her forceful debate position that the federal government shouldn’t leave it to localities to assist school desegregation with busing. “Harris muddied the waters,” the Associated Press reported, when “she told reporters she too did not support federally mandated busing and supported it only as an option for local governments.”
On foreign policy, the little that Harris has to say is often hazy while conforming with mainstream Democratic Party militarism. In the Senate, she has voted for six of eight major military spending bills.
Harris — who co-sponsored a bill to withhold U.S. dues to the United Nations because of a UN Security Council resolution that condemned illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank — pandered to AIPAC while delivering 2017 and 2018 speeches to the Israel-can-do-no-wrong organization. While acquiescing to requests from MoveOn and other groups that presidential candidates not speak to AIPAC’s 2019 conference in late March, she pulled off a smooth maneuver, as Mondoweiss pointed out: “Harris is a very pragmatic politician, and the conference came to her yesterday! She met leading AIPAC officials at her office and then tweeted her devoted support to Israel.”
Harris’s tweet shared the news: “Great to meet today in my office with California AIPAC leaders to discuss the need for a strong U.S.-Israel alliance, the right of Israel to defend itself, and my commitment to combat anti-Semitism in our country and around the world.” But progressive journalist Ben Norton did not share in the upbeat mood as he tweeted: “Far-right Israeli PM Netanyahu just formed an alliance with a literal fascist party, and is bombing people trapped in the Gaza concentration camp right now, but fake ‘progressive’ Kamala Harris is meeting with AIPAC and praising the apartheid regime.”
Yet Harris does not adhere completely to AIPAC positions. She co-sponsored the Yemen war powers bill introduced by Bernie Sanders. And she has expressed support for the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama that was canceled by President Trump.
The military-industrial complex might prefer Biden to Harris. But from all indications, that complex would be quite comfortable with a President Harris, and vice versa. The same goes for Wall Street and other big corporate sectors. No wonder they’re pouring many millions of dollars into the Biden and Harris campaign coffers.
However tense and testy the current relations between Biden and Harris might be, their falling out is likely to be temporary. “I adore Joe Biden,” she proclaimed in mid-spring when he was on the verge of announcing his campaign. Anyone who doubts the prospect of a rapprochement — and even a shared ticket — is forgetting how easily campaign-trail conflicts can be jettisoned a little bit down the road. In 1980, George H.W. Bush fought Ronald Reagan for the GOP presidential nomination all the way to the convention, even after losing the vast majority of primaries, and tensions were raw; then came the Reagan-Bush ticket.
Among the Democratic presidential candidates, the viable alternatives to the Biden and Harris corporatist duo are the progressive candidate Elizabeth Warren and the more progressive candidate Bernie Sanders. While Warren is impressive in many ways, I continue to actively support Sanders. As an eloquent essay by Shaun King recently underscored, Sanders — like no other member of the Senate or candidate for president — has boldly participated in progressive movements for his entire adult life. That orientation toward social movements is crucial in a time of profound needs for fundamental change, in an era of multiple and concentric crises — from record-breaking economic inequality to extreme corporate greed to racist xenophobia to the climate emergency to rampant militarism and so much more. No matter how distasteful or repugnant, the electoral process is an opening for progressive forces to be influential and potentially decisive.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Nancy Pelosi Has Chosen Her War, and It's With Her Own Party's Future |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44184"><span class="small">Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 08 July 2019 08:28 |
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Hasan writes: "It is time for liberals and leftists who lambast Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to admit to themselves that the hippie-punching Pelosi has become a Trump enabler too."
House Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Oliver Contreras/The Washington Post)
Nancy Pelosi Has Chosen Her War, and It's With Her Own Party's Future
By Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept
08 July 19
hey call themselves the “Squad.” From climate change to student debt to migrants in detention, progressive House Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley have been energetic and outspoken since getting elected last November — and, as a result, have become inured to constant attacks from congressional Republicans and, of course, Fox News.
But how about from their own boss?
In an interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed the Squad as “four people” who have their “public whatever and their Twitter world” but don’t “have any following.”
Ouch. This isn’t the first time Pelosi has trolled the left-wing quartet. In April, when she was asked by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes to comment on the newly emboldened progressive wing of her party, Pelosi responded: “That’s like five people.”
In the wake of November’s midterms, Pelosi mocked calls from AOC and her allies for a Green New Deal: “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”
To be clear: none of these freshmen Democrats have personally attacked Pelosi and all four of them backed her bid for the speakership. As CNN’s Nathan McDermott tweeted, “It is pretty notable that the most vocally anti-Pelosi Democrats (ala the moderates in swing districts who opposed her leadership) don’t get as much criticism from her as the left-wing of the party.”
How about Donald Trump? Pelosi is willing to criticize Trump — “I’ve never encountered, thought about, seen within the realm of my experiences as a child or an adult, anybody like this” — but only criticize. Nothing more. Not impeachment, that’s for sure. The top Democrat in the House told Dowd that the president has engaged in criminal behavior but — wait for it — “you can’t impeach everybody.”
The New York Times interview is yet another reminder for liberals and leftists that if they want to oppose Trump, they have to oppose Pelosi too.
Think I’m exaggerating? Consider three recent — and shameful — episodes.
First, the rape allegations against the president. On June 21, New York magazine published a cover story from the famed advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll, in which she documented in excruciating detail how Trump, back in the mid-1990s, forced “his penis halfway” inside of her in the midst of a “colossal struggle” in a Bergdorf’s dressing room.
Pelosi’s response to a reporter who asked her for comment a whole six days later? “I don’t know the person making the accusation… I haven’t paid that much attention to it.”
Now, she tells Dowd: “I respect the case she has but I don’t see any role for Congress.”
The sitting Republican president has been credibly accused of having committed a sexual assault and yet Congress, says the Democratic speaker of the House, has no “role” in holding him to account for it. Oh, and the speaker herself hasn’t been paying “attention to it.”
This, my dear liberals, is your (feminist) champion.
Second, the crisis at the border. One of the reasons Pelosi cited for not being familiar with the E. Jean Carroll story was that she was “busy worrying about children not being in their mother’s arms.” Yet on that same day, as the New York Times reported, Pelosi “capitulated to Republicans and Democratic moderates and dropped her insistence on stronger protections for migrant children in overcrowded border shelters” by signing onto a bill from the Republican-led Senate, giving the Trump administration $4.6 billion to tackle the situation on the southern border.
Last time I checked, though, this administration’s horrific decision to separate migrant children from their parents had nothing to do with a lack of funds. “The cruelty is the point,” as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer so memorably put it. Plus, 18 so-called “centrist” Democrats pushed Pelosi into dropping her objections to the Senate bill and yet in her New York Times interview, the speaker decided to level her attack on… you guessed it… the Squad. They made themselves irrelevant and shouldn’t have voted against “our bill,” she told Dowd, adding: “They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
Yet they were far from alone in opposing Pelosi’s decision. “The final vote, 305 to 102,” reported the Times on June 27, “included far more Republicans in favor, 176, than Democrats, 129.”
Meanwhile, over at the border, children continue to be starved, women continue to drink out of toilet bowls, and men continue to be held in standing-room-only conditions. The Trump administration is now contemplating mass video proceedings held over video.
Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Third, Trump’s tax returns. Last Tuesday, almost exactly six months after Democrats won control of the House, they finally took the president of the United States to court to try and force disclosure of his financial records. Trump administration officials and Trump’s army of personal lawyers have offered a range of excuses for refusing to release these records — and for defying congressional subpoenas in the process. But as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has noted, one in particular stands out from the rest.
On June 10, in an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Trump’s lawyers contested the claim that the House’s impeachment power could justify subpoenaing the president’s financial records while gleefully pointing out to the judge that impeachment is not even on the table. They wrote in their brief:
Speaker Pelosi has steadfastly denied that the House’s investigations are in any way related to impeachment. In March, she unequivocally told the Washington Post, ‘I’m not for impeachment.’ In late May, the Speaker reiterated that ‘any suggestion that Democrats are planning to pursue impeachment ‘simply isn’t the truth.’” After she received the district court’s ruling in this case, the Speaker boasted that the Committee had prevailed despite “the fact the House Democratic caucus is not on a path to impeachment.” Just four days ago, the Speaker again told senior Democratic leaders that “she isn’t open to the idea” of impeachment, and Chairman Cummings “sided with Pelosi.”
Is it not a source of shame for rank-and-file Democrats, whether on the left or in the “center,” that Trump lawyers are citing Pelosi’s refusal to impeach him as their defense in court? As their justification for ignoring congressional subpoenas?
Meanwhile, Pelosi herself continues to duck and dodge the arguments in favor of impeachment — even when she happens to be the one making them. “The thing is that, he every day practically self-impeaches by obstructing justice and ignoring the subpoenas,” she told the Times.
Sorry, what is she on about? I may not be a U.S. citizen yet, or speaker of the House of Representatives for that matter, but I have read the U.S. Constitution from beginning to end and I have yet to come across the clause that refers to “self-impeachment.”
So forget the “you-go-girl memes for literally clapping back at Trump” that Dowd fawns over in her interview with the speaker. It is time for liberals and leftists who lambast Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to admit to themselves that the hippie-punching Pelosi has become a Trump enabler too.
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Megan Rapinoe Owned This World Cup. Rose Lavelle Will Own the Next Four Years. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51125"><span class="small">Eric Betts, Slate</span></a>
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Monday, 08 July 2019 08:22 |
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Betts writes: "Megan Rapinoe was standing over the ball, 12 yards out from the goal, in the second half of a scoreless Women's World Cup final against the Netherlands on Sunday."
Megan Rapinoe poses with the Golden Ball next to Rose Lavelle with the Bronze Ball after the U.S. won the Women's World Cup. (photo: Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images)
Megan Rapinoe Owned This World Cup. Rose Lavelle Will Own the Next Four Years.
By Eric Betts, Slate
08 July 19
 egan Rapinoe was standing over the ball, 12 yards out from the goal, in the second half of a scoreless Women’s World Cup final against the Netherlands on Sunday. The U.S. women’s national team had earned a penalty thanks to the tournament’s least controversial VAR review—pro tip: you’re not allowed to kick Alex Morgan in the arm—and there wasn’t another American (dead or alive) you’d rather have taking the shot.
Rapinoe had already buried both penalties she had taken this tournament, in the Round of 16 game against Spain. She had scored both goals in the U.S.’ win over host France in the quarterfinal. She’d also been the tournament’s star off the field, stating her opinions with eloquence and force on subjects ranging from FIFA’s treatment of the women’s game to the Trump administration’s actions.
It’s a credit to Dutch goalkeeper Sari van Veenendaal that there was even a sliver of doubt that Rapinoe would score. Through luck, reflexes, and tremendous positioning, van Veenendaal had kept the U.S. off the scoreboard. The Dutch keeper was playing pinball wizard the entire game, reading every bounce, tracking the ball through every screen, and flicking something out at the last minute to swat away every U.S. attempt on goal. She seemed locked in, like she wanted this to be the clincher of what would come to be remembered as The Sari van Veenendaal Game.
But she leaned the wrong way. Rapinoe hit it to her other side, not great, but good enough. 1-0 U.S. And the moment became an encapsulation of Rapinoe’s tournament. She won the Golden Boot as the World Cup’s top scorer and the Golden Ball as its best player, and she did it despite scoring just twice with the ball in play. (She scored on those three penalties and one slightly fortunate free kick.) In this World Cup, she brought to the table more than her creativity and willingness to attempt the audacious, which haven’t waned but have been harder to put into practice when her legs sometimes can’t keep up with her mind. The key was her mental toughness, her leadership, the ice in her veins. What Rapinoe has displayed all tournament was not so much arrogance as an acute and perfect self-confidence. She knows that she is a star whether she makes this penalty kick in a World Cup final or not, and so of course she makes it.
But she leaned the wrong way. Rapinoe hit it to her other side, not great, but good enough. 1-0 U.S. And the moment became an encapsulation of Rapinoe’s tournament. She won the Golden Boot as the World Cup’s top scorer and the Golden Ball as its best player, and she did it despite scoring just twice with the ball in play. (She scored on those three penalties and one slightly fortunate free kick.) In this World Cup, she brought to the table more than her creativity and willingness to attempt the audacious, which haven’t waned but have been harder to put into practice when her legs sometimes can’t keep up with her mind. The key was her mental toughness, her leadership, the ice in her veins. What Rapinoe has displayed all tournament was not so much arrogance as an acute and perfect self-confidence. She knows that she is a star whether she makes this penalty kick in a World Cup final or not, and so of course she makes it.
It was only the capstone to Lavelle’s campaign as the breakout player of the tournament. She drew an early yellow card on Sunday that limited Dutch defensive midfielder Sherida Spitse for the rest of the game. She had nutmegged a defender and dummied the ball near the sideline to open space for Kelley O’Hara to assist Christen Press for the opener against England in the semifinal. Every game she came up with some new audacious display with which to embarrass her direct opponent and inspire the viewing audience to wonder if they just saw what they thought they saw. She won the Bronze Ball as the third-best player and had some people wondering how she had gotten robbed.
Lavelle had a tournament that was as effusive and ebullient as Rapinoe’s was undaunted. The U.S. needed both facets to win its fourth World Cup. Lavelle’s ability to dumbfound defenses will be crucial to the U.S. team’s play for the next four years and beyond. Rapinoe will be 37 when the next World Cup starts. That may seem too old come 2023, but this month, this tournament, is not the time to doubt her. Can you imagine, even four years from now, anyone else you’d rather have standing over the ball with the game on the line?
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There Is No 'Right' v 'Left': It Is Trump and the Oligarchs Against the Rest |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Sunday, 07 July 2019 14:24 |
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Reich writes: "I keep hearing that the Democratic party has moved 'left' and that Democratic candidates may be 'too far left.' But in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power at the top, I can't help wondering what it means to be 'left.'"
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
There Is No 'Right' v 'Left': It Is Trump and the Oligarchs Against the Rest
By Robert Reich, Guardian UK
07 July 19
The president is the puppet master so Americans of all persuasions must look behind him, to where the real danger lies
 keep hearing that the Democratic party has moved “left” and that Democratic candidates may be “too far left”.
But in an era of unprecedented concentration of wealth and political power at the top, I can’t help wondering what it means to be “left”.
A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” sought stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market.
But as wealth and power have concentrated at the top, everyone else – whether on the old right or the old left – has become disempowered and less secure.
Safety nets have unraveled, public investments have waned and the free market has been taken over by crony capitalism and corporate welfare cheats. Washington and state capitals are overwhelmed by money coming from the super rich, Wall Street and big corporations.
So why do we continue to hear and use the same old “right” and “left” labels?
I suspect it’s because the emerging oligarchy feels safer if Americans are split along the old political battle lines. That way, Americans won’t notice they’re being shafted.
In reality, the biggest divide in America today runs between oligarchy and democracy. When oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates, they neuter democracy.
The oligarchs know politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them. So as long as they control the money, they can be confident there will be no meaningful response to stagnant pay, climate change, military bloat or the soaring costs of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, college and housing.
There will be no substantial tax increases on the wealthy. There will be no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of giant corporations. There will be no meaningful regulation of Wall Street’s addiction to gambling with other peoples’ money. There will be no end to corporate subsides. CEO pay will continue to skyrocket. Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will continue to make off like bandits.
So long as the oligarchy divides Americans – split off people of color from working-class whites, stoke racial resentments, describe human beings as illegal aliens, launch wars on crime and immigrants, stoke fears of communists and socialists – it doesn’t have to worry that a majority will stop them from looting the nation.
Divide-and-conquer allows the oligarchy free rein. It makes the rest of us puppets, fighting each other on a made-up stage.
Trump is the puppet master.
He has been at it for years, long before he ran for president. He knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos.
He is well-versed in getting evangelicals and secularists steamed up about abortion, equal marriage rights, out-of-wedlock births, access to contraception, transgender bathrooms.
He knows how to stir up fears of brown-skinned people from “shitholes” streaming across the border to murder and rape, and stoke anger about black athletes who don’t stand for the national anthem.
He’s a master at fueling anxieties about so-called communists, socialists and the left taking over America.
He can make the white working class believe they’ve been losing good jobs and wages because of a cabal of Democrats, “deep state” bureaucrats and Hillary Clinton.
From the start, Trump’s deal with the oligarchy has been simple: he’ll stoke tribalism so most Americans won’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while they’re slicing the pay of average workers, so most Americans won’t pay attention to Wall Street demanding short-term results over long-term jobs, won’t notice a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations”.
The only way to overcome the oligarchy and Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back.
That means creating a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class Americans who will fight for democracy and oppose oligarchy.
White, black and Latino; union and non-union; evangelical and secular; immigrant and native-born – all focused on ending big money in politics, stopping corporate welfare and crony capitalism, busting up monopolies and stopping voter suppression.
This agenda is neither “right” nor “left”. It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.
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