The problem of Corporate Democrats and how to kick them out

[b_lumenkraft]

[Martin Gisser]

Well, as i remember the 2016 events, i saw a very popular candidate Sanders who, without any doubt in my mind, would have become president if it wasn't for corruption and undemocratic intrigues inside the Democratic party.

However, i reject the notion of being 'pro-GOP'. Not one single right-wing argument was made.

We can disagree on politics or strategy but comparing someone on the radical left to a GOP minion will not bring us forward in discussions.

Sorry, that is effectively pro-GOP propaganda. Sanders was not popular enough. He lost the primaries. (And BTW wasn't even a member of the party.) Get over it, Berners.

The rightwingnuts don't win with arguments. They win with lies and BS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Proponents of Horseshoe Theory argue that the extreme left and the extreme right are closer to each other than either is to the political center

[Lurk]

RT, Dore blah blah and half the commentariat in the polit threads here as effectively pro-GOP

There is not one poster here like that.

Hate Inc. https://taibbi.substack.com/

How, And Why, The Press Makes Us Hate One Another.
(If you believe it)
A serial book, delivered by email, by Matt Taibbi.

[Martin Gisser]

[Kulinski video]

As if evidencing the horseshoe theory, alt-right Breitbart chimes in:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/05/report-nancy-pelosi-aide-told-health-execs-they-wont-back-medicare-all/

Was it Pelosi herself who did the powerpoint? Nope. One slide says:
Agreement in Democratic caucus on the importance of universal coverage.

The question is, how to get there. (Not a trivial task given the entrenched trllion-$$ system.)

Plus, it is urgent to lower drug prices now - while Trump and McConnell are still in power. Looks like Pelosi is the only one to get that done - while Kulinski et al prefer to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Here are the slides: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5724245-Health-Powerpoint-Final.html#document/p1
Have a look and forget Kulinski's BS. Pelosi's advisor seems to try make a point for improving ACA. But the slides don't tell what he was talking.

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/02/is-nancy-pelosi-opposed-to-medicare-for-all/

-------------------------------------------
P.S.:
The Breitbart article actually isn't that bad below the BS headline.

Henry Connelly, a spokesman for Pelosi, said that Speaker Pelosi remains committed to offering Democrats hearing opportunities for Medicare for All legislation.

Connelly said:

Speaker Pelosi has ensured that Medicare for All will have hearings in the House and tapped Congressman Brian Higgins to take the lead on Medicare buy-in legislation. For the first time, House committees will be seriously examining and tackling some of the questions and possible solutions raised by Medicare for All legislation.

[b_lumenkraft]

I won't say more, don't want to piss off Neven again.

Only a guess, but i think it's things like linking breitbart and calling people GOP propagandist is what Neven opposes, not the fact you state your opinion here.

Again, i kindly ask you to not discredit me as a kind of right-wing propagandist. I consider myself as radically left and you are insulting me by saying things like "that is effectively pro-GOP propaganda". We can't discuss the issues like that.

[Martin Gisser]

Well, as i remember the 2016 events, i saw a very popular candidate Sanders who, without any doubt in my mind, would have become president if it wasn't for corruption and undemocratic intrigues inside the Democratic party.

However, i reject the notion of being 'pro-GOP'. Not one single right-wing argument was made.

We can disagree on politics or strategy but comparing someone on the radical left to a GOP minion will not bring us forward in discussions.

Sorry, that is effectively pro-GOP propaganda.

(my emph.)

Example from Oct. 2016, a Trump tweet:

“Bernie should pull his endorsement of Crooked Hillary after she decieved him and then attacked him and his supporters.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/02/bernie-sanders-defends-hillary-clinton-recording

I see no problem with linking to Breitbart here. Russia Today is also no problem.
Now I yield the echo chamber.

[Neven]

People who support Pelosi, Clinton and all the other neoliberal hypocrites, are not serious about AGW. It's as simple as that.

[b_lumenkraft]

Warren pulls a Kamela

[Martin Gisser]

Apropos health care and corporate Democrats: John Dingell (D - car industry) is gone.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/08/692744027/former-rep-john-dingell-left-an-enduring-health-care-legacy

Former Rep. John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who holds the record as the longest-serving member of the U.S. House, died Thursday night in Michigan. He was 92.

And while his name was not familiar to many, his impact on the nation, and on health care in particular, was immense.

[...]

As a tribute to his father, who served before him and who introduced the first congressional legislation to establish national health insurance during the New Deal, Dingell introduced his own national health insurance bill at the start of every Congress.

And when the House passed what would become the Affordable Care Act in 2009, leaders named the legislation after him. Dingell sat by the side of President Barack Obama when he signed the bill into law in 2010.

Dingell was "a beloved pillar of the Congress and one of the greatest legislators in American history," said a statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "Yet, among the vast array of historic legislative achievements, few hold greater meaning than his tireless commitment to the health of the American people."

[...]

--------------
P.S.: Who cares about U.S. health care politics should know him. He gave a concise history lesson in a series of tweets 2017. His life work is the paradigm of the whole conundrum. Guess what he said about Hillary... and Obamacare...

--------------------
P.P.S.: F* stupid U.S. healthcare. The higher the mortality rate of the elderly middle class murrican man, the better (*) (except exceptions). Opioids to The People!

-----------------------
P.P.P.S.: Them proud young (male) turkeys stand on the shoulders of giants they have no idea of. Nuff said.

--------------------
(*) for the planet

[Lurk]

I saw this a few days ago, but don't think I copied it here



That's not a bad response imho.

Nancy Pelosi response was to stand and applaud repeatedly. I have not seen any separate response from her as yet. Did she make one in or out of the House? She's "the leader" of the House Democrats right? I wonder if she knows what's she doing or in fact doing it intentionally.

[sidd]

Re: "The higher the mortality rate of the elderly middle class murrican man, the better (except exceptions). Opioids to The People!"

This quote at the end of a panegyric to Dingell is quite ... unhelpful. Dingell would have been in vehement disagreement; Detroit suffers the scourge as severely as any.

And as a friend to many "elderly middle class murrican" men, including a few indeed under opioid medication, allow to me to say, cordially: fuck you.

sidd

[Lurk]

Re: "The higher the mortality rate of the elderly middle class murrican man, the better (except exceptions). Opioids to The People!"

This quote at the end of a panegyric to Dingell is quite ... unhelpful. Dingell would have been in vehement disagreement; Detroit suffers the scourge as severely as any.

And as a friend to many "elderly middle class murrican" men, including a few indeed under opioid medication, allow to me to say, cordially: fuck you.

sidd

https://www.rt.com/news/451154-mexico-fox-trump-fyou/

Hint: Shit Hits Fan (at anytime, soon and ongoing)

I recommend "duck and cover" .... metaphorically speaking, I hope.

[Martin Gisser]

a panegyric to Dingell is quite ... unhelpful. Dingell would have been in vehement disagreement; Detroit suffers the scourge as severely as any.

My intention was not praising Dingell but to show that things aren't as simple as some young turkeys paint it ("Nancy is not your friend!" etc). A corporate Democrat can be a champion of universal healthcare.

I haven't watched Dingell's car industry lobbying much, last century, but it looks similar to Germany: Resisting any decent technological progress, resisting any decent regulation or taxation of this lousy failure of a market. Then whining when the dinosaurs they produce are no longer competitive.

[Lurk]

All advanced economies and first world nations (witht eh sole exception of the USA) worked this out by the 1960s and acted accordingly.

    Illness and medical bills contributed to over 66% of bankruptcies between 2013 and 2016. More than half a million families file bankruptcies each year that are linked to medical issues. We need #MedicareForAll to prevent these tragedies. https://t.co/SiHJaLJIYM
    — Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) February 11, 2019

    Medicare for all would not only guarantee health care for all people, not only save families and our entire nation significant sums of money, it would radically improve the lives of all Americans and bring about significant improvements in our economy. https://t.co/Osktw8zcCj
    — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 3, 2018

It's 2019 and still they cannot work this out.

[b_lumenkraft]

In view of the recent occasion:
The Lobby - USA, episode 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE&feature=youtu.be

[Lurk]

This one Twitter post of AOC playing her "Campaign finance laws Game" gets 34.1 Million views in under a week.

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1093601038622281728

It's a pity she is not as popular as Nancy Pelosi is. Maybe she'd get somewhere with new Policy ideas if she was.

[Lurk]

On that same thread I found this:

Rep. @aoc joined this ‘Donkey Kong 64’ marathon on Twitch to help raise money for trans youth
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1093893295707770881 

So very very cool!

Rakesh asks: "Why are the other dems in Congress not this articulate?"

[Lurk]

In view of the recent occasion:
The Lobby - USA, episode 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE&feature=youtu.be

There's posts here last month (?) with extra background about The Lobby doco.

Anyway The Lobby, The Canary, and AIPAC had a a big win recently: this was their objective

Jimmy Dore reports ... never saw anyone else mention this in the news:

2.18: "Just last week 77 out of 100 United States senators voted for the AIPAC act Combating BDS Act which targets the Palestinian solidarity movement and violates First Amendment free speech rights of United States citizens [ buy Gaslighting them and shaming them, and lying about them, harassing and threatening them and Black mailing them).

So you know what that is BDS is boycott divestment sanctions, boycott divestment and sanctions and it's a non-violent way to pressure the Israeli government to stop oppressing the Palestinians and come to a two-state solution or a solution and stop having Gaza be an open-air prison and stop shooting medics at their border and stop oppressing the people right.

So that's what the BDS is what was done to South Africa it works so now people are doing it to Israel -- BUT Israel says that's anti-semitic to single out their horrible behaviour when a lot of people (nations) are also horrible that's not a really good defence but that's what they say."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/anti-bds-measure-stalled-senate-190109150723359.html

https://mondoweiss.net/2019/02/combating-presidential-paranoia/

It's tucked away in this S.1 Bill
Sponsor:    Sen. Rubio, Marco [R-FL] (Introduced 01/03/2019)
S.1 - Strengthening America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019

AN ACT

To make improvements to certain defense and security assistance provisions and to authorize the appropriation of funds to Israel, to reauthorize the United States-Jordan Defense Cooperation Act of 2015, and to halt the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people, and for other purposes.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/1/text

So many people are living in an alternative universe, or at least in another solar system.

[Martin Gisser]

Jimmy Dore reports ... never saw anyone else mention this in the news:

Just one counterexample:

[sidd]

Corporate Democrats gag discussion of poverty: Minsky at the Nation

"Susie wrote a resolution prior to the Chicago DNC meeting in August 2018 to form an official Poverty Council of the DNC. "

"Susie was contacted by DNC staff members who rejected the proposal for a Poverty Council and altered the resolution to make it a toothless reaffirmation of the Democratic Party’s commitment to poverty issues, with no establishment of a Poverty Council. "

" Despite her rejecting their changes, the staff sent out their version in the first meeting notice sent to the DNC members. "

"For months, she was told to wait. The agenda was not ready yet ... one day from the deadline for the publication of the DNC agenda, Susie was contacted by the DNC staff and told that they were not going to put the Poverty Council on the agenda "

"She has reserved a conference room at the Washington Marriott Marquis hotel, the same hotel as the DNC meeting, on her own dime ..."

"doesn’t their fear of addressing poverty mean that they are tacitly accepting mass poverty as a constant in American society? "

"By Bill Clinton’s presidency the shift away from supporting programs designed to address poverty became official party policy ... "

"The prevailing ideology of the past four decades, call it neoliberalism or market fundamentalism, embraced by the mainstream of both parties, offers no solution to American poverty. Rather, it tacitly accepts it as part of the landscape. So an alternative poverty policy will, by definition, fly in the face of Democratic establishment orthodoxy. "

https://www.thenation.com/article/democratic-national-committee-poverty-susie-shannon/

sidd

[Martin Gisser]

https://www.thenation.com/article/democratic-national-committee-poverty-susie-shannon/

While Clinton blame is not missing, there's no word about Reagan's destruction of mental health care institutions. (Shannon is from California,, where it all started.) About 1/3 of the U.S. homeless should be in a psychiatric clinic. Dunno prison population numbers, but I guess it is as crazy.
https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-reagan-and-the-federal-deinstitutionalization-of-mentally-ill-patients/

[Neven]

Jimmy Dore reports ... never saw anyone else mention this in the news:

Just one counterexample:

That's Ilhan Omar stating her opinion on this particular issue. Do you have an example of a panel of people in suits discussing Ilhan Omar's opinions on this particular issue? Preferably one saying similar things to Jimmy Dore, or that agrees with Ilhan Omar's arguments?

And which Democrats have condemned her? Do they happen to be in bed with AIPAC (like Clinton and Obama)?

[Rob Dekker]

Jimmy Dore reports ... never saw anyone else mention this in the news:

Just one counterexample:

That's Ilhan Omar stating her opinion on this particular issue. Do you have an example of a panel of people in suits discussing Ilhan Omar's opinions on this particular issue? Preferably one saying similar things to Jimmy Dore, or that agrees with Ilhan Omar's arguments?

On this particular issue, I have not found anyone disagreeing with Ilhan.

And which Democrats have condemned her? Do they happen to be in bed with AIPAC (like Clinton and Obama)?

I don't think any Democrat condemned her. Do you ?
They all accepted her apology.

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy of Trump condemning Ilhan Omar for anti-semitic tropes is truly mind boggling, as brilliantly exposed here :

[Lurk]

Jimmy Dore reports ... never saw anyone else mention this in the news:

Just one counterexample:

That video is from January. The "report" I was referring to, that I had not seen mentioned in "news reports" recently, was actually the senate vote on the Bill. At least 20 Democrats voted Yay. Sorry if that was unclear. Sorry you cannot stomach Jimmy Dore too.

The issue I was focusing on in my comments above was not so much about Ilhan Omar personally but about the Israel Lobby/AIPAC and the Israeli Governments ongoing attempts to manipulate anti-BDS Laws being passed in the USA which has been their mission of late. I recommend The Lobby doco (links already provided here) as a good place to start - IF you wish to better inform yourself of the issue.

South Africa BDS and the recent Laws voted on in Ireland are useful comparisons with what is been attempted today in 2019 by the Israeli Govt and the Israel Lobby in the US Congress.

So when I was a teenager in my private school uniform going to South African apartheid protests after school in the 1970s the question people would be advised to ask themselves is - at that time what would have been the public political reaction had the PM Botha tweeted that "People like me were nothing more than an Anti-White Racist Xenophobic Anti-democratic Communist bastard!" 

Even though I was simply an everyday Anglo-Saxon teenage dufus who disagreed with his Government Policy? What do you image the media and politicians response would have been in the UK, in Australia, in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Austria etc at that time?

That Botha was right?

That it would be a very good thing if Botha could arrange for a secretive dishonest deceptive South African Lobby to pressure and blackmail/gaslight Congress any way he wanted to until he got his way no matter what the US Constitution and social norms said about such matters?

Like that's all Kosher in the 70s was it? Acceptable behaviour to pass laws banning teenagers from protesting the Apartheid Regime.... including promoting BDS or protesting the Vietnam War and Conscription.

These are the kind of things YOU need to seriously think about properly!

[Lurk]

These are the kind of things YOU need to seriously think about properly!

Nah, that's the wrong word to use. I'm thinking more like more broadly and holistically, the bigger picture from multiple points of view without being caught by one of them. I think there's a historical pattern in how both politicians and the media handles these Israel related issues. But it's only one more example of how much more extreme the polarities have become of late ... in recent years in the USA and it's like the main source for kind of mental virus travelling the entire now.  Trump the outcome not the cause imho Mr Opportunist that's all this modality was made for him and those like him on the left the right and everywhere else.

That the Israel Lobby can even get this far trying to shut down speech about BDS is a canary in the coal mine of much more and far worse to come. Of course nothing said here will make any difference to that as it's kind of baked in already .... much like much more global warming is baked in.

But each to their own ...

Odd coincidence that AOC is of a similar mind

 Ilhan Omar Retweeted
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
‏Verified account @AOC
Feb 8

This stuff is really sad. The GOP is so intellectually bankrupt that they no longer engage to debate issues in good faith, but instead seek to lie, distort, name-call, target, & destroy people/communities w any means possible.

It’s a virus and a race to the bottom.
 

[Neven]

And which Democrats have condemned her? Do they happen to be in bed with AIPAC (like Clinton and Obama)?

I don't think any Democrat condemned her. Do you ?
They all accepted her apology.

The second sentence from the video you posted: Minnesota Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar was accused this week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats of spreading "anti-semitic tropes".

Condemned, accused, tomayto, tomahto.

Of course, if you happily agree that BDS is anti-semitic (because you have neocon/neolib leanings), it's easy to then focus on Trump, Trump, Trump. But thanks for confirming that the mainstream media also toes that line. I think it will be hard for Martin to find a panel of people in suits - most of them out-of-touch millionaires - agreeing that Ilhan Omar's stance or support of BDS has nothing to do with anti-semitism whatsoever.

[Martin Gisser]

Yes AIPAC is bad. First time I'm with Lurk. AIPAC can rightly be compared to the NRA. That made a lot of Dems squeal.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sorry-democrats-your-nra-is-spelled-aipac_us_59d62c62e4b0666ad0c3cb12
Sorry, Democrats: Your NRA Is Spelled AIPAC

[wili]

Sounds like we finally have a 'kumbaya moment' here!!

And all prompted by the brave and truthful words of my awesome Rep, Ilhan Omar. She was the first person that my daughter got to vote for, and right when we came back from the polling place, there she was at our front door, with one of my daughters good friends who was helping to make a film about her. Believe me, she is every bit as poised, bright, and wonderful in person as you see her in her fierce questioning of the slime bag Elliott Abrams!