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Bernie Sanders Says He Raised $34.5 Million in the Fourth Quarter

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Thursday that he had raised more than $34.5 million in the final three months of 2019, a haul that will allow him to run an extensive campaign in the new year as Democratic voters begin the process of selecting a nominee.

That’s a few million dollars shy of what 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton raised in the same period in that election cycle, but Sanders’ campaign notes that his fourth-quarter contributions came from more than 1.8 million individual donations and the average donation during that period was $18.53, indicators of grass-roots support.

“Bernie Sanders is closing the year with the most donations of any candidate in history at this point in a presidential campaign,” said campaign manager Faiz Shakir. “He is proving each and every day that working-class Americans are ready and willing to fully fund a campaign that stands up for them and takes on the biggest corporations and the wealthy.”

Bernie Sanders Says He Raised $34.5 Million in the Fourth Quarter

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont raised more than $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, his presidential campaign said Thursday, yet another display of his enduring financial might fueled by a huge base of grass-roots donors.

Mr. Sanders received more than 1.8 million donations in the quarter, with an average donation of $18.53.

His fourth-quarter total is larger than any candidate has raised in a single quarter so far in the primary race. And it soundly eclipsed the totals of two other candidates who have reported figures for the three-month period from Oct. 1 until Dec. 31: On Wednesday, Pete Buttigieg’s campaign said he took in more than $24.7 million in the quarter, and earlier Thursday, Andrew Yang, a little-known entrepreneur when he entered the race, said he raised $16.5 million in that period.

Still, taken together, the high totals suggest the willingness of Democrats eager to defeat President Trump to open their checkbooks and donate to potential nominees. But Mr. Trump still retains a formidable fund-raising advantage: In the third quarter, for instance, his re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee combined to raise a staggering $125 million.

Mr. Sanders revealed his fund-raising haul a day after announcing that he had received more than five million donations since entering the race, which he said was more “than any campaign has received at this point in a presidential election in the history of our country.”

Mr. Sanders has raised more than $96 million since he announced he was running for president last February.

‘Entire Species Are Being Wiped Out’: Ecologists Say Half a Billion Animals May Have Been Killed by Australia Wildfires

Ecologists at the University of Sydney are estimating that nearly half a billion animals have been killed in Australia’s unprecedented and catastrophic wildfires, which have sparked a continent-wide crisis and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in desperation.

News Corp Australia reported Wednesday that “there are real concerns entire species of plants and animals have been wiped out by bushfires following revelations almost 500 million animals have died since the crisis began.”

“Ecologists from the University of Sydney now estimate 480 million mammals, birds, and reptiles have been lost since September,” according to News Corp. “That figure is likely to soar following the devastating fires which have ripped through Victoria and the [New South Wales] South Coast over the past couple of days, leaving several people dead or unaccounted for, razing scores of homes and leaving thousands stranded.”

The horrifying figures come as images and videos of animals suffering severe burns and dehydration continue to circulate on social media.

Mark Graham, an ecologist with the National Conservation Council, told the Australian parliament that “the fires have burned so hot and so fast that there has been significant mortality of animals in the trees, but there is such a big area now that is still on fire and still burning that we will probably never find the bodies.”

Koalas in particular have been devastated by the fires, Graham noted, because they “really have no capacity to move fast enough to get away.”

As Reuters reported Tuesday, “Australia’s bushland is home to a range of indigenous fauna, including kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, possums, wombats, and echidnas. Officials fear that 30 percent of just one koala colony on the country’s northeast coast, or between 4,500 and 8,400, have been lost in the recent fires.”

AOC Tells Democrats How to Get it Right in 2020

As 2019 closed, the centrist pundits and politicians who make it their mission to police the Democratic Party were busy reanimating one of the oldest lies in the book. They were aiming at 2020, the year in which the party will nominate a candidate to take on the biggest liar in American politics: Donald Trump. To beat Trump, the centrists argued, Democrats must reject “purity tests.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, luckily, has recognized this threat contained in the coded language about “purity tests” and countered it with a masterful defense of the politics of principle that will be essential to upend Trump and Trumpism. She finished the year arguing, correctly, that Democrats must stand strong for their ideals in 2020, or they will run the risk of letting Trump frame the debate.

“For anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests, it’s called having values. It’s called, giving a damn,” the Democratic representative from New York told a cheering crowd of 14,000 at a December 21 rally for Bernie Sanders in Venice, California.

While at least one Sanders rival, Pete Buttigieg, has been busy decrying purity tests regarding issues and strategies, AOC has pushed back against a politics where the parties are defined by the demands of big donors—and the cautious policies they favor. “It’s called having standards for your conduct to not be funded by billionaires but to be funded by the people,” she said.

The wrestling over standards between progressives and centrists is real, and it can be healthy for a democracy. Unfortunately, the centrists who refuse to surrender their rigid grip on the Democratic Party—especially when it comes to naming presidential contenders—want Democrats to believe that the only way to tackle Trump, the man who has shredded every standard for electioneering and governing, is with a return to politics as usual. They imagine that it is possible to make politics great again. Their back-to-the-future approach, which is as dangerous as it is naive, suggests that the 2016 election was an aberration.

Centrism is an unyielding ideological construct. It demands that candidates and parties abandon ideals in order to satisfy the whims of professional pessimists like David Brooks of The New York Times, who earlier this year reduced the Democratic contest to a David Brooks primary. In a Times column headlined, “Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away,” Brooks warned, “The party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable. And it’s doing it without too much dissent.”

Never mind that poll after poll shows that the “positions” Brooks perceives to be electorally poisonous—support for real health care reform and a sufficient response to the climate crisis—are, in fact, quite popular. Never mind that Brooks, a man unscathed by even the slightest measure of irony, bemoaned the lack of dissent in a column prominently featured in the nation’s most influential newspaper. Brooks was not happy because no one seemed to accept his premise that “the moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.”

We Must Call a Coup a Coup

The overthrow of Evo Morales’s progressive government in Bolivia in November was a traditional coup d’etat. It was stoked by right-wing elite, and has now been consolidated by a proto-fascist leadership. Coup leaders celebrated their victory by burning Whipalas in the streets — a flag representing indigenous nationalities — and boasted of having defeated communism.

Accounts of what has happened in the aftermath of the coup are, to say the least, disturbing. Assassinations, disappearances, torture, mass rape (including of children), persecutions, and the burning of houses have all been reported amongst Morales’s Movement for Socialism (MAS) supporters. There has been a shocking outpouring of revanchist, racist barbarism.

Though one might expect unanimous repudiation of the coup by all democrats, this hasn’t been the case. In Bolivia and internationally, many progressives — especially intellectuals — have refused to repudiate the coup; some have even gone so far as to back the mobilizations against Morales. For these commentators, what has occurred in Bolivia is not a coup, but a popular rebellion against fraud and an increasingly authoritarian left-wing government. While this is obviously an implausible analysis, the influence these intellectuals carry means that they cannot be ignored completely.

“Socialism Is More Alive in Vermont Than It Ever Has Been”

Bernie Sanders began his political career in Burlington, Vermont. But he’s far from the only socialist representing the city. Brian Cina, a socialist member of the Vermont state house, recently spoke with Jacobin about leftist political power that still exists in Burlington.

Cyber attacks and electronic voting errors threaten 2020 outcome, experts warn

Potential electronic voting equipment failures and cyber attacks from Russia and other countries pose persistent threats to the 2020 elections, election security analysts and key Democrats warn.

In November significant electronic voting equipment problems occurred in an election in the vital battleground state of Pennsylvania, sparking a lawsuit by advocacy groups charging the state is using insecure electronic voting machines.

Other key states like Florida and North Carolina which experienced voting problems in 2016 and Georgia which had serious equipment problems in 2018, are being urged to take precautions to curb new difficulties in 2020, say election analysts.

The Brennan Center’s electoral reform program last month released a study that stressed testing backup systems and electronic voting equipment before the primaries and next November’s general election was needed to reduce risks of cyber attacks and equipment failures, and offered guidance about ways to recover from attacks or malfunctions.

In response to these and other threats, Congress in December added $425m for election related spending, including security measures, to a massive $1.4tn spending bill for 2020.

But Democratic senators such as Mark Warner and Ron Wyden, who backed other election security bills that passed the House but were blocked by Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, still see the need for more election security measures next year, including permanent security funding and other steps to ensure safe elections.

Centrist Democrats need a 2020 reality check before it’s too late

In obsessively pursuing white, middle-class midwestern voters, Democratic leaders are setting their party up for disaster

Amazonian chief Raoni Metuktire: ‘Bolsonaro has been the worst for us’

At close to 90 years old, Brazil’s most venerated indigenous leader, Raoni Metuktire, has returned to the spotlight to challenge the man he calls the worst president of his lifetime, Jair Bolsonaro.

In an interview with the Guardian, the Kayapó chief said he wanted to speak out about the far-right administration’s plans to allow mining in indigenous territory and he warned that Brazil’s Amazon policies threatened global efforts to protect nature and address the climate emergency.

“Ï have seen many presidents come and go, but none spoke so badly of indigenous people or threatened us and the forest like this,” he said. “Since he [Bolsonaro] became president, he has been the worst for us.”

Raoni has lived through 24 administrations since first making contact with the world outside his rainforest home, and is at the forefront of a reinvigorated indigenous movement in South America’s biggest nation.

Along with Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, he is leading the resistance against government plans to open up the rainforest to land speculators, cattle ranchers, loggers and gold miners.

With his lip disc, beads, earrings and flowing grey hair, Raoni is probably the best-known Amazonian in the world. But he spent the first 18 or so years of his life unknown to anyone outside his forest community.

Raoni was a young, jenipapo-painted warrior when his tribe, the Metuktire Kayapó, was first contacted by non-indigenous invaders in the early 1950s, according to a new book by the veteran British explorer John Hemming. The intruders brought gifts of metal blades and beads but left behind European diseases such as malaria, influenza and measles that decimated the population.