We Must Save and Strengthen Our Precious Public Assets
If we do not fight for the commons, Jeff Bezos will own your life.

Post Office banking would help millions.

As I recall, the largest union is the post office, so right wing has been trying to crush it for years and they harmed it in their pension legislation. Here is another front in fight to save the post office.

It probably won’t be long before Amazon decides to crush the U.S. Postal Service altogether. There is talk of the Trump administration privatizing the USPS, but I don’t think that should be our biggest fear—people could be mobilized to defend that institution. But what if Jeff Bezos decides to destroy it? Amazon, which now has a giant, highly efficient shipping apparatus, could open brick-and-mortar shipping stores by post offices around the country and start offering person to person shipping. The USPS, which is creaky and inefficient, will be further financially damaged by Amazon undercutting it on prices and speed. There’s a law against private carriers using federal mailboxes, but the Trump administration wants to change that, and even if they don’t, I’m sure “Amazon boxes” would start popping up next to people’s ordinary mailboxes. What use will there be for a postal service anymore? With Amazon’s giant fleet of vehicles and network of warehouses, why couldn’t it run the mail? (This is not some far-off dystopian idea; it has already been suggested that Amazon displace public libraries.)

Amazon is ruthless and they will never stop expanding into more and more areas of life. They went from the “world’s biggest bookstore” to the “everything store” to the “everything business.” That means they dominate cloud computing (40 percent of all of it occurs on Amazon Web Services), they own grocery stores and a movie studio, and they are trying to “slowly take over all shipping and logistics direct from manufacturers in China and India.” They are the second-largest employer in the United States; more people work for Amazon than live in the entire U.S. state of Vermont.

So expect to see more and more Amazon in your life. They’ll probably do healthcare soon enough. Amazon clinics. They’ll build private roads to save Prime members from traffic. They’ll enter the rideshare business—why not? Will Amazon’s delivery drones be weaponized and sold to the military? I don’t see why not—the military is certainly buying. Amazon has such colossal power that it can dominate almost anyone it chooses to take on. They win, in part because the services they offer to customers are usually cheap and high-quality, in part because they do not care about making money, they care about building power.

sad news

Sheriffs loose their power and maybe their job

new rules to not hold people in jail for pre trial detention

Most people held in local jails – 66 percent in New York state as of December 2019, just before the new rules came into effect – are there pretrial, meaning they have not yet been convicted of a crime. Reducing pretrial detention will thus substantially shrink jail populations, possibly leading many jails to become largely unnecessary.

New York jails, which in upstate New York, as in much of the country, are run by elected county sheriffs, are expected to see their populations drop by around 40 percent under the state’s new pretrial detention rules, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

WHEN A SHERIFF’S JAIL IS EMPTIED
New York sheriffs are fighting the state’s cuts to pretrial detention. But bail reform can push sheriffs to embrace shrinking jails.

Not a highly rated poll but in line with other recent Iowa polls showing a Bernie lead.

https://www.changeresearch.com/post/pollercoaster-2020-sanders-leads-by-8-points-in-iowa-caucuses

Sanders has the support of 27% of likely caucusgoers; Buttigieg and Biden trail him with 19% and 18%, respectively; Warren is next with 15%; and Klobuchar is at 10%. Other than Yang and Steyer, at 4% each, no other candidate is above 1%.

However, many voters are still unsure. 48% of caucusgoers say they could still change their mind. Furthermore, 52% either have made up their mind in the last month or haven’t made up their mind at all. Sanders’s support is firmest: 65% of Sanders voters say they’re absolutely certain to stick with him. Warren is next on this measure, at 58%, while Buttigieg is at 53%. Only 49% of Biden’s supporters say they’re certain to caucus for him, and Klobuchar’s number is only 35%.

Of the voters who’ve made up their minds in the last week, 25% have gone with Klobuchar, suggesting she may have some momentum. Next up among that cohort of voters are Warren at 17% and Buttigieg at 16%. Among those who say they’re still making up their mind, Biden (22%) and Klobuchar (21%) lead.

No candidate is poised to gain disproportionately from attracting nonviable candidates’ supporters. Warren is the most voters’ 2nd choice, but only because she’s the most Sanders voters’ 2nd choice — and Sanders will likely be viable in most precincts. Buttigieg, Biden, and Warren are all poised to pick off a significant number of Klobuchar supporters in places where Klobuchar isn’t viable; the other candidates’ supporters fan out to the top five candidates. We see this when we ask which of the top 4 candidates voters would support if they had to choose: the margins are almost identical to how they look in the initial toplines, with Sanders at 30, Buttigieg at 23, Biden at 22, and Warren at 20. 5% say they’re not sure.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/28/what-sanderss-surge-says-about-democratic-establishment/

I stand with my colleague Paul Waldman, who argued last week that it’s all but impossible to know how Sanders will fair against President Trump until — and if — such a match-up ever happens. Let’s focus instead on how so many who should have known better dismissed the possibility of this sort of endgame.

For starters, Sanders’s online fundraising ability should have let everyone know how formidable he would be. We’re a nation that likes to tell people to put their money where their mouth is, and no group on the Democratic side did that more than Sanders supporters. Over and over again, reporters found themselves noting not only that the Sanders campaign raised the most money of any Democratic contender, but that he’d accomplished it by grass-roots small-dollar donations. He did so in the first quarter of 2019, the second quarter, the third quarter and the fourth. But instead of pondering that level of enthusiasm, much of the attention centered on the fact that it would allow Sanders to remain in the primary even if he wilted electorally.

Then there is the millennial vote. The generation has been whipsawed by a confluence of bad economic circumstances — a massive recession, immense amounts of student debt, sky-high housing prices and so on. And here’s a pro tip: A future candidate who tells the younger generation to “give me a break” when they complain about “how tough things are” is not likely to win many of those people over to his cause. Neither is a candidate whose response to calls for tuition-free college is she would do it if she was a “magic genie.” No one likes being talked down to. The result? A WBUR poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters conducted last week found Sanders maintaining a large lead with both male and female voters between ages 18 and 49.

That large portions of the Democratic establishment seem caught off-guard by Sanders says more about the party than the senator. It implies that the party is not taking the issues that are roiling the electorate as seriously as they should. Their panicked response doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the establishment’s ability to effectively challenge Trump come November.

I looked at the sample for the ARG NH poll (medium rated). It actually seemed older than the actual voters in 2016 so all the better for Bernie. A lot of these NH poll have had older samples.