Tips, Comments, Complaints, Etc.

Site/Signup issues can be sent to the tpwhelpdesk at the google mail.

Biden tamps down idea of Sanders or Warren in administration

Speaking with NBC News’ Lester Holt, Biden said that the two former Democratic presidential candidates were vital to advancing his progressive agenda in Congress and that his administration already had “significant representation among progressives.” Still, he said, “there’s nothing really off the table.”

“Taking someone out of the Senate, taking someone out of the House, particularly a person of consequence, is a really difficult decision that would have to be made,” Biden said. “I have a very ambitious, very progressive agenda. And it’s going to take really strong leaders in the House and Senate to get it done.”

Biden has unveiled his picks for key administration posts over the last few days — a list marked by decades of experience and Ivy League credentials. He picked former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen as his Treasury secretary — a post those close to Warren said she’d hoped for. Other administration picks include Ron Klain for chief of staff, Tony Blinken as secretary of State and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser.

Biden did, however, acknowledge that he was open to appointing Republicans to his administration as a sign of unifying the country. His transition team had been vetting Republican candidates for cabinet spots in the lead-up to Election Day.

CNN cutting off a black man calling out a former elected official for covering up the death of a black child that was murdered by cops to protect their white liberal base is…exactly what CNN is there to do

— 🌽🌽Erica, the white trash socialist🌽🌽™️ (@herosnvrdie69) November 24, 2020

‘Major Test’ for Soul of Biden Presidency: AOC, Ilhan Omar Back Effort to Keep Deficit Hawk Bruce Reed Out of White House

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib on Tuesday became the first sitting members of Congress to join a new pressure campaign demanding that President-elect Joe Biden keep Bruce Reed—an unapologetic architect of Bill Clinton’s disastrous “welfare reform” and notorious austerity proponent—out of the White House.

The “No Deficit Hawks” petition, launched by advocacy group Justice Democrats and backed by other progressive organizations, comes as Reed is reportedly under consideration to lead Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a key agency that will be tasked with crafting the incoming administration’s budgetary agenda amid a devastating economic crisis.

“Putting someone who will prioritize paying down the deficit ahead of all other concerns in charge is a recipe for cutting our earned benefits and turning the Covid recession into a depression,” the petition states. “Rejecting Reed will be a major test for the soul of the Biden presidency.”

A long-time Democratic operative who has advised and worked for Biden for years, Reed helped craft the 1996 welfare reform law that produced a massive surge in extreme poverty, inflicting severe damage on vulnerable children. Reed, who in 2016 characterized the law as an overall “success,” has also been credited with authoring Clinton’s infamous vow to “end welfare as we know it.”

In the wake of The American Prospect’s report last week that Reed is under consideration to head OMB, progressives spotlighted Reed’s role as executive director of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, an Obama administration initiative that recommended slashing Social Security benefits.

Social Security Works, one of the backers of the new petition, said it is imperative to “keep Reed and his toxic austerity politics out of the Biden administration.”

Omar echoed that message in a tweet on Tuesday, declaring: “If the Biden administration is serious about protecting Medicare and Social Security, they must not appoint one of the biggest champions of cuts to lead their budget agency.”

Will a Tar Sands Pipeline Become a Covid Super Spreader?

Minnesota boasts about being The Land of 10,000 Lakes. Yet somehow the Walz administration has issued the water quality permit necessary to build a 337 mile long tar sands pipeline, Line 3, across the entire northern breadth of the state, which is also known as, yes, Lake Country. Science tells us that any new tar sands pipeline is a disaster for the climate. Common sense and history tells us that a tar sands pipeline, especially in Lake Country Minnesota, will also be a clean water disaster at some point.

But this article is primarily about Line 3 and Covid. Minnesota currently has the fifth highest infection rate in the country. It has the highest infection rate of any state whose governor isn’t a Republican, even though Gov. Walz is constantly voicing concern about spreading the disease. He tweets about a “Dial Back To Save Lives” campaign that calls on Minnesotans to hit pause on a number of activities because, he says, the virus is like wildfire. His twitter header features a masked face and a “Mask Up Minnesota” message along with “StaySafeMN”. He tweets #DialBackMN. But he doesn’t tweet #DialBackLine3. And he should.

On Oct. 14 Enbridge, the Canadian energy giant that is building Line 3, announced that 400 workers had finished building the 12 mile section that runs through North Dakota. It is wholly in Pembina County, which has a population of about 7,000. When construction started in mid-August there were 27 Covid cases in the county. By Oct. 14 there were 146. That’s an increase of 540%. How much of that increase was due to the influx of out-of-state Line 3 workers is unknown. One thing is certain – their presence didn’t lower the spread.

In Montana, Keystone XL’s impact on the spread of Covid is a little clearer. That pipeline’s owner, TC Energy, known previously as TransCanada, made a big deal last spring about how it had donated $20,000 worth of Covid relief to Montana communities in the form of tote bags full of soap, shampoo, toothpaste, etc. Later in the summer it donated something else. It’s workers brought the first two Covid cases to Phillips County on July 28. Up until then, the county had been Covid-free. It is a huge county (5212 sq miles) with a tiny population of about 4,000, or less than one person per sq mile. The case count is now 242 and climbing with at least 5 deaths.

This is why it is so baffling that Gov. Walz has not at least hit pause on Line 3, which will bring in thousands of out-of-state workers for a very long time and they will disperse all across the state. Many in Minnesota and far beyond are hoping he will reconsider and follow the example of Gov. Whitmer’s strong leadership regarding Enbridge and Line 5. She looked at Enbridge’s history and was not impressed, to put it mildly. If Gov. Walz does not change course, concerned citizens are looking to Attorney General Keith Ellison to step up. From a climate perspective, a clean water perspective and a Covid perspective, Line 3 is nuts. #DialBackLine3

Sanders Announces Eleventh Annual State of the Union Essay Contest

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has launched his eleventh annual State of the Union essay contest.

Each January, the President of the United States delivers the “State of the Union” address to a joint session of Congress, which outlines priorities for the coming year. Because Senator Sanders knows that great ideas can come from everyone – not just those in power – and wants to encourage young people to become engaged in the political process, he created the State of the Union Essay Contest. The contest is an opportunity for Vermont high school students to describe a major issue facing our country and propose what they would do to solve it.

The 250-500 word essays can be on any issue of national importance. A volunteer panel of Vermont teachers will judge the essays on the students’ ability to articulate an issue and propose a solution, without regard to the students’ political views. Senator Sanders will enter the essays of the ten finalists into the Congressional Record – the official archive of the U.S. Congress.

“I started this essay contest 11 years ago to help our students be actively engaged, no matter where they stand on the issues,” said Sanders, who serves on the Senate education committee. “This year, our state and nation face a health and economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with a renewed fight for racial justice. Many of you have seen family members struggle because of lost wages or health concerns, you have been asked to learn online, and you face a future that may feel uncertain. To my mind, the unprecedented nature of this time makes it more important than ever to hear perspectives and innovative ideas from you, our young people.”

More than 4,600 students from high schools throughout Vermont have written essays in the past ten years about critically important issues, including climate change, access to mental health care, the rising cost of college, and much, much more. Last year, Isabelle Hiller from Woodstock Union High School was selected as the winner from 536 submissions for her essay on criminal justice reform.

The deadline for student essay submissions is Jan. 12, 2021. More information can be found on Sanders’ Senate webpage at https://www.sanders.senate.gov/stateoftheunion or by calling (800) 339-9834.

Defund-Police Organizers to Biden: “We’re Not Going Away”

On the Saturday after Election Day, not long after media outlets announced the projected winner of the presidential race, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors fired off a short letter to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. She wanted to congratulate them on their historic victory, and also to request a meeting so she could share her organization’s expectations for the next administration. “In short, Black people won this election,” she wrote to them. “We want something for our vote. We want to be heard and our agenda to be prioritized.”

Black Lives Matter organizers made their agenda clear over the summer, as millions of people took to the streets to demand that government officials defund law enforcement agencies and end police brutality. That energy helped bring an unprecedented number of voters to the polls, who overwhelmingly passed police accountability measures and helped elect Biden.

Now that he’s won, leaders of the defund-police movement hope to keep expanding their power in the halls of Washington. They want his administration to spend more money on health care and housing, and much, much less on law enforcement.

But while Biden is more amenable to their goals than President Trump, who repeatedly threatened anti-police protesters with violence, he hasn’t necessarily been their strongest ally. During the campaign, Biden spoke about holding cops accountable, but proposed investing $300 million more in police across the country, largely for better training. “The vast majority of police officers are good, decent, honorable men and women,” he said during the first presidential debate in September. “They risk their lives every day to take care of us, but there are some bad apples.” Biden’s transition website now outlines plans to ban chokeholds and create a national police oversight commission, but not to pull resources away from law enforcement departments. Cullors still hasn’t gotten a response to her letter.

“I’m very pessimistic about what we can expect, at least initially, from the Biden administration,” says Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who wrote The End of Policing, a well-known book about police abolition. “He’s made it very clear that he wants to put more resources into policing, that he supports the kind of superficial and ineffective procedural reforms that the Obama administration proposed.”

“Anything compared to the Trump administration is going to look sophisticated,” says Lex Steppling, a grassroots organizer in Los Angeles who works with the group Dignity and Power Now. “But the truth is the Obama-era DOJ didn’t achieve very much.”

..

These people cannot tell people to take something seriously and then not do so themselves, it undermines the entire messaging of scientists and prompts others to use them to justify their own non compliance which puts more work on already suffering frontline workers. I understand that republicans are not subject to the same criticism because they do not impose restrictions, but in my mind it is just like climate change.. knowing the science and not following best practices is no better than outright denial. It’s ‘I dont believe science’ vs ‘I believe science but dont give a damn if it inconveniences me’. /end rant.

Governors take heat for violating their own coronavirus restrictions

Several top Democrats have come under criticism in recent days for violating the coronavirus restrictions they imposed on their own states and cities in hopes of curbing the spread of the pandemic.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was photographed attending a dinner party at the French Laundry, one of the nation’s priciest restaurants, with a group of prominent lobbyists, including several who represent the California Medical Association. The photos show no one in the large party wearing a mask.

Newsom apologized a few days later.

..

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said Monday that his 89-year-old mother and two of his daughters would travel to his residence in Albany for Thanksgiving, after urging residents to avoid travel that might cause a spike in cases over the holiday.

“His arrogance and hypocrisy knows no bounds,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter. “Do as I say, not as I do. Rules for thee, but not for me.”

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) also took criticism for attending an Election Night celebration for President-elect Joe Biden in Wilmington, Del. Washington’s rules require anyone traveling to a potential hotspot quarantine for two weeks when they return to the city. Delaware is included among those hot spots, but Bowser declined to quarantine, calling the trip essential travel.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), a resident of Chicago, has declined to say whether he will follow Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) advisory against Thanksgiving travel. And Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) canceled a planned dinner for incoming first-term lawmakers after backlash against an event that would have crammed dozens of people into an indoor, poorly-ventilated space.

Violating orders or even recommendations could have negative effects on a state’s efforts to slow the spread of the virus, experts said, because most of those orders are not enforced by police. Instead, they require citizens to follow rules of their own volition.

Joe Biden Is Filling His Cabinet With Pro-War Hawks

here was no rea­son to think that a Biden admin­is­tra­tion would be to the left of the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion when it comes to for­eign pol­i­cy. Biden comes with a long polit­i­cal career of sup­port­ing the wars of the Unit­ed States and its allies, from the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq to Israel’s aggres­sion against Pales­tini­ans to the pro­tract­ed occu­pa­tion of Afghanistan.

And what­ev­er lim­it­ed over­tures he made to the Left dur­ing his cam­paign for the gen­er­al election in 2020 (while he simul­ta­ne­ous­ly ran on dis­tanc­ing him­self from the Left), for­eign pol­i­cy was almost entire­ly omit­ted, as evi­denced by the issue’s exclu­sion from the uni­ty task force with Bernie Sanders.

Per­haps the most dis­tin­guish­ing for­eign pol­i­cy posi­tion Biden took on the cam­paign trail was his saber rat­tling toward Chi­na, which was not quite as racist as Trump’s, but nonethe­less got so bad a Biden ad was rebuked by pro­gres­sive Asian-Amer­i­can groups for its racist con­tent (Biden even­tu­al­ly walked back some of the ad’s rhetoric).

Biden did say dur­ing his cam­paign that he wants to end “for­ev­er wars” (many of which he helped start) and that he’s against the war in Yemen (a posi­tion he only took after he served in the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion that sup­port­ed the war), but he nei­ther cen­tered these plat­forms nor accom­pa­nied them with con­crete pol­i­cy pro­pos­als that would actu­al­ly bring an end to end­less war.

In keep­ing with this tra­jec­to­ry, Biden is already draw­ing from a host of pro-war indi­vid­u­als from the Oba­ma era to fill his cab­i­net. Because many of these peo­ple have been around for a while and have rela­tion­ships across Wash­ing­ton, there is no short­age of well-known polit­i­cal fig­ures who are tes­ti­fy­ing to their decen­cy and smarts — that’s how the rel­a­tive­ly insu­lar world of Wash­ing­ton ​“nation­al secu­ri­ty pro­fes­sion­als” works, after all.

But for those on the out­side of the Wash­ing­ton Blob look­ing in, the oper­a­tive ques­tions are, ​“What are these appointees’ records, and what does this say about what exact­ly we are up against in a Biden administration?”

Kshama Sawant: Democrats and the Right Are Attacking Me — And Left Movements Everywhere

Big business, the right wing, and now the courts have rung the bell on what is now the fourth round of the fight to expel socialists from Seattle City Hall.

The corporate elite are determined to do so by hook or by crook. They failed in the first three rounds to buy this city council seat, the last time with unprecedented corporate cash from Amazon. The latest effort, a right-wing recall campaign, is perhaps the most serious threat so far, seeking now to use the courts and four trumped-up charges to overturn my reelection last year.

It’s not for nothing. Socialists and social movements have dramatically altered the course of Seattle politics since my first election in 2013, and we have repeatedly set powerful examples that have spread nationally.

We spearheaded fights for Seattle to become the first major city to pass a $15 minimum wage, landmark renters’ rights victories like the winter evictions ban and the move-in-fees cap, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, our first-in-the-nation ban on chemical weapons, the Amazon tax earlier this year for affordable housing and a Green New Deal — a $2 billion transfer of wealth from wealthy corporations to ordinary people over the next decade — and more.

Victories like these are why the ruling class wants a do-over, not only of my reelection, but also of all these victories for the working class and oppressed communities. Already, for example, they are trying to overturn our chemical weapons ban in the courts. Democracy is no concern. Just as the right wing fought to steal the vote for Trump nationally, locally they want to reject last year’s progressive vote in Seattle’s District 3.

When I was first elected in 2013, the first open socialist to hold office in Seattle in nearly a century, the city’s political establishment was in an uproar. The main local weekly, the Stranger reported that corporate Democratic politicians in City Hall were “apoplectic” and had likened my pending arrival to a “mountain lion in a grocery store.”

In the seven years since that time, our opposition has taken up virtually every tool at their disposal to try to block or oust us.

Indigenous people across the US want their land back — and the movement is gaining momentum

Around this time every year, Americans come together to share a feast commemorating a myth about its first inhabitants.

An indigenous tribe did eat with the Pilgrims in 1621 and sign a treaty with the colonists that had settled on their shores — an act of survival rather one of goodwill and friendship. But the relationship would eventually break down, decimating the tribe’s population and whittling away its land.

Nearly 400 years later, the descendants of the very tribe at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday are still fighting to reclaim their lands — a fight that ironically hinges on whether or not the tribe meets the federal government’s definition of “Indian.”

“We’re kind of stereotyped as the tribes that met the Pilgrims and that’s our whole history, like we ceased to exist in 1621,” said Robert Maxim, a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

“That couldn’t be further from the truth.”

The Mashpee Wampanoag have lived in what’s now Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years. Despite their storied history in the US, they weren’t recognized by the federal government until 2007. And in recent years, court rulings challenging whether the tribe’s reservation is eligible to be put in trust have posed an existential threat.
Their fight is one in a broader movement by indigenous people across North America to reclaim their lands — a movement that is gaining steam as the nation grapples with injustices committed against marginalized communities.

Each battle is unique. For some, reclamation is about identity: ceremonies, connections to ancestors and traditional knowledge. For others, it’s about economics: being able to hunt for food, access clean water and build homes or schools. And it can be about sovereignty: jurisdiction and governance.

Ultimately, it’s about getting indigenous lands back in indigenous hands. Though the fight is not new, activists are seizing on the moment to amplify their demands. Because finally, some non-Natives are paying attention.

Honestie Hodges, whose encounter with police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, made headlines when she was violently handcuffed outside her home at just 11-years-old, has died from COVID at age 14. https://t.co/hGUWY8zhJM

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) November 25, 2020