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Bernie Sanders looks beyond contests in Iowa and New Hampshire

ernie Sanders’ campaign Manager Faiz Shakir aims to win the early-voting states, including Iowa and New Hampshire, but revealed in an interview with CBS News that the campaign has been building out its path to winning the nomination without taking the first-in-the-nation contests.

“Is there a path without New Hampshire? There is a path,” Shakir said. “You could do very well on March 3rd – California, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina – all those other states.”

On March 3, the voting day known as “Super Tuesday,” seventeen states and territories will be holding their primary elections. This includes California, which is worth twice as many delegates as the first four voting states combined.

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Bernie Sanders’ seven-figure ad buy in New Hampshire, Shakir said, covers Portland, Maine and Boston media markets, targeting voters in both Super Tuesday states.

But focusing solely on March 3 would be a misguided strategy, says Sanders’ campaign manager.

“You can’t just spend a bunch of money on TV ads, à la Michael Bloomberg, and decide that ‘I’m going to parade in at the last moment and try to win this nomination by buying it,'” Shakir said.

At the same time, the Sanders campaign has reportedly earmarked $30 million on television advertising alone to reach untapped voters in the first four voting states, plus California. In the last month, Sanders has spent $830,000 in digital ads on Google and Facebook, according to the marketing agency ACRONYM. Of that, 14.2% of all Facebook ad buys target voters in California.

Shakir stressed that victories on March 3 potentially buoy a previously sinking campaign. And another upside to Super Tuesday, Shakir offered, is the opportunity to empower more diverse voting blocs that counterbalance the majority-white early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

AMAZON’S RING PLANNED NEIGHBORHOOD “WATCH LISTS” BUILT ON FACIAL RECOGNITION

RING, AMAZON’S CRIMEFIGHTING surveillance camera division, has crafted plans to use facial recognition software and its ever-expanding network of home security cameras to create AI-enabled neighborhood “watch lists,” according to internal documents reviewed by The Intercept.

The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would be automatically alerted when an individual deemed “suspicious” was captured in their camera’s frame, something described as a “suspicious activity prompt.”

It’s unclear who would have access to these neighborhood watch lists, if implemented, or how exactly they would be compiled, but the documents refer repeatedly to law enforcement, and Ring has forged partnerships with police departments throughout the U.S., raising the possibility that the lists could be used to aid local authorities. The documents indicate that the lists would be available in Ring’s Neighbors app, through which Ring camera owners discuss potential porch and garage security threats with others nearby.

Ring spokesperson Yassi Shahmiri told The Intercept that “the features described are not in development or in use and Ring does not use facial recognition technology,” but would not answer further questions.

This month, in response to continued pressure from news reports and a list of questions sent by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey, Amazon conceded that facial recognition has been a “contemplated but unreleased feature” for Ring, but would only be added with “thoughtful design including privacy, security and user control.” Now, we know what at least some of that contemplation looked like.

Kamala Harris aide says in resignation letter: ‘I’ve never seen staff treated so poorly’

An aide to Sen. Kamala Harris blasted the treatment of staff on the California Democrat’s presidential campaign in a resignation letter this month.

“This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” wrote state operations director Kelly Mehlenbacher in the Nov. 11 letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.

“While I still believe that Senator Harris is the strongest candidate to win in the General Election in 2020, I no longer have confidence in our campaign or its leadership,” she added.

She wrote that the way staff was treated during the past two weeks was “the final straw in this very difficult decision.”

“It is not acceptable to me that we encouraged people to move from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore only to lay them off with no notice, with no plan for the campaign, and without thoughtful consideration of the personal consequences to them or the consequences that their absence would have on the remaining staff,” Mehlenbacher’s letter said. “It is unacceptable that we would lay off anyone that we hired only weeks earlier. It is unacceptable that with less than 90 days until Iowa we still do not have a real plan to win.

“Our campaign For the People is made up of diverse talent which is being squandered by indecision and a ‘lack of leaders who will lead,'” it continued.

Sanders leads Democrats in fundraising in Oklahoma, while Bloomberg drops more than $300,000 on ads

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders holds a big lead over other Democratic presidential candidates in money raised in Oklahoma this year, while President Donald Trump has collected more than most of the Democrats combined.

Democrat Michael Bloomberg hasn’t reported raising any money in Oklahoma but he has already outspent every candidate in the state, dropping more than $300,000 on television ads in the past few days.

Candidate filing for Oklahoma’s presidential primaries begins on Monday and runs through Wednesday. Oklahoma will be part of Super Tuesday on March 3, when 14 states, including Texas, California, Arkansas and Colorado, are expected to hold their contests.

Sanders, of Vermont, won Oklahoma’s Democratic presidential primary in 2016, defeating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The senator has the most extensive organization in Oklahoma this year and has already visited the state, holding events in Norman and Lawton in September.

Sanders has raised $89,468 in Oklahoma this year, according to Federal Election Commission figures that run through Sept. 30.

Joe Calvello, a spokesperson for Sanders’ campaign, said, “Working families across Oklahoma are giving $3, $18, $27 or whatever they can to help elect Bernie Sanders.

“Our team is immensely proud of the grassroots support we have across the state and the operation we are building. In 2016, Bernie won the Oklahoma primary in a dominating fashion, and we plan to do the same thing in 2020.”

You Deserve to Live Close to Where You Work

riting in the December 2019 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason, Matt Welch warns that the Left is “conjuring up new rights.” His primary example isn’t Bernie Sanders’s campaign for sweeping new rights to health care, higher education, and other such core social goods, but a tweet from mediocre former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke.

Living close to work shouldn't be a luxury for the rich. It's a right for everyone. pic.twitter.com/lohRdoFGrH

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 10, 2019

In the video, O’Rourke says that “Rich people are going to have to allow, or be forced to allow, lower-income people to live near them.” He notes that the absence of such conveniently placed mixed-income housing often has the effect of forcing “lower-income, working Americans to drive one, two, three hours in either direction to get to their jobs, very often minimum-wage jobs.”

Beto was a forgettable centrist, and I have no doubt that whatever incremental scheme he may have proposed to solve this problem would have been thoroughly inadequate. He’s absolutely correct, though, to say that everyone should have a right to live within a reasonable distance of where they work.

The Student Worker Movement Is Growing

Faced with a hostile NLRB, repressive university policies and a lack of institutional support, student workers across the country are pushing ahead in their campaign to unionize.

Mike Bloomberg’s media cheerleaders don’t want to talk about his scandals

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s entrance into the crowded presidential race hasn’t caused big changes in polling for the top three Democratic candidates Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. It has, however, brought a number of media cheerleaders for the city’s richest resident out of the woodwork.

In the New York Post (11/9/19), columnist Michael Goodwin said that Bloomberg’s record of raising “student test scores, creating jobs and cutting crime,” while being liberal on “abortion, climate change and gun control,” is the kind of sensible centrism needed to counter the “militant class warfare” he sees in candidates like Warren, who he called an “Occupy Wall Street brat.”

In the New York Times (11/12/19), Thomas Friedman yammered on about Israeli politics before he celebrated Bloomberg as an industrialist, which he described as a more virtuous form of making billions of dollars than investing or trading, and claimed that Bloomberg would be well-positioned to address inequality, because doing so requires “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship — and fostering a culture of accountability, lifelong learning and self-motivation.”

Columnist Bret Stephens (New York Times, 11/8/19) took a similar tone, contrasting Bloomberg’s real business leadership with Trump’s fakery, and asserting that the former mayor is immune to the right’s usual rallying cries against liberals:

Politics
“You’ll know the tree by the fruit it bears”: Bernie Sanders’ people powered campaign

When most progressives think about Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, the first thing that generally comes to mind is his ambitious policy platform, with just one example being the senator’s comprehensive Green New Deal legislation, which greatly expands on the Congressional resolution put forward by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey in February of this year. At the same time, even sympathetic reporters often miss the campaign’s other great strength: its people.

No other candidate in the Democratic primaries has relied more on individual citizens to build momentum for his candidacy and this people powered approach is stated best by the campaign’s slogan, “Not me, us”. This approach is especially visible at massive rallies like his campaign relaunch at Queensbridge Park in New York on October 19th, where 26,000 people turned out to hear him speak and receive the endorsement of Representative Ocasio-Cortez, who spoke passionately about how her participation in his insurgent 2016 campaign inspired her successful run against the odds to win her seat in Congress last year.

Evidence that the Vermont Senator has made a mostly unexamined impression on millions of his fellow citizens can also be found in the sheer number of small donations pouring into to support his run for the U.S. presidency. In fact, the Sanders campaign has already broken previous records, many of them set by the senator in 2016, in terms of individual donations at this stage of the Democratic primary process. With over 4 million donations thus far, he’s already where he was after the Iowa caucuses in 2016, which are still more than 60 days away during the current cycle.

As his campaign manager Faiz Shakir was recently quoted as saying in terms of the campaign’s grassroots funding, “Working-class Americans across the country are chipping in $3, $18, $27, or whatever they can to help elect Bernie Sanders because they know he is the only candidate who will fight for them and take on corporate greed and corruption.”

How Mark Ruffalo found an outlet for his political passions in ‘Dark Waters’

Mark Ruffalo has long been paranoid about his drinking water. His home, tucked in the Catskill Mountains along the Delaware River, is outfitted with an elaborate water filtration system even though his well water is some of the cleanest in the nation.

But he knows the risks, and he can’t ignore them. A decade ago, energy companies threatened to begin natural gas drilling near his 47-acre former dairy farm in New York State. He subsequently became an outspoken environmental activist, arguing that the process of extracting gas via hydraulic fracturing — or hydrofracking — contaminates water with dangerous chemicals.

But until this weekend — with the nationwide release of his new film “Dark Waters” — Ruffalo has kept his politics and his acting career largely separate. In his off time, he shows up at rallies to speak about his antifracking stance and campaigns for Bernie Sanders, whom he supports in part because of the candidate’s belief in the Green New Deal. At work, most of his calendar has been dominated by Marvel. Since 2012, he’s played the Hulk in four films in the comic book universe.

“I love those, and I fit in well there and I enjoy that, but I also — I have more to say,” said Ruffalo. “So finally I was like, ‘Hey, wait a minute. How do I blend this activism that means so much to me into my storytelling?’ It occurred to me: Why don’t I just start producing stuff, so that I’m not waiting for someone to bring this kind of story to me but I’m actually moving it to happen?”

He told his agents that he wanted a project about the environment — maybe a story about climate change, or perhaps one on the clean-water issue. The first thing they brought to him was the 2016 New York Times Magazine article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.” The piece detailed how an Ohio-based corporate attorney named Robert Bilott singlehandedly uncovered how the chemical company had been putting its employees and U.S. communities at risk for decades by exposing them to dangerous pollutants.

Rural America Has a Young People Problem

Rob Handel, who lives just up the road from me, is that rarest of rural residents: a bright, educated young person who has actively chosen to live in the small Catskill Mountain town where he grew up. He’s also openly gay and a Democrat.

“I do miss things a city can offer, but I’ve satisfied a lot of those needs by building a community here,” says Rob, 28. “I’m interested in permanence.”

I first met Rob two or three years ago when he came to a town board meeting to protest what he regarded as the high-handed running of a local museum. Of medium height, a bit on the stocky side, and with an impish face framed by a dark beard, he argued his points with notable clarity. Since then, I’ve come to know him as an outstanding chef—he works at a farm-to-table restaurant a few miles from here—and as a budding entrepreneur with a growing catering business.

If rural areas like mine are to have an economically viable future, they need people like Rob who not only can find ways to make a decent living here, but who also bring energy, enthusiasm, and fresh ideas to their communities. But whether he is a harbinger of the future—part of the wave of organic farmers, artisans, and others who are helping to revive towns including Catskill, our county seat—or whether he is an anomaly and will remain so, is open to debate.

From 1990 to 2010, according to US Census data, the number of people in our town between the ages of 25 and 34—in other words, young adults who have put down roots—declined from 14 percent of the population to 7 percent. And those who left are likely to have been among the best and the brightest: According to Rob, almost all his high school acquaintances who were in advanced placement classes went off to college and never returned.

Such facts have implications for politics, not just economics. “In high school, I thought I was a conservative,” says Rob. “For most of my life, I’ve been a straight white male. I came out around the same time I moved back here. In Hartford [where he went to college], I met people of color and began to appreciate more just what injustices exist. Hartford opened a new world to me.”

BERNIE SANDERS TO HOST INDIANOLA TOWN HALL

Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders is making a stop in Indianola next Sunday, hosting a town hall at Simpson College. Sanders is making a statewide campaign tour of Iowa, with stops including talks with the Iowa Farmers Union, Organic Farmers Association and Iowa Organic Association, and town halls in Iowa Falls and Cedar Rapids before Indianola. The town hall will be located in Hubbell Hall on the Simpson College campus beginning at noon. Tickets are not required, but an RSVP is recommended. Entrance will be on a first come-first served basis.

Why a Great Corbyn Campaign Is Good News for Bernie Sanders

Previous months and years have been mired by a Brexit impasse in Britain, political inertia, a massive rollout of austerity and unfathomable inaction to tackle the climate crisis. The Conservatives are offering a continuation of neoliberal policy, further deregulation and abandonment of hard-won workers’ rights and environmental standards in a shabby Brexit deal designed to curry favour with Donald Trump. The Liberal Democrats have been hedging bets that their “remain or bust” narrative will override concerns surrounding their lack of environmental commitment and the uninspiring economic policies unveiled in their manifesto. Meanwhile, though Labour started the campaign far behind the Conservatives in the polls, Jeremy Corbyn’s party is offering the most radical and transformative political programme in a generation.

Designed to tackle the climate and ecological crises while addressing widespread social inequality, the Labour manifesto offered inspiration at a crucial juncture in the election. Recent polling suggests widespread support for ambitious targets to eliminate emissions, with a majority of voters indicating climate will influence how they vote. Running parallel, a global scientific consensus pronounces increasingly stark warnings about irreversible and disastrous climate breakdown. The Green New Deal put forward in the manifesto could be the antidote to such interlinked crises. Radical by nature, such a set of policies would act as a national action plan to rapidly eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, transform the economy to one which is fit for the future, and dramatically improve people’s lives in the process.

A successful Corbyn-led Labour campaign embodying this agenda could also ignite a spark that provides fresh inspiration to the grassroots Democratic movement and therefore Sanders run at the presidency in late 2020. For the first time in a long time, there are significant social forces on both sides of the Atlantic working to build a cross-pollinating international movement, while also waging their own campaigns embodying a major push-back against the forces of far-right neoliberal capital.

For instance, the Green New Deal, first conceived in the UK in 2008 but overshadowed by the global financial crash, has since been translated into the radical ambition of community organising by US youth organisation the Sunrise Movement. It has then progressed to be championed at the top of the political echelons by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and presidential hopeful Sanders. In turn, the momentum created in the US has inspired movements in the UK, notably Labour for a Green New Deal, which organised around the radical plan and won groundbreaking support at Labour party conference. Similarly, the headline grabbing actions of the Sunrise Movement have inspired the emergent Green New Deal UK and climate strike movements on both sides of the Atlantic. This has seen synergies and moments of collaboration across the labour and climate movements throughout the past year, vital in creating a political landscape in which radical policies are viewed as necessary and inspiring solutions.