Hopefully, Greta can adopt something from this, like she did with brat from Trump’s friend Bolsonaro.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1205100602025545730?s=20

The squad, Jayapal, Pocan, Khanna, and 34 other Dems were nos.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/12/atrocious-188-democrats-join-gop-hand-trump-738-billion-military-budget-includes

In a floor speech ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the most vocal opponent of the NDAA in the House, said “there are many things you can call the bill, but it’s Orwellian to call it progressive.” Khanna was standing across the aisle from Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who hailed the measure as “the most progressive defense bill we have passed in decades.”

“Let’s speak in facts,” said Khanna. “This defense budget is $120 billion more than what Obama left us with. That could fund free public college for every American. It could fund access to high-speed, affordable internet for every American. But it’s worse. The bipartisan amendment to stop the war in Yemen: stripped by the White House. The bipartisan amendment to stop the war in Iran: stripped by the White House.”

My friend @RepRoKhanna is right: it is Orwellian for Congress to hand over billions of dollars worth of weapons and bombs to a president waging a horrific, unconstitutional war in Yemen—and call that progressive. pic.twitter.com/6SUmUUhv3q

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 11, 2019

Bernie’s advisers weigh in on Dems supporting the military bill

New Rule: Every Member of Congress who voted to give the most corrupt, unhinged & unstable president in history $738 billion to fight endless wars, fund a bogus space force & put our troops at risk must never tell us that we cannot afford #MedicareForAll or a #GreenNewDeal. Ever.

— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) December 12, 2019

Congrats to Democratic leadership on getting outnegotiated by JARED KUSHNER. On a provision that was already passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress. To end US support for a war that has created to the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe.

Great goddam job. https://t.co/JmYd57lgds

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) December 11, 2019

Katrina vanden Heuvel is a rare bright spot in WaPo’s columnists—the anti-Rubin. Of course, she writes about 1/10 of the columns that Rubin vomits out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/10/capitalism-is-broken-its-time-something-new/?utm_source=reddit.com

I argued that the American system is broken in three ways.

First, it is fueling extreme inequality. Four decades of stagnant wages and upward flows of wealth in the United States have supercharged the existing wealth divide and other inequalities rooted in racial, gender and geographic differences. Productivity gains have flowed to the investor class, not to workers, and social mobility has declined. In his latest column (prepared for the debate), David Brooks countered that “capitalism has brought about the greatest reduction of poverty in human history.” But Oxfam International highlights a more nuanced reality: While there has been a meaningful decline in extreme poverty, hundreds of millions more people could have been lifted out of poverty if not for extreme inequalities within and across countries.

Second, capitalism is undermining democracy. In the Citizens United era, the amount of money in politics has exploded, resulting in elected officials from both parties who are more beholden to wealthy donors — and their business interests — than ever before. Corporate concentration is reducing competition and rendering both workers and consumers increasingly powerless against rising plutocracy. And this is happening as the forces of private equity and big tech conspire to annihilate the local and independent journalism that is vital to maintaining a democratic society.

It doesn’t take a socialist to see capitalism’s corrosive impact on democracy. In fact, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a former McKinsey consultant who was forced on Monday to finally agree to disclose his campaign bundlers, used to recognize it earlier in the campaign, saying, “There’s tension between capitalism and democracy, and negotiating that tension is probably the biggest challenge for America right now.”

And, third, capitalism is destroying nature. As corporate lobbyists work to dismantle the regulatory apparatus, the companies they represent are irrevocably harming our environment, our health and our collective future. In pursuit of profits at any cost, corporations continue to ravage public lands, demolishing ecosystems, and poisoning the water we drink and the air we breathe. Meanwhile, even as corporate America has become more vocal about the importance of sustainability and the perils of climate change, it has opposed the dramatic policy changes needed to prevent catastrophe.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/12/afl-cio-politics-union-flight-attendant-sara-nelson-president-trumka-082739

Nelson, 46, is now weighing a run to become first woman to lead the AFL-CIO, effectively the leader of organized labor in the United States, representing 12.5 million workers who still have the power to shape major legislation and swing elections. The election to replace the federation’s leader, Richard Trumka, who is expected to step aside, won’t happen until October 2021, well after a presidential contest that is shaping up as referendum on the nation’s tolerance for seismic left-wing change to the economy. Nelson has tied her candidacy to the same progressive ideas that are dominating the debate among the Democratic aspirants for the White House and wants to remake the labor federation as dramatically as candidates like Sanders and Warren hope to do from the White House. She rejects the current labor leadership’s moderate approach and unapologetically calls on labor to embrace a more liberal set of values as a way to reverse decades of systemic decline in membership and influence.

The labor movement is split—thanks to Trump, whose candidacy in 2016 created a schism in the labor vote that deeply embarrassed Trumka and probably helped deliver the White House to a president who openly despises unions. Nelson, however, is not interested in pulling the factions back together. She wants to repudiate Trump—and, implicitly, rank-and-file members of AFL-CIO unions who support him for his trade policies and broader war on establishment elites.

Her likely candidacy also embodies the growing influence of women in the labor movement and the shift of unions away from the blue-collar manufacturing sector to more white-collar jobs in service industry and government. While union membership rates among men have fallen by more than half since the early 1980s, the percentage of women has dropped by just 4 percentage points over the same period; as of last year, the rates were nearly equal. And in public-sector unions—a sector that gained 132,000 members from 2018 to 2019 despite a Supreme Court ruling outlawing mandatory collective bargaining fees—women now outnumber men.

“Sara Nelson embodies the changing demography of the labor movement, which is now increasingly women and increasingly people of color,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Work, Labor, and Democracy center at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Nelson, by contrast, embodies a growing cross-section of union-minded Democrats who believe labor needs to stop apologizing for being liberal. Unions would have more success, she argues, if they embraced their activist roots.

Speaking to the Chicago Democratic Socialists in May—a speaking invitation it’s hard to imagine Trumka ever accepting—Nelson extolled radical labor leaders of yore. She spoke of A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the first black union, and his protégé, Bayard Rustin, who in 1963 organized 250,000 people for Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, and Lucy Gonzales Parsons, who was thrust into activism after her husband was executed on false charges that he had carried out an attack at a labor demonstration in 1886.

“They were shot down at Homestead, Pennsylvania and in the hills of West Virginia,” Nelson said. “They were hanged for the Haymarket Affair in Chicago and beaten on an overpass near Detroit. … These activists thought it was important enough to stand up against all odds. … Today it’s our turn.”

“Our task,” Nelson added, “is to build a labor movement that sees itself truly as a labor movement — not just a collection of separate unions.”

After former Maryland Rep. John Delaney argued that supporting Medicare for All would “get Trump reelected,” Nelson swooped in to back Sanders and Warren, two of its most prominent advocates. Government health care, she said, would allow unions to spend their time bargaining for higher wages and other benefits.

“It’s a huge drag on our bargaining,” Nelson told POLITICO in August. “So our message is: Get it off the table.”