Tip Jar for y’all! 🙂

I’ve been crazy busy, but so enjoy reading all of your comments whenever I can.

Here’s to you, here’s to Bernie, and here’s to South Carolina!

Thank you!!

https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1233617828156186630

Democrats Chasing the White Moderate Vote With White Moderate Candidates Ignore People of Color

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested and taken to a Birmingham, Alabama, jail after leading a peaceful direct-action campaign to protest the treatment of Black Americans in the city. He led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and their local affiliate, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), during several days of nonviolent action to desegregate the city. When King was arrested, he was placed in solitary confinement, where he penned the “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

In response to white allies and advocates who were concerned about the peaceful protests in Birmingham, King wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” King’s concern is a timely reminder that even when white Americans align themselves symbolically with issues facing marginalized people, they frequently fall short of enacting and supporting enduring political change where issues of race are concerned.

Now all eyes are on South Carolina, where the February 29 primary will give Black voters a chance to be heard in a major way — it’s believed that more than 60% of the Democratic electorate in the state is Black. Biden has bet big on the state to revitalize his campaign, while billionaire Tom Steyer has made a big advertising play there following dismal results in other early-voting states. Buttigieg has been making an appeal to Black voters by emphasizing his veteran status while Klobuchar has recently taken personal responsibility for diversifying her support; both candidates performed poorly with Black voters in Nevada.

All of the white moderate candidates have, thus far, struggled to appeal to Black and Latinx voters. Biden’s national support among Black voters has been relatively high, but it dropped in a February poll to only 27%, with Bloomberg in second at 22% and Sanders in third at 19%. Just this week, Sanders took his first lead with Black voters in a national Morning Consult poll, earning 33% of Black support compared to Biden’s 29%.

The question that remains is whether picking a moderate candidate like Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Bloomberg just because they seem viable with white moderates will yield the long-term solutions the Democratic Party needs to serve an increasingly diverse population of Americans. While voters and media alike have at times seemed focused on which of the moderate candidates will be the inevitable candidate (or how bad the progressives might be for the party), there is a general consensus that Biden, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg have been dueling for the same base of moderate voters.

Hopefully, as this battle for the moderate vote continues, the concerns raised by Black and Latinx voters and activists who have been holding candidates accountable thus far will reemerge front and center before the Democratic National Convention in July. White voters ultimately went for President Donald Trump in 2016; trying to win them over might ultimately come at the expense of alienating the communities of color that Democrats will need support from to secure power in the future.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/democrats-white-moderate-vote-candidates-ignores-people-of-color

NYT!

The bad part about this coming from NYT is that I cannot read most of it!
So if anyone else can, and has the time, please share more of it?

Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here’s the Math.

By Steve Phillips
Mr. Phillips is the host of the podcast Democracy in Color With Steve Phillips.

Most available evidence points in the direction of a popular vote and Electoral College victory.

Whatever you think about Bernie Sanders as a potential president, it is wrong to dismiss his chances of winning the office. Not only does most of the available empirical evidence show Mr. Sanders defeating President Trump in the national popular vote and in the critical Midwestern states that tipped the Electoral College in 2016, but his specific electoral strengths align with changes in the composition of the country’s population in ways that could actually make him a formidable foe for the president.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/opinion/bernie-sanders-polls.html?fbclid=IwAR3tCdbe2TI_3bSalZ1nwMKZFNrZBaXTR6vrQ4gWh3lqAGfNPIDyDeto_9M

Absolute bullshit that they would pull this petty tyrant crap on you. "Canvassing While Black", I assume.

— Voodoo CyberPork (@Voodoo_Pork) February 28, 2020

Doublecheck that ballot: Controversial voting machines make their primary debut in #SouthCarolina – The state bought new machines in 2019 that are more secure than its old ones, but cyber experts say they’re still risky. https://t.co/Ga44cH9FnL

— 🌹Justice for Seth Rich🌹 (@AmyCMcintosh) February 29, 2020

‘The Democratic Party Has a Problem’: Bloomberg Hires Super Tuesday State Democratic Vice Chairs

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, hired party vice chairs in Texas and California to work on his campaign just before the states prepare to vote in the presidential primaries on March 3—a move that drew charges from progessives of an attempt buy influence from party elites.

“This does seem to fit a longstanding pattern of Bloomberg using his billions to help generate support among political elites,” Campaign Legal Center federal reform program director Brendan Fischer told The Intercept.

According to Lacy’s reporting:

Both Brailey and Rooker are superdelegates who will likely vote for the Democratic presidential nominee at the party’s national convention this summer. Hiring the leadership of a state party doesn’t appear to break any campaign laws.

The apparent legality of the move—despite what was broadly seen as a clear example of corruption—befuddled observers.

“It boggles my mind that this doesn’t seem to break any rules,” tweeted Lacy’s Intercept colleague Alex Emmons.

Bloomberg’s hiring of the two vice chairs also struck observers as problematic because of the possibility of a brokered convention in Milwaukee this July which would allow superdelegates to vote from the second round on, giving the unelected party elites an outsized say in the ultimate nominee.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/28/democratic-party-has-problem-bloomberg-hires-super-tuesday-state-democratic-vice

Landmark Win in ‘Fight for Habitable Future’ as Jury Refuses to Convict Climate Activists Who Presented Necessity Defense

Environmentalists celebrated a landmark victory in the “fight for a habitable future” after a Portland, Oregon jury on Thursday refused to convict five Extinction Rebellion activists—including valve turner Ken Ward—who presented the climate necessity defense at their trial for blockading a train track used by Zenith Energy to transport crude oil.

“When citizens are told the truth about the climate crisis—which is the first of Extinction Rebellion’s demands—they take appropriate and responsible action, as our jury did, and we thank them,” said Ward.

The five activists were arrested last April for building a garden on the tracks of Houston-based Zenith Energy’s railroad terminal in Portland to protest expansion of the fossil fuel infrastructure.

“The activists had been protesting the expansion of the oil terminal at a time when they say we should be dismantling fossil fuel infrastructure, not creating more,” the local radio station KOPB-FM reported at the time. “A few small mounds of soil extend onto the rail line—not much, but apparently enough to make it unusable. Activists also sat on the tracks.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/28/landmark-win-fight-habitable-future-jury-refuses-convict-climate-activists-who

‘Good News for Democracy’: Wisconsin Appeals Court Rejects Voter Purge Targeting More Than 200,000 People

Voting rights advocates applauded a Wisconsin appeals court ruling Friday which is set to stop a voter purge from going forward—sparing more than 200,000 people from having their names removed from voter lists.

A three-judge panel unanimously rejected a lawsuit filed by conservative law group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty arguing that the voter purge of about 209,000 should go forward ahead of the 2020 election.

The decision represented “good news for democracy for all,” tweeted Mary Kay Henry, president of the SEIU.

Sanders Is Not Another McGovern. I Know – I Worked on McGovern’s Campaign.

Those who fear that Republicans will insist Sanders is a “socialist” and equate his social democratic policy positions with Soviet-style Communism should remember that Republicans apply such labels and worse toward practically any Democrat, even in situations where the tactic is ludicrous. The Republican attacks are going to be vicious and dishonest whoever is nominated. Furthermore, red-baiting doesn’t have the resonance it did during the Cold War. The majority of voters at this point weren’t even adults when there was a Soviet Union, which collapsed nearly 30 years ago.

Socialism is not as scary a concept as it used to be: One poll found over 40 percent of Americans actually prefer socialism to capitalism, and other recent polls have also yielded similar figures.

Perhaps Sanders as the nominee would alienate some moderate Republican-leaning voters. They are a vanishing breed, however. There were no serious Republican challengers to Trump’s re-nomination. Polls show overwhelming support for Trump among Republican-leaning voters. (This is why Republican members of Congress have been so afraid to challenge him, even when faced with clear evidence of impeachable offenses.) Polls also show Sanders has more support among independent voters than any other Democrat and is running better than most Democrats in key swing states.

https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-is-not-another-mcgovern-i-know-i-worked-on-mcgoverns-campaign/

Two sectors that the best-performing ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) funds invest heavily in are financial services (such as Mastercard and Visa) and tech (such as Amazon and Google) — which, Bloomberg claims, “have historically been low-emission sectors.”

Unfortunately, it takes a singularly narrow view of what constitutes a “low-emission sector” to make this claim.

Take Amazon. With its vast supply chain and customers spanning much of the world, the company occupies a central place in a global economy that profits from unsustainable and ever-growing levels of extraction, production, consumption and waste.

As a retailer incentivizing this consumption (especially through membership programs such as Amazon Prime), Amazon should be considered responsible for the resulting greenhouse gas emissions.

Moreover, shipping all those products requires a massive amount of packaging, which Amazon has made worse by switching to single-use plastic that can’t be recycled to package many of its shipments — exactly the wrong move in a world that’s awash with plastic waste.

Where does all this plastic come from? It’s fossil fuels, of course. Plastics are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in every stage of their production, use and disposal. As a website that sells a lot of plastic junk, packaged in more plastic junk, Amazon is directly implicated in this damage.

Finally, the cloud computing services division of Amazon is also responsible for climate and environmental destruction — and not just because the company refuses to run its cloud entirely on sustainable energy. Even worse, it sells its cloud services to oil and gas companies, the company says, to “optimize production and profitability.”

The bigger problem is that the stock market, by its very nature, is dependent on growth at all costs. It’s institutionally incapable of recognizing that the cycle of endless production, consumption, growth and waste is inherently unsustainable. We need a profound political transformation to reverse this trend, not greenwashing masquerading as “socially responsible” investment.

https://truthout.org/articles/when-it-comes-to-sustainability-amazon-delivers-greenhouse-gas-emissions/

And in other news, today is my birthday and I voted for @BernieSanders in the Washington State Primary! What a great present this is! #NotMeUs pic.twitter.com/v3G2kDbSfX

— The Bern Report (@TheBernReport) February 28, 2020