Catnip jar

Is this British campaign ad a look at the future of Democratic politics?

The UK’s Labour Party, in a similar pinch but with a general election less than a week away, has taken the progressive populist route. Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected rise to leadership in the fall of 2015, months after another romp by former Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives, represented a sharp left turn for the party, which under Tony Blair and his successors had mostly run parallel with the (Bill) Clinton-era Democrats.

Now, with another UK vote nearing (it’s on June 8), Labour ally Ken Loach, the British director, has produced a film/ad — shared online by Corbyn — that could offer some insight into what the Democratic party might look and sound like in the coming years, should it choose a similar path to Labour.

You’ll be unsurprised that Corbyn has a fan in Sen. Bernie Sanders, who in the UK this week declared himself “very impressed” with his counterpart’s campaign, which he suggested to the Guardian was a lot like his own insurgent bid.

We have had enough. We demand a fairer society, #ForTheMany, not the few. Please watch and RT this powerful film by Ken Loach. #WeDemand pic.twitter.com/QpzfUK2HNB

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) June 2, 2017

Jeremy Corbyn is Surging by Using Bernie Sander’s Playbook

Jeremy Corbyn, the sixty-eight-year-old leftist who heads the opposition Labour Party in the U.K., wasn’t scheduled to appear at the BBC’s televised general-election debate this week. With Theresa May, the Conservative Prime Minister, and the hot favorite to gain reëlection, skipping the event out of a super-abundance of caution, Corbyn’s aides didn’t think that it would do him any good to debate the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who was standing in for May, and the leaders of five smaller parties: the Liberal Democrats, the U.K. Independence Party, the Greens, the Scottish National Party, and the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru.

At the last minute, however, Corbyn, changed his mind. Buoyed by a series of opinion polls showing Labour gaining ground on the Conservatives, he zipped up to Senate House, at the University of Cambridge, where the debate was being held. Seizing on May’s absence, and her reluctance to appear anywhere in public except in front of confirmed Conservative supporters, he performed well. “The Tories have been conducting a stage-managed, arms-length campaign, and have treated the public with contempt,” he declared. And he went on, “On June 8, you have a choice. More cuts in services and living standards with the Conservatives, or vote Labour to transform Britain for the many and not the few.”

This language was similar to that used by Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who ran an insurgent campaign for President, and the echoes were quite deliberate. Like Sanders, Corbyn is an outsider tilting at the economic and political élites. He is very popular among the young; he is using social media to outflank the mainstream press. And his agenda is explicitly redistributionist: it features sizable tax hikes on rich households and corporations to finance higher spending on public services, such as health care, education, and social care for the elderly. “For the Many, Not the Few” has been Labour’s slogan since Corbyn launched the Party’s campaign, on May 9th.

How much of a surge?

At that juncture, Labour was trailing the Conservatives by twenty points or more in the opinion polls, and virtually everybody at Westminster regarded the outcome of the election as a foregone conclusion. But after seven years of Conservative austerity policies, which have reduced spending in many areas of government, large numbers of Britons, particularly the young and the traditional Labour voters who had drifted away from the Party, seem to be warming to Corbyn’s message. On Friday, poll averages showed that the Tory lead had been whittled down to single figures, and some individual polls have indicated the race to be within five or six points.

Rudd, who spoke first in this week’s debate, said that the “only question to consider is who should be in Number Ten to steer Britain to a brighter future: Jeremy Corbyn, with his money-tree, wish-list manifesto and no plan for Brexit, or Theresa May and her record of delivery, and her clear plan for Brexit?” This framing of the race reflected the Conservatives’ thinking when, a few weeks ago, they called a snap election just after the Prime Minister received Parliament’s blessing to start the Brexit process. Merely by invoking Corbyn and Labour’s reputation as a spendthrift party, the Tory thinking went, the government would be returned to power with a much-enlarged majority in the House of Commons. (In the six-hundred-and-fifty-seat chamber, its current majority is just seventeen.) Such an outcome would, in turn, would give May more leeway in the upcoming Brexit negotiations.

Read the rest here: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/jeremy-corbyn-is-surging-by-using-bernie-sanderss-playbook

Ex-DNC chair’s office may have attempted ‘unsolicited contact’ – Sanders lawsuit attorneys

Three law firms representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee and former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said they received “unsolicited direct contact” allegedly from a phone number connected to her district office.

The law firms are involved in a class action lawsuit against the DNC and Wasserman Schultz that claims seven different violations – including fraud, negligent misrepresentation, unjust enrichment and negligence – connected to revelations that the party essentially rigged its 2016 presidential primary process for the benefit of eventual Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The firms represent a group of supporters for Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s primary opponent.

On June 1, the law firms filed a notice to the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida that alleged “unsolicited direct contact by your client Debbie Wasserman Schultz” through a caller that seemed to use a voice anonymizer. The number where the call originated, the firms said, is the phone number to Wasserman Schultz’s district office in Aventura, Florida.

Is this common?

On the afternoon of June 1, the “caller refused to identify himself/herself, but asked my secretary about the Wilding et al. v. DNC et al. lawsuit,” the notice said.

Attorney Elizabeth Lee Beck continued, writing that a worker in her firm’s office who received the call said “it sounded like the caller was using a voice changer, because the voice sounded robotic and genderless—along the lines of the voice changers used when television show interviews are kept anonymous. The caller concluded with ‘Okey dokey,’ after my secretary gave the caller public information about the case.”

“What just occurred is highly irregular,” the notice concluded.

Attorneys representing Wasserman Schultz filed a response, according to the Observer, in which they denied that the call came from the district office. Wasserman Schultz’s attorneys have asked the US Capitol Police to investigate the potential fraud.

The plantiff’s rationale behind noting this event was:

While there is, of yet, no conclusive evidence of the call originating in Wasserman Schultz’s office, apps that aim to mask a caller’s identifying information often bar the use of government offices in such attempts, the Observer noted.

Jared Beck, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, said the law firms had a duty to notify the court.

“I’ve never encountered a situation quite like this in my practice, but I have seen situations where one party has made unsolicited contact with lawyers on the other side,” Beck told the Observer.

“In such situation, I believe it is a lawyer’s responsibility, as officer of the court, to make prompt notification to the court of any unsolicited communications received, which is what we did in this case.”

https://www.rt.com/usa/390673-wasserman-schultz-office-phone-fraud/

This commentary is by Peggy Noonan. I’m aware that many shun her opinions because she worked for the 2nd Coming of Jesus Reagan, but once in awhile, she hits a single base hit. This is a triple. I can only provide a few snippets as it is behind a paywall. It is the trending piece today at the WSJ. (once in awhile, it’s helpful to see what the opposition is writing about)

Hillary Lacks Remorse of Conscience

At the same time she won the popular vote by 2.9 million. It would take anyone time to absorb these things emotionally and psychologically.

But wow. Her public statements since defeat have been malignant little masterpieces of victimhood-claiming, blame-shifting and unhelpful accusation. They deserve censure.

She gets to the heart of the argument here:

Her plodding, charmless, insincere style of campaigning defeated her. Bad decisions in her campaign approach to the battleground states did it; a long history of personal scandals did it; fat Wall Street speeches did it; the Clinton Foundation’s bloat and chicanery did it—and most of all the sense that she ultimately stands for nothing but Hillary did it.

In the campaign book “Shattered,” journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes report they were surprised “when Clintonworld sources started telling us in 2015 that Hillary was still struggling to articulate her motivation for seeking the presidency.” Her campaign was “an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority . . . distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose.” “Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.” “Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”

What is true is that throughout her career Mrs. Clinton has shown herself to be largely incapable of honest self-reflection, of pointing the finger, for even a moment, at herself. She is not capable of what in Middle English was called “agenbite of inwit”—remorse of conscience, the self-indictment and implicit growth, that come of taking a serious personal inventory. People are always doing bad things to her, she never does bad things to them. They operate in bad faith, she only in good. They lie and exaggerate, she doesn’t. They are low and partisan, not her. There’s no vast left-wing conspiracy only a right-wing one.

People can see this. It’s part of why she lost.

It is one thing to say, “I take responsibility,” and follow that up with a list of things you believe you got wrong. It’s another thing to say, “I take responsibility,” and then immediately pivot to arguments as to why other people are to blame. “I take responsibility for everything I got wrong, but that’s not why I lost,” is literally what she is literally what she said Wednesday.

Noonan then gets to third base with this closing:

The worst part is that she insulted her own country by both stating and implying that America is full of knuckle-dragging, deplorable oafs who are averse to powerful women and would never elect one president. Has she not learned anything? Does she never think Britain had Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Theresa May now, that Germany has had as its leader Angela Merkel since 2005? Is America really more backward, narrow and hate-filled toward women than those countries? Or was Mrs. Clinton simply the wrong woman, and the wrong candidate?

It would have been helpful if she’d spoken at least of those who’d voted for her and supported her and donated to her campaign precisely because she was a woman.

You should never slander a country that rejected you. Maybe it had its reasons. Maybe her most constructive act now would be to quietly reflect on what they might be.

Noonan was somewhat charitable in my view.

Follow-up to Subir’s post from a couple of days ago.

Sanders: “Occupation must End” Days before 50th Anniversary of 1967 War

US Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a video message Saturday to the left wing Knesset party Meretz, who plans to hold a conference on Sunday to mark 50 years of occupation.

Sanders, who has historically run as an Independent in his home state before challenging former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, addressed members of the Mertz party in a recorded speech due to their similar progressive stances, namely on economic policies and the peace process.

Sanders began his comments by describing Meretz as “Israel’s most prominent political organization,” adding that the party stands “for many of the same values that progressives are fighting for here in the United States and throughout the world.”

He stated that the global politics is currently witnessing the rise to several movements “which are racist, intolerant and authoritarian in nature.”

Sanders emphasized rights for Equality–bottom up:

Sanders then called for an “international movement” that fights for equality, reminding viewers that “real change comes from below and not from the top.”

Sanders said that it is possible to “change the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” adding “we are now in the 50th year of Israel’s occupation, an occupation which denies basic Palestinian rights while failing to deliver Israel real security.”

Sanders mentioned that many agree with him when he says: “this occupation must end.”

He noted that peace “means security” for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and “it means supporting self-determination, civil rights and economic well-being for both peoples.”

He concluded that “equality, security, democracy and justice” are the values that should guide this change and that Meretz shares those ideals. He finished by wishing Meretz “a very successful conference.”

If I can track down the video, I’ll update this post.