Tom Perez Stacks 2020 Convention Committees With 'From the Swamp' Nominations

This is the face of the corporate owned DNC. This is the plan to maintain the deadly status quo of the corporate DNC which is the core of the patriarchal neoliberal predatory capitalist system that is destroying our country and the Earth. This is what must be seen for what it is, stopped and shut down, and completely dismantled if there’s to be any chance of a livable planet for our children and grandchildren and all species everywhere. This is about so much more than getting rid of Trump. This is about engaging in the fight of our lives. Everything we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly

Perez's nominations clearly show that the swamp seems in it to win for itself, regardless of the electoral outcome for the nation.

By

Thomas Neuburger

"Where would you stick the knife in?"—2020 Democratic Convention Rules Committee nominee John Podesta, referring to candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016

DNC chair Tom Perez recently presented his nominations for the 2020 Democratic Convention standing committees. The full list can be seen here.

If you think the Democratic Party as currently run is determined that no progressive will receive the nomination, the DNC and the superdelegates, who get to vote in all but the first round of voting, are the last bulwarks against such an outcome.

We'll have more to say about the superdelegates and what they may do later. For today let's consider how Tom Perez, Barack Obama's pick for DNC chair over Keith Ellison, is loading up the 2020 Convention standing committees with determined anti-progressives, Clinton and Obama loyalists and operatives, enemies of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, a bevy of corporate and national security lobbyists and high-dollar Democratic Party consultants and firms.

As you read the following, consider this:

• Given the popularity of progressive policies in the actual country—that is, among people who vote—it certainly appears possible that the primary goal of the DNC is to guarantee the continuous flow of corporate dollars to DNC coffers and approved consultants and lobbyists. In that sense, the whole organization seems focused first on insider jobs and wealth security.

• Only after the first goal is achieved is a secondary goal — winning elections — taken into account. 

Is this too cynical? Is this cynicism justified? Read on and decide for yourself.

The 2020 Platform Committee

Kevin Gosztola offers us a rundown of Perez's nominations in a series of tweets, many points with accompanying documentation. The tweets are here. I've summarized his main points below, absent much, but not all, of the documentation that he provides (emphasis and some reparagraphing mine).

Of the nominees for the Platform Committee, Gosztola notes the following:

• [Co-Chair] Denis McDonough was Barack Obama's chief of staff during his second term. He also chairs Rework America Task Force, which launched Rework America Business Network with Heidi Capozzi, senior vice president of human resources at Boeing, in December 2018.

[The] Rework America Business Network that McDonough helped launch counts as its founding members the following: Aon, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Boeing, Duke Energy, Kaiser Permanente, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Stanley Black & Decker, Walmart, & Zurich Insurance

Jon Hamm portrayed McDonough in 2019 film, "The Report," which told the story of Senate's CIA torture report through perspective of Senate staffer Daniel Jones. On behalf of the CIA, McDonough advocated for more redactions from the executive summary that was released.

• [Vice-Chair] Danielle Gray, former Obama administration official, is the senior vice president, chief legal officer and corporate secretary for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina

Gray was a partner in the New York law firm of O’Melveny and Myers, where she advised "health care companies, financial services institutions, universities, and clients in a range of industries on litigation, internal investigations, and government enforcement actions."

• [Vice-Chair] Jake Sullivan is a member of the Alliance for Securing Democracy's Advisory Council. He was a senior policy adviser for Hillary Clinton's 2016 and 2008 presidential campaigns. Sullivan was also a national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

• Georgia State Senator Nikema Williams served as member of Obama Victory Fund 2012. She was one of "top ten influential African American bundlers for Obama."

• Carol Browner is senior counselor for Albright Stonebridge Group, business firm founded in 2009 by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She worked on climate change policy in Obama admin.

Clinton's campaign appointed Browner to 2016 DNC Platform Drafting Committee. As a Clinton delegate, during the 2016 Platform Drafting Committee meeting, voted against a ban on fracking, Medicare For All, opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), keeping fossil fuels in ground, and measure[s] to halt abuse of eminent domain by fossil fuel industry.

• Mary Kay Henry is the president of SEIU. In 2015, she ensured the major union endorsed Hillary Clinton early. SEIU donated $1 million to Priorities USA, the primary super PAC that supported Clinton's 2016 campaign in spite of Clinton's reluctance to back a $15 minimum wage.

Please continue this article here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/01/27/tom-perez-stacks-2020-convention-committees-swamp-nominations?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook

They Forgot About Bern

Great article!

 The candidate with the most money, most committed supporters, and now the highest early-state poll numbers was dismissed by the Democratic establishment for months. It was a disqualifying mistake.

BY DAVID DAYEN, ALEXANDER SAMMON

With six days until the Iowa caucuses, the political establishment has arrived at a troubling realization: It might be time to take this Bernie Sanders guy seriously. In the past few days, polls have shown Sanders breaking dramatically from the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire. Polls have shown him leading in Super Tuesday states California and Utah, while he’s climbed meaningfully in early states Nevada and South Carolina. 

In the aftermath of Sanders’s ascendancy, various corporate gatekeepers and big-money representatives are scrambling—with little coherence or success—to put together a last-minute campaign to slow him down. The justification for such action, of course, is that the political establishment and their corporate henchmen, self-styled paragons of pragmatism and stewards of lucid, sober thinking, need to protect the electorate from a wild-eyed radical who is dangerously out of touch with America. 

But the last-second freakout tells us less about the Sanders campaign than about those political elites themselves, whose political instincts are so alarmingly wrongheaded that they’ve managed to ignore an obvious risk to their continued status until a week before voting begins. If anyone has revealed themselves as inept to the point of disqualification, it’s the anti-Sanders neighborhood watch. 

Sanders has been in the race since last February, which means he’s spent some 350 days shattering donation records, building a committed fan base of millions, and never exiting the top three in polling, while spending the majority of the race in second place. Meanwhile, he’s run up a long list of high-profile endorsements from prominent politicians and celebrities. This is not someone who snuck up on the field.

Please continue this article here: https://prospect.org/politics/they-forgot-about-bernie-sanders/

Norman Solomon: Bernie Sanders Has All the Right Enemies

Such an important article from last month. We are a massively propagandized people. This long-term pattern must be recognized for what it is and stood up to. Together we can say that facts matter, truth matters, and transforming ourselves, our nation, and the world matters if there is to be a future for our children and grandchildren. There are so many excellent independent resources out there that we can seek out for our information and which empower us to say NO MORE! to the mainstream media that has long poisoned our minds and our hearts against taking action and embracing belief systems that are in the highest good of us all. Now I say NO MORE! We all can unite in the political movements based in Revolutionary Love! The time for our human evolution is NOW! — Molly

 By Norman Solomon

For the United States, oligarchy is the elephant—and donkey—in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.

Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word “oligarchy” was heard once. “We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,” Bernie Sanders said, “where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.”

Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy—defined as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes”—can’t really be a democracy.

The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race”—Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar—for “offering a more positive future.”

But “a more positive future” for whom? Those “moderates” are certainly offering a more positive future for the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.

The Washington Post‘s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign—from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the “PBS NewsHour” and NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it doesn’t require complete uniformity—only dominant messaging, worldviews and assumptions.

Prevailing in news media’s political content is the central, tacit assumption that oligarchy isn’t a reality in the United States. So, there’s scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA “now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.” As for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania Trump’s wardrobe.

Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there’s a renewed pattern of mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign’s progress. Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not surprising.

In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence—with no ceiling on the often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth—defenders of oligarchy see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.

For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity with the “moderate” orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is clear. Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.

Please continue this article here: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-has-all-the-right-enemies/

Norman Solomon: Bernie Sanders and His Movement Are on the Verge of History

Yes, Bernie Sanders is the movement leader who as President will be accountable to the younger generations in our country — and the older people, the people of color, the poor and disenfranchised, and all of us. This is why our movement grounded in radical change and Revolutionary Love is growing exponentially. Another world is possible! — Molly

 By Norman Solomon

Fifty-two years after young people changed history with the New Hampshire primary election, a new generation is ready to do it again — this time by mobilizing behind Bernie Sanders.

During early 1968, thousands of young people volunteered in New Hampshire to help the insurgent presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. Eugene McCarthy — who went on to stun the party establishment by winning 42 percent of the state’s primary vote against President Lyndon Johnson’s 49 percent. Three weeks later, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election.

What propelled McCarthy and his young supporters into the snows of New Hampshire was their opposition to the war in Vietnam. Five decades later, in effect, what’s propelling Bernie Sanders and his young supporters is the grim reality of class war in America.

The New Hampshire Youth Movement — which its leadership calls “the largest youth power organization in the state” — endorsed Sanders last week. NHYM could provide the margin of victory in New Hampshire’s Feb. 11 primary.

The strategy has been methodical. “People involved with NHYM have been canvassing nonstop,” the state director of the organization’s field program, Dylan Carney, told me. “We’ve gathered over 9,500 pledge-to-vote cards from people aged 18 to 25 and will be working to get them voting for Bernie Sanders on Feb. 11th.”

I asked Carney for his assessment of why polling nationwide shows young people prefer Sanders over every other Democratic contender by a lopsided margin.

“Sanders is a movement candidate — who will be accountable to our generation,” Carney replied. “He has proven that he is aligned with the version of the world that we want to create. And since before our generation was born, he was fighting the injustices that we are fighting today.”

New Hampshire Youth Movement is a natural ally of the Bernie 2020 campaign, as the organization’s website makes clear:

● “Scientists tell us that we have less than 10 years left to prevent irreversible damage from the climate crisis. Our ability to act on the climate crisis depends on who we elect to be our president. We need a president that is committed to passing a just and robust Green New Deal.”

● “Everyone deserves access to quality healthcare regardless of their ability to pay. People across this country are drowning in medical debt just to receive the services they need to stay alive while pharmaceutical and insurance executives accrue unimaginable wealth. To address the healthcare crisis, we must elect a candidate who will fight for a Medicare for All system that includes everyone and eliminates private insurance companies.”

● “Students and alumni are drowning in debt while private loan providers are making obscene amounts of money. Providing free college for all will be a massive investment in our work force and our economy. We can build a system that eliminates tuition and fees at all public colleges and all existing student debt if we turn out to vote for a candidate who will fight with us.”

After living in New Hampshire for all of his 23 years, Dylan Carney is keenly aware that the state’s margin of victory often hinges on a small number of votes. When he says that “we have the reach to turn out 10,000 young voters for Bernie Sanders,” he quickly adds that Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in New Hampshire by only a few thousand votes in 2016 while the incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte was unseated by just 1,017 votes.

Young voters have the potential to make Bernie Sanders the winner of the New Hampshire primary — and young voters across the country have the potential to make him president of the United States.

Please continue this article here: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-and-his-movement-are-on-the-verge-of-history/ 

Daniel Elsberg: Remembering My Hero, Howard Zinn

My hero. The hero of millions. Such a courageous, inspiring, and beautiful human being. I remember the day 10 years ago when I learned of Howard Zinn’s death and I just wept. Today I’m comforted with knowing that his legacy lives on. 🙏 Molly

 By Daniel Ellsberg

The renowned historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, 2010. On the occasion of the 10 year anniversary of his passing, we are revisiting the following piece by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg about his close friend and “the best human being [he’s] ever known,” originally published on January 28, 2010. 

I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the February release of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.”

Just weeks ago, after watching the film, I woke up thinking that I had never told him how much he meant to me. For once in my life, I acted on that thought in a timely way. I sent him an e-mail in which I said, among other things, what I had often told others: that he was, “in my opinion, the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life.”

Our first meeting was at Faneuil Hall in Boston in early 1971, where we both spoke against the indictments of Eqbal Ahmad and Phil Berrigan for “conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger.” We marched with the rest of the crowd to make citizens’ arrests at the Boston office of the FBI. Later that spring, we went with our affinity group (including Noam Chomsky, Cindy Fredericks, Marilyn Young, Mark Ptashne, Zelda Gamson, Fred Branfman and Mitch Goodman), to the May Day actions blocking traffic in Washington (“If they won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government”). Howard tells that story in the film, and I tell it at greater length in my memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” But for reasons of space, I had to cut out the next section in which Howard — who had been arrested in D.C. after most of the rest of us had gone elsewhere — came back to Boston for a rally and a blockade of the Federal Building. I’ve never published that story, so here it is, an outtake from my manuscript:

A day later, Howard Zinn was the last speaker at a large rally in Boston Common. I was at the back of a huge crowd, listening to him over loudspeakers. Twenty-seven years later, I can remember some of what he said. “On May Day in Washington, thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace. But there is no peace. We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.”

He said, “If Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had been walking the streets of Georgetown yesterday, they would have been arrested. Arrested for being young.”

At the end of his comments, he said: “I want to speak now to some of the members of this audience, the plainclothes policemen among us, the military intelligence agents who are assigned to do surveillance. You are taking the part of secret police, spying on your fellow Americans. You should not be doing what you are doing. You should rethink it, and stop. You do not have to carry out orders that go against the grain of what it means to be an American.”

Those last weren’t his exact words, but that was the spirit of them. He was to pay for that comment the next day, when we were sitting side by side in a blockade of the Federal Building in Boston. We had a circle of people all the way around the building, shoulder to shoulder, so no one could get in or out except by stepping over us. Behind us were crowds of people with posters who were supporting us but who hadn’t chosen to risk arrest. In front of us, keeping us from getting any closer to the main entrance to the building, was a line of policemen, with a large formation of police behind them. All the police had large plastic masks tilted back on their heads and they were carrying long black clubs, about four feet long, like large baseball bats. Later the lawyers told us that city police regulations outlawed the use of batons that long.

But at first the relations with the police were almost friendly. We sat down impudently at the very feet of the policemen who were guarding the entrance, filling in the line that disappeared around the sides until someone came from the rear of the building and announced over a bullhorn, “The blockade is complete. We’ve surrounded the building!” There was a cheer from the crowd behind us, and more people joined us in sitting until the circle was two or three deep.

Please continue this article here: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/remembering-my-hero-howard-zinn/

Aracelis Girmay: You Are Who I Love

So beautiful, moving, heartfelt. Thank you

to my friend Jason Espada for passing

this one on to me. — Molly

You Are Who I Love

You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart

You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees

You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats

You protecting the river   You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe

You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet

You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June

Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts

You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal

You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME

You are who I love, you struggling to see

You struggling to love or find a question

You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes

You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping

You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound, singing toward us in the dream

You carrying your brother home
You noticing the butterflies

Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens

You who did and did not survive
You who cleaned the kitchens
You who built the railroad tracks and roads
You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love
You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying
Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.

You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children

You cactus, water, sparrow, crow      You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage, making the cobbler,

getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds

You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail

You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations

You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow, you with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick

You are who I love, sighing in your sleep

You, playing drums in the procession, you feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut

You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still

You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses

You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand

You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives of the trees you belong to

You studying stars, you are who I love
braiding your child’s hair

You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert

You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,

bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late

You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home

You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often

You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love    I love

your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there    

How “Fuck you” becomes a love song

You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face

You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love   You are who I love  You and you and you are who

 By Aracelis Girmay

https://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/you-are-who-i-love