12 Left Challengers Taking On the Party Establishment in 2018

A Democratic Spring: 12 Left Challengers Taking On the Party Establishment in 2018

The scattering of challenges to the Democratic establishment after Bernie Sanders’ run has become a tidal wave.

BY THEO ANDERSON

http://inthesetimes.com/features/2018_democratic_primary_progressive_left_challengers.html?

THE SHOCK OF DONALD TRUMP’S ELECTION inspired an organized, determined resistance on many fronts and in many forms. One could be called a “democratic spring”: a long-germinating rebellion within the Democratic Party that gained strength with Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid and might just save the withered institution from itself.

The Left has sprouted an independent electoral infrastructure, including the formation of new groups like Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Indivisible and Brand New Congress; the invigoration of existing political organizations like the Working Families Party; and a shift toward greater electoral engagement by groups like People’s Action and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Another trend, propelled by Trump’s grotesque misogyny and the emergence of the #MeToo movement, is a surge in the number of women running for office. As of mid-April, 331 women had filed to run, easily beating the old record of 298, set in 2012. Of those, Democrats outnumber Republicans 248 to 83.

Yet another is the galvanization of young people. A March survey by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that 37 percent of people under 30 definitely plan to vote this fall, the most interest ever recorded in the poll, with Democrats driving the surge. In 2014, only 23 percent of respondents under 30 had definite plans to vote.

Removing Trump from office, whether through the impeachment process or the next presidential election, is a high priority for progressives. But when Trump is finally gone, an even more daunting challenge will remain: creating a political system that represents the people and the public interest.

This goal will not be achieved overnight, to say the least. It’s worth remembering that the current incarnation of the GOP began to take shape in the mid-1970s, with the fusion of corporate interests and a resurgent Christian Right. At the time, the Republican vision of breaking unions, redistributing wealth to the wealthiest, slashing corporate taxes, gutting the public sphere and privatizing public education must have seemed an impossible mountain to climb. Reforming the Democratic Party into a vehicle for a progressive agenda is no less daunting, given the way corporate money has swamped and deformed our democracy.

But a key lesson of the GOP’s radical shift to the right is that party transformation is possible, and primaries, more than general elections or conventions, are the soil in which party transformation takes root. Primary candidates often offer competing visions for the future, and challengers to an incumbent must either affirm or deny the party’s status quo.

Sanders’ 2016 bid is a case study on the effect a serious challenger can have. His relatively narrow loss to an icon of establishment politics, Hillary Clinton, suggests the depth of anger and desperation for reform within a broad segment of the party. The implications of the Sanders campaign will unfold for many years, but one clear effect is the spread of policy ideas pushing the party left, including Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free college, free or subsidized child care, criminal justice and campaign finance reform, progressive taxation, and policies addressing economic inequality.

The 2016 Democratic Party platform at least nodded to many of these ideas, largely because of Sanders’ influence. Over the past 18 months, in a series of state party conventions and special elections, these ideas have been the distinguishing mark between progressives and establishment Democrats. The current midterm contests are the most forceful and comprehensive expression of this ongoing challenge and will set the stage for epic battles to define the party in 2020 and far beyond.

The national news media have spotlighted and obsessed over a few races, most notably Marie Newman in Illinois, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Randy Bryce in Wisconsin, Cynthia Nixon in New York and Ben Jealous in Maryland. All merit the attention, but the focus on a few high-profile candidates obscures the passion for change and the range of issues inspiring a plethora of progressives to run—in defiance of Trump, surely, but also in response to the failures of the Democratic Party.

The dozen candidates for state and federal offices profiled below have attracted relatively little national press, but they offer a wide window on the multi-dimensional movement to transform the party. In a U.S. House race, for example, Sarah Smith prioritizes an antiwar stance. In state legislature races, Jovanka Beckles focuses on affordable housing and Alessandra Biaggi calls out campaign finance corruption. Some will win and some will lose, but all are aiming to help grow organizations, coalitions and a grassroots base that have the power to fundamentally change the status quo—beginning inside the Democratic Party and radiating out.

Whether this momentum will amount to a political revolution is unknowable. One painful truth underscored by the Trump era is that, though the arc of history is long, it doesn’t bend toward any definite conclusion. And yet, primary by primary, issue by issue, perhaps progressives can bend it ever so slightly toward justice once again.

Viral MSNBC Coverage Shows 8 Nazis Running in the Midterms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs78b7s2g10

"Charity Is The Opiate Of Capitalism" - Nellie McKay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVDIebJZoiU

The secret of how to defeat Trump lies in Europe

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/428812-donald-trump-sides-europe/













Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London

























There may well be two sides to Donald Trump. The “peaceful” and the “belligerent,” depending on his moods. And we might just have seen both of them in quick succession.



Just after announcing the meeting with Kim Jong-un, Trump decided to withdraw from the Iran agreement, thereby bringing instability and the threat of war (not only) to the Middle East.



But, of course, there is only one Trump, who was doing exactly the same thing in both cases. In the case of North Korea, he began with exerting extreme pressure, including economic sanctions and military threats, and he is doing the same to Iran, in the hope that, if it worked the first time, it will work now also.



Will it though? What if the US government is well aware that the pressure on Iran will not work? What if, together with Israel and Saudi Arabia, they are preparing for war with Iran?



It is difficult to speculate about the consequences of such a military conflict. We should rather focus on the limitation of Trump’s entire approach: will Trump get his comeuppance? Because neither Russia nor China can do this – they are caught in the same game as Trump and they basically all speak the same language of “America (Russia, China…) first.”



Last hope



Only the European Union can deliver a hammer blow, and the new situation offers the bloc a unique chance to assert itself as a sovereign power block and to act as if the pact with Iran is still valid. Seizing this opportunity, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that Trump’s proposals to corral the EU into joining US foreign policy on Iran should be counteracted by a stronger, independent European foreign policy. “We have to work among ourselves in Europe to defend our European economic sovereignty. Do we want to be a vassal that obeys and jumps to attention?”



Sounds nice – but does Europe have enough strength and unity to do it? Will the new East European, post-Communist axis (stretching from the Baltic States to Croatia) follow the EU resistance to the US, or will it bow to the US and thus provide yet more proof that the quick expansion of the EU to the east was a mistake?



What further complicates things is that Europe is caught in its own populist revolt, triggered by the fact that people trust less and less the Brussels technocracy, regarding it as a center of power with no democratic legitimacy.



The result of the last Italian elections is that, for the first time in a developed Western European country, Euroskeptic populists came to power. Plus, the withdrawal from the Iran agreement is just the middle one of the three anti-European acts of the US: the move of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem vehemently opposed by the EU, plus the opening shot in the trade war with three of its biggest trading partners by deciding to begin levying tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum from the EU, Canada and Mexico.



Other view



Although most of us sympathize with the European reaction, we should not forget the (as a rule ignored) background of the US decision. To understand it, let’s turn to another topic which may appear to be totally different: the current uproar in the US over the abrupt cancellation of ABC’s hit TV show ‘Roseanne’ because of a racist tweet by the show’s star Roseanne Barr.



In her column “With Roseanne Barr gone, will the US working-class be erased from TV?” Joan Williams argues that the Left should finally start to listen to the white working class. She perspicuously notices how a key fact of this affair passed unnoticed: the cancellation “deprived American television of one of the only sympathetic depictions of white working-class life in the past half century – in other words, since television began.”





Williams unambiguously supports the exclusion of Barr on account of her racist tweets – but she adds: “All that said, race is not the only social hierarchy. Disrespectful images of the working-class whites are part and parcel of the cultural disrespect that paved the path for a demagogue like Trump.” The sad plight of the working-class whites is the clearest indication of the disappearance of the American dream.



“Virtually all Americans born in the 1940s earned more than their parents; today, it’s less than half. The rust belt revolt that brought both Brexit and Trump reflects rotting factories, dying towns, and a half century of empty promises. Those left behind are very, very angry; Trump is their middle finger. The more he outrages coastal elites, the more his followers gloat they got our goat. Finally, they are being noticed.”



And it is crucial to read Trump’s tariff war against the closest allies of the US against this background: in his populist version of class warfare, Trump’s goal is (also) to protect the American working class (and are metal workers not one of the emblematic figures of the traditional working class?) from “unfair” European competition, and thereby save American jobs. This is why all the protests of public officials and economists in EU, Canada and Mexico, as well as the countermeasures proposed by them, miss the target: they follow the WTO logic of free international trade, while only a new Left addressing the concerns of all those left behind can really counter Trump.



At some deep and often obfuscated level, the US neocons perceive the European Union as the enemy. This perception, kept under control in the public political discourse, explodes in its underground obscene double, the extreme Right Christian fundamentalist political vision with its obsessive fear of the new world order (with conspiracy theories such as how Obama is in secret collusion with the United Nations, international forces will intervene in the US and put all true American patriots in concentration camps etc.)



Conflicting ideas



One way to resolve this dilemma is the hardline Christian fundamentalist one, articulated in the works of Tim LaHaye et consortes: to unambiguously subordinate the second opposition to the first one. The title of one of LaHaye’s novels points in this direction: ‘The Europa Conspiracy.’



So, the true enemies of the US are not Muslim terrorists, they are merely puppets secretly manipulated by the European secularists, the true forces of the anti-Christ, who want to weaken the US and establish a new world order under the domination of the United Nations. And, in a way, they are right in this perception: Europe is not just another geopolitical power bloc, but a global vision which is ultimately incompatible with nation-states.



This brings us back to Trump and Putin: one openly supported Brexit, and the other is believed in the West to have desired it. Both figures belong to the conservative-nationalist line of “America/Russia first,” which should perceive a united Europe as its biggest enemy (even if Putin publicly says the opposite and many Russians resent their exclusion from the European project, rather than the notion itself) – and they are both right.



The problem for Europe is how to remain faithful to its emancipatory legacy, which is now threatened by the conservative-populist onslaught?



In his ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Culture,’ the great conservative T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today: the only way to really defeat Trump and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy is to perform a sectarian split from liberal democracy’s main corpse.

Fed Up With Big Banks That Fund Climate Crisis and Oppression, Community Coalition Demands Public Bank for New York

"It's time New York City puts its money where its mouth is, divests from Wall Street, and—through a public bank—invests in us."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/05/fed-big-banks-fund-climate-crisis-and-oppression-community-coalition-demands-public?utm

Chanting, "Wells, Chase, B of A, public bank's a better way!" social justice groups rallied at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday to demand that New York City divest from Wall Street banks and establish a public bank that is "expressly chartered to serve the public interest."

"New York deserves a public bank that will invest in community needs, and be accountable to New York City residents—one that will prioritize housing...and not prey on low-income New Yorkers," said Scott Hutchins, a member of the grassroots social justice group Picture the Homeless.

The more than two dozen groups that gathered on Wall Street also included New York Working Families, the Pan-African Community Development Initiative, and Food & Water Watch.

Investment in Wall Street banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of Americas, and JPMorgan Chase is synonymous with harming the environment, propping up private prisons, and putting working families at risk for financial collapse as well as pushing them out of New York neighborhoods, argued the groups.

The rally came days after the Trump administration announced it would roll back the Volcker Rule, which since 2014 has prohibited banks from using their accounts to conduct risky, speculative trading, in an effort to avoid another financial meltdown like the one that threw the country into a recession in 2008. 

"With the Trump Administration and Congress handing out massive corporate tax breaks, rolling back federal financial reform, and gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street is heading straight for another crisis," said Deyanira Del Rio, Co-Director of New Economy Project. "A public bank will allow New York City to deposit our public money with a bank that belongs to New Yorkers."

The crowd also heard from a Brooklyn resident whose rent has doubled in recent years and who spoke about the exorbitant fees New Yorkers pay to big banks every year, a student who spoke out against predatory loan practices and Wall Street's investment of billions of dollars in fossil fuels that accelerate and worsen the climate crisis, and a social justice activist who told the crowd of JPMorgan Chase's support for private prisons.

"As long as the city continues to deposit its money in prison financiers like JPMorgan Chase, we will remain complicit in systems of oppression that profit off of incarcerating our communities," said Bamsa Eid of the racial and economic justice group Enlace. "It's time New York City puts its money where its mouth is, divests from Wall Street, and—through a public bank—invests in us."

A public bank would allow New York's public money to go towards investing in small businesses run by locals, low-income housing, and financial services to immigrant and low-income communities.

"Here's the deal: New York City currently deposits billions of public dollars in the big Wall Street banks," said Stephan Edel, director of New York Working Families. "These bankers make millions off these deposits and high fees, while providing little benefit to the City, small businesses, and residents of New York. Our money should be put to use in our communities."

Despite Rightwing Fearmongering, Experts Say Now Is the Time to Expand Social Security











"Social Security is a solution to our looming retirement income crisis, the increasing economic squeeze on middle-class families, and the perilous and growing income and wealth inequality."






by
Jake Johnson, staff writer






































https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/05/despite-rightwing-fearmongering-experts-say-now-time-expand-social-security?utm



















As corporate media outlets predictably trumpeted the right-wing narrative that Social Security is in dire financial straits after the Social Security Trustees' annual report was released on Tuesday, advocacy groups and experts were quick to denounce the fearmongering and correct the record, arguing that the new analysis shows the program is "stronger than ever."









"Each year, the release of the trustees report provides an occasion for Social Security scaremongering by those wanting to shrink our social insurance system," Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, noted in a blog post on Tuesday. "But not only can we afford current benefits, we can afford to expand them."







In addition to demonstrating that "there is sufficient revenue to pay for all benefits until 2034" even if Congress does nothing, Social Security Works president Nancy Altman said the Trustees' report clearly demonstrates that an ambitious expansion of Social Security benefits is also both affordable and desirable.







"Poll after poll shows that the American people overwhelmingly support expanding the program's benefits," Altman noted in a statement. "Social Security is a solution to our looming retirement income crisis, the increasing economic squeeze on middle-class families, and the perilous and growing income and wealth inequality."







"In light of these challenges and Social Security's important role in addressing them, the right question is not how can we afford to expand Social Security, but, rather, how can we afford not to expand it," Altman concluded.







The Trustees' annual report comes amid a relentless push by the GOP-controlled Congress and the Trump administration to slash Social Security benefits—along with Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps—after delivering $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.







In a petition demanding immediate congressional action to expand Social Security benefits, SSW communications director Linda Benesch noted that "all we need is for the wealthy to pay their fair share and we can afford to not only extend the lifespan of the trust fund, but expand benefits for millions of Americans."







"We can afford to protect and expand Social Security when millionaires and billionaires pay the same rate as the rest of us," the petition concludes.

Vowing to 'Padlock Revolving Door' in DC, Warren Teases New Anti-Corruption Legislation

"The Trump administration and an army of lobbyists are determined to rig the game in their favor, to boost their own profits—the cost to consumers be damned," the senator says

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/05/vowing-padlock-revolving-door-dc-warren-teases-new-anti-corruption-legislation?

"Change is coming," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared Tuesday at a War on Regulations symposium hosted by the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards and Georgetown University Law School. In her live-streamed speech, Warren revealed plans to introduce anti-corruption legislation to protect the American public from the Trump administration's corporate-friendly deregulatory agenda.

"When we send a message that corporate profits and powerful interests cannot overpower the health, safety, and economic well-being of hardworking families, we fire a warning shot," she said. "This is our time, our responsibility, our chance to build a country where government works, not just for the rich and powerful, but government that works for the people."

In her 30-minute address, Warren highlighted the Trump administration's efforts to defang the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency she helped establish. "The agency is under attack now. The Trump administration and an army of lobbyists are determined to rig the game in their favor, to boost their own profits—the cost to consumers be damned," she warned.

"But it's not just the CFPB that is under attack. In agency after agency across the federal government, powerful corporations and their Republican allies are working overtime to roll back basic rules that protect the rest of us," Warren continued. "Giant corporations and wealthy individuals are working in the shadows to make sure that government works for them, not for the people."

As an example, Warren pointed to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt. "Corruption oozes out of his office, from wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to cutting deals to make himself rich to doing the bidding of the highest-paid lobbyists," she said, noting his attacks on the Clean Water Rule, pesticide safety, the Clean Power Plan, vehicle emissions caps, and methane emissions limits.

The senator rebuffed the GOP's favored narrative that regulations hinder businesses and individual freedom—calling that claim "a greasy baloney sandwich that has been left out in the sun so long that it has started to stink." She also detailed the importance of regulations throughout American history and argued that "good rules empower people to live, work, and do business freely and safely."

In response to the ongoing deregulatory efforts of wealthy "corporate predators"—which Warren noted have continued since the Reagan administration under presidents from both parties—the senator said she will soon introduce "sweeping anti-corruption legislation to clean up corporate money sloshing around Washington and make it possible for our elected government to actually work for the American people again."

"My plan will padlock the revolving door between government and industry," she vowed. "It will eliminate the ability of government decision-makers to enrich themselves through their government service. It will empower federal agencies pass strong regulations that benefit the public by ending corporate capture of the regulatory process."

In addition to Warren's address, the symposium featured two panels: one focused on the deregulatory agenda the Trump administration has imposed at federal agencies, and one focused on the communities that have suffered under that agenda. Participants included former EPA scientist Betsy Southerland; Public Citizen president Robert Weissman; and Heidi Shierholz, the senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.