[Peace-discuss] My take on Sanders' campaign to draw people into the Democratic Party, and recent Democracy Now coverage

[Brussel, Morton K]

Just some impressions interspersed with your remarks.

On Apr 12, 2020, at 10:08 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:

https://soundcloud.com/whatisleftpod/preview-the-politics-of-aoc

Aimee Terese has been on to AOC for quite some time, this excerpt from 11 months ago.

Her co-host Benjamin Studebaker has also written about AOC on his blog, in February of last year:

Much dull, supposedly erudite, gobbledygook displayed here.

https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2019/02/18/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-seems-confused-about-race/

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 1:39 AM J.B. Nicholson via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:
DN is an increasingly establishment-friendly news outlet no better than NBC, CBS,
PBS, etc. The issues that drove Aaron Mate away are serious and the most recent AOC
interview on a major bill is consistent with their slide into being just another
establishment outlet.

 DN is often bad, frustrating, but not quite as bad as those others. Not with interviews of Chomsky, Naomi Klein, McKibben, Greenwald, Ellsberg, … given voice. But yes, many other strong enlightening voices are not heard: Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, and various worthy others . Goodman often shoots for headlines, and does not often ask obvious crucial follow-up questions of those she interviews.

 Goodman's most recent AOC interview has some talk about the bailout bill (I refuse to
call it a "stimulus" because it only stimulates executives ability to buy back their
stock, artificially inflate their company value, and buy out competition all while
not funding the public at large. None of that helps us.).

AOC seems to be aware of that, from what follows.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/7/aoc_coronavirus_stimulus_corporate_slush_fund
 > JUAN GONZÁLEZ: [...] Congresswoman, could you talk about the debate that you had
 > within yourself in terms of whether to support this package, given the enormous
 > tax breaks and the direct grants and loans to corporate America?
 >
 > REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Yeah. Well, you know, I think, ultimately, this
 > debate, it was up to each and every member. I don’t slight any member for how they
 > voted. I could not bring myself to ultimately support this bill, because I believe
 > that people will soon see the extraordinary asymmetrical assistance that went to
 > corporations. We’re not just talking about half a trillion dollars that went to
 > Wall Street, as I mentioned in my remarks. That is being leveraged to $4 trillion
 > for Wall Street and corporations. And what we’re seeing in payroll protection for
 > small businesses is just a drop in the bucket compared to that.
 >
 > But, ultimately, what this administration did was hold every hospital hostage,
 > hold every frontline worker hostage. And it is not an easy decision whatsoever for
 > any member. But, ultimately, I think that people will soon see the betrayal that
 > was in this bill, that was pushed forward by the administration and by Mitch
 > McConnell. It is completely — it is completely unethical and inhumane, what has
 > been done. And we talk about the oversight of this bill. It is far too little. It
 > is far too flimsy. And what we have essentially done was give Steven Mnuchin a
 > blank check to pick and choose who this administration will reward with $4
 > trillion.

When AOC said "I could not bring myself to ultimately support this bill" it gives the
impression that she voted against the bill but she didn't exactly say that she voted
against that bill. AOC won't say precisely how she voted and because DN's reportage
is biased in her favor, they don't explicitly ask her how she voted using proper
language and confirmation of how she voted.

The Hill recently insisted "AOC DID vote no on the bailout" in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjXMdFCMDuk but there's no evidence to back that up.
It's a voice vote. Sadly, The Hill quoted this same interview segment from DN to
conclude that AOC voted against that bill. That's either The Hill's poor evaluation
criteria at work, or they're a part of the manufacture of a proper image for AOC.

The Hill, is no sympathiser of left politics..

Jimmy Dore responds to that claim from The Hill in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5uH0Dn7PfU and makes excellent points:

- AOC should have called for a roll call vote, but she didn't.

- AOC should have called out her leadership for not insisting on a roll call vote,
but she didn't.

Requiring condemnation? Give her a break; she’s been a breath of fresh air in Congress.

- AOC has an invitation to go on Jimmy Dore's show and say that she did not vote for
that bailout bill, but she won't go on Dore's show and say that because she knows the
truth: she voted for that bill. I call this an excellent point because this is a real
'put up or shut up' moment and we need to be clear about who is on our side.

Unwarranted assumption?

- Therefore AOC wouldn't be using euphemisms like she "could not bring [her]self to
ultimately support this bill" if she had voted against that bill. She'd be explicit
and precise in her language. She'd rightfully and repeatedly boast to her base and to
her constituents that she did right by them in their time of need, thus justifying
putting her in power.

Arguable.

I'd also add:

- Democracy Now (Amy Goodman) never should have accepted that vague language from
AOC. Goodman should have asked "So did you vote for the bill, yes or no?" but Goodman
didn't do that. We had come to expect a vastly different interview style from DN and
Goodman in particular -- asking lengthy questions to that CNN reporter (Aaron Brown?)
about shitty news coverage from CNN, "keeping" Pres. Clinton on the phone answering
tough questions and for far longer than he wanted to talk followed by Goodman
pointing out in subsequent interviews about that call that 'the most powerful man in
the world doesn't know how to hang up the phone?', and so on. We don't need unclear
reportage like what we got from AOC in this promotional spot posing as an interview.
We get euphemisms and obscurantism all the time from other establishment-friendly
outlets. DN was supposed to stand apart from that coverage and be worth charitably
contributing to.

As I said, Goodman does not often go for the jugular in interviews.

Consider this excerpt from DN, which is typical of what they've broadcast every day
recently:

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/9/bernie_sanders_naomi_klein
 > NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think the main thing that I want to say this morning, Amy, is
 > just that I just would like to express my huge gratitude to Bernie Sanders, to his
 > entire family, to the many people who worked for the campaign just so tirelessly
 > and opened up the window of what was possible politically in this country. It was
 > an incredibly tough campaign. And I trust that Bernie is making the right decision
 > in this moment as the leader of that campaign and also as a U.S. senator. I know
 > that he’s not going to just go relax, as he said in his address. He intends to
 > fight for people, as he has always done, in this critical moment, in terms of what
 > kind of relief, rescue and reimagining that we do in the midst of this pandemic.
 > He is staying on the ballot. He is still building power in order to pressure the
 > Democratic Party and Joe Biden to run the most progressive campaign that they can.
 > So, you know, I feel so much gratitude for Senator Sanders.

Similar to what Chomsky has been saying.
 >
 > More than anything else, I think what the campaign did is help us find each other.
 > And by “us,” I mean that huge “us” of the “Not me. Us.” campaign. And he did this
 > not just in this campaign, but in 2016, where he really broke the spell of the
 > Reagan era, that spell that has lasted for four decades, that told people, who
 > believed, that this system that was funneling so much wealth upwards and spreading
 > insecurity, precariousness, poverty and pollution for everybody else — everybody
 > who saw that system and thought there was something deeply wrong with it, what the
 > neoliberal era told us was that we were the ones who were crazy, we were a tiny
 > minority of fringe people, and that we should just accept it. And what the Sanders
 > campaign did in 2016 is tell us that we had been lied to, that, in fact, there
 > were so many millions of us who saw that this world was fundamentally upside down.
 > And all of the incredible organizing, including digital organizing but also
 > in-person organizing, wove this amazing web, and we were able to find each other
 > and find that we were many and they were few. And so, I don’t think we can ever
 > thank Bernie Sanders and the campaign enough for that. And being part of the
 > campaign as a volunteer — but I did go to four states for the campaign — was some
 > of the — provided some of the greatest moments of my political life. I mean, I was
 > in Nevada when we won, and got to be part of that incredibly joyful moment and
 > just got to meet so many other like-minded people.

Precisely what did Sanders do in or around 2016 that could fairly be described as
"[breaking] the spell of the Reagan era, that spell that has lasted for four decades,
that told people, who believed, that this system that was funneling so much wealth
upwards and spreading insecurity, precariousness, poverty and pollution for everybody
else"?

Sanders used Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and some other policy ideas to
attract people to a campaign he (by all available evidence) never intended (?) to win.

… or suspected or knew he wouldn’t win? What did he want to do with his campaign in your opinion?
except propel his political future and convince people about the domestic morass they were experiencing.
.
Then he full-throatedly endorsed his neoliberal opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The persistent conundrum, Trump? or  Clinton?. "I’ll go with Clinton" (he decided). Sanders showed his failure to go on the attack against the Dem establishment, the same failure manifested in the current campaign with the DNC and Biden.
.
People at the time were so pissed at how his campaign was treated that they sued the
DNC corporation (a suit both DN and Sen. Sanders himself were tellingly silent
about), and these disaffected Sanders supporters did not vote for Clinton (becoming
part of a major reason why she lost -- she didn't keep the Obama voters across enough
states with enough electoral votes to win). I believe that came to be known as
"#DemExit", inspired by the portmanteau Brexit.

Regarding Noam Chomsky's comments to DN about Sanders' 2020 campaign:

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/9/noam_chomsky_bernie_sanders_campaign
 > Noam Chomsky: [...] Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be
 > essentially a continuation of Obama — nothing very great, but at least not totally
 > destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being
 > done, to impose pressures.

What does "not totally destructive" mean? How about Climate Change, so dangerous acccording to Chomsky? Would Biden effectively fight the fossil fuel lobby? And relations with China and Russia and Cuba and Venezuela and Iran and Israel and Saudi Arabia and … If one believes in the importance of an election as we shall be having, there seems no beneficial outcome possible (for the world). We just have to wait until people rise up. Can they?

 > It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake.
 > I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate
 > and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago are now right in
 > the middle of attention.
 >
 > The worst crime he committed, in the eyes of the establishment, is not the policy
 > he’s proposing; it’s the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements, which
 > had already been developing — Occupy, Black Lives Matter, many others — and turn
 > them into an activist movement, which doesn’t just show up every couple years to
 > push a leader and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism
 > and so on. That could affect a Biden administration.

As Naomi K. reiterated.

I disagree. With what leverage will Sanders "pressure the Democratic Party and Joe
Biden to run the most progressive campaign that they can" (and what a weak standard
that is) or "impose pressure”?

Obviously, the leverage is the Sanders voters who have been  ticked off who may not vote, or vote “wrong”.

What activist movement did Sanders build? Sanders had some people interested in his
campaign and Sanders has a Democratic Party candidate incubator group ("Our Revolution").

I'd chiefly attribute increased interest in Medicare for All and Universal Basic
Income now to COVID-19 lockdown/stay-at-home economic pressure (various types of
strikes, people losing their jobs, to name a couple of examples) more than I'd
attribute this to Sanders' speeches.

And, even if we assume this activist movement exists, precisely how is that activist
movement more likely to sway a theoretical Biden administration than the Trump
administration?

Because they they are liberal voters who the Dems want to be on their bandwagon.

The most credit I can give Sanders is bringing slightly more attention to Medicare
for All for a time but ultimately that credit had to stop when he abandoned that very
effort in the swan song of his campaign (when he said "Let me be clear: I am not
proposing that we pass Medicare for All in this moment. That fight continues into the
future." and saying in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uQV83U5Dk around 41m44s "This
is not Medicare for All, we can’t pass that right now."). He did that in order to
appease his real master the Democratic Party.

I can't help but think that Congress knows that bailing out businesses was
unnecessary and that they are all too feckless to challenge their party leadership
for a better bill. So they're falling back on unchallenging PR to create better
"optics" (as they say in the public relations biz).

I could be convinced toward Chomsky's nicer position if he gave evidence. But there
is none to be found so it's not surprising that Chomsky didn't give any evidence. As
far as I can tell it's all a 'feelings'-based argument driven by a Democratic Party
desire to manufacture a better legacy for someone who did drop Medicare for All
promotion, and absolutely did vote for the bailout bill (we have the roll call vote
to prove this). That vote means that Sanders could have made a name for himself by
voting against that bill and then taken that 'no' vote to the people whom he still
hopes to collect votes from and campaign contributions from -- remember that Sanders
merely "suspended" his campaign. That bailout bill still would have easily passed the
Senate without Sanders' yay vote). So my calling Sanders feckless seems completely
fair, right, and proper to me, particularly considering that this is a time of
obvious struggle for the poorest among us, and that this bill implements the largest
wealth transfer. People haven't fully felt the effects of this bill yet. By the time
they do they'll be asking "Wha happened?" and they'll need to look back on history
and recognize not only what did happen, and who made it happen, but also they'll need
to skip a lot of establishment-friendly media which was lying to them.

Feckless was Sanders in not attacking the Dem élites and their candidate, but he remained quite steadfast in his advocacy of other domestic programs compared to all the others. His caving on full fleged Medicare-for-all was simply a recognition that he couldn’t push it through even as he still had faint hopes for his campaign. A mistake, I think, which he could have profited from with the onset of the coronavirus issue. Bad timing.

Recent big events (including war!) are so poorly covered by DN of late, DN is just
not worth my time and certainly not worth contributing money to. I only watch it now
on rare occasion and purely as a bellweather for so-called "progressive" media as DN
is still considered a well-known outlet in those circles. I don't trust the news I
get from DN without other independent confirmations. Also, the interviews DN gets are
often not that great (see above with AOC).

I think that history will come to see Jeffrey St. Clair's book "Bernie & The
Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution"
(https://store.counterpunch.org/product/bernie-the-sandernistas/) about Sanders' 2016
campaign as prophetic -- Sanders deserved the criticism he received for his 2016
campaign from both St. Clair and Black Agenda Report (such as
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary). Sanders
deserves the criticism he receives now. And the establishment-friendly media is
desperate to create another narrative where Sanders looks a hell of a lot better than
his political record can support (on April 7 he posted
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1247689671557201924 which reads "There is a
word to describe our health care system today: grotesque. We need Medicare for All."
and then on April 8 he "suspended" his campaign and dropped Medicare for All saying
it wasn't politically tenable. If that doesn't urge sharp critique, what does?
Sanders never had a foreign policy position that was clearly distinguishable from a
neocon's, so he's got nothing to offer there). Perhaps Jimmy Dore is correct: Sanders
did what he did to escape being viewed with hatred like the DNC views Ralph Nader.
Sanders' choices are consistent with that motivation.

David, it is clear that you have been sorely disappointed with Sanders and AOC and…? You hoped they would be more pure/principled in their words and actions, or did you? Yet, they did effect change in the debate, persisting in the campaign as long and robustly as they did, and deserve some praise for that.
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