A week from last Saturday was the big kick off push for Bernie Sanders campaign volunteers. There were nearly five thousand gatherings across the country, many that congregated in living rooms and around kitchen tables and private homes, across the fruited plains. There were several in my area and since I wanted to get a pulse on how the campaign was going, I attended three of them.
Having just finished watching Lost in it’s entirety — for the first and last time — this last fall, this particular analogy is uncanny.
Glenn Beck to Sean Hannity: “We are officially at the end of the country as we know it” if Trump loses in 2020. I sure as hell hope so, but I have my doubts. We’ve heard this kind of thing before. Those on the political right tend to use this kind of hyperbole to generate hysteria and rally the troops to get them out to vote. (This is especially when the Republican rank and file is being asked to vote for an an unsavory and unpopular like Trump.) But liberals do it too: recall that Obama was supposed to bring hope and change yet 8 years later we were in short supply on both counts. Nonetheless I remain hopeful. Hope, after all, is a choice.
It seems a bit… what’s the word?…Cheeky. It seems a bit cheeky to put anti-Facebook ads up on Facebook, but that’s precisely what Elizabeth Warren did. Predictably, Facebook took the ads down. In the ads Warren called for the break-up of tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, all of which Warren is calling out. I really respect what Warren has been doing in the early phases of the 2020 campaign. She’s come out swinging, challenging the domination of corporations with an intense and uncompromising sense of urgency, which is precisely what we needed if we hope to even make a dent in the corruption that both parties have made normative in America. Here’s more from the article:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Saturday called capitalism “irredeemable.” “Capitalism is an ideology of capital – the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit,” she said during an interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, according to Bloomberg News. “To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” she added, arguing that capitalism’s goals come at a cost to people and the environment, Bloomberg reported.
“There continues to be a substantial push toward the legalization of marijuana in the United States. Across demographic groups, all but one generation of Americans support the legalization of cannabis, according to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday.”
DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) is the activist organization that I “fuck with,” fuck with being a younger person’s slang/trendy term used to describe the persons/places/things/ideas that one is down with. All fucking aside, I’ve been a member of DSA for a few years now, and currently the national DSA organization is debating whether to formally endorse Bernie in 2020, so at our March organizing meeting here in Santa Cruz we dedicated a good bit of the meeting to discussing the Berning question. For us it’s kind of an odd subject matter because we mostly focus on local politics/activism, not so much on national politics or national issues.
