Six on 2020 Election: CBS News and Gaillard Center ready the building for the Democratic debate in Charleston; Our Dishonest President; The...
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Thanks John and Gary
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"The Bloomberg 2020 operation is hiring more than 500 people at a rate of $2,500 a month to text friends and post on social media in support of the former New York mayor and billionaire media mogul. These “deputy field organizers,” as the campaign calls them, are focusing their efforts on California and its 415 delegates up for grabs. It has not been picky in choosing messengers.
A look inside the strategy — based on documents reviewed by The Times, interviews with five of these organizers and an examination of the operation’s social media output — shows that many have been using accounts created within the last month for their Twitter posts. At least two had openly posted in support of other candidates. And unlike the high-profile influencers the campaign recently hired to create viral memes, the vast majority of these organizers have modest personal audiences. On Twitter, many have fewer than 20 followers.
Rather than create their own content, organizers often use the exact text, images and links provided to them by the campaign. The result has been a stiff outpouring of tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts with little to no engagement and sometimes half-hearted text messages. Some organizers were so robotic in their tweeting, Twitter suspended their accounts Friday evening after The Times inquired about whether their behavior complied with the platform’s rules on spam and manipulation."
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“Sanders’ popularity presents a chance to challenge the legitimacy of racist anti-communist tropes.”
"MSNBC’s Chris Matthews recently warned viewers that it remains unclear whether Bernie Sanders aligns with so-called “Nordic socialism” in Denmark or Castro-led socialism in Cuba. Matthews raised the possibility that a Sanders presidency would result in “assassinations in the streets” of Central Park. He added that a “victory for the reds” during the Cold War would have placed him in front of the socialist firing squad. At the New Hampshire debate, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked candidates to raise their hands if they were concerned about Sanders’ identification with democratic socialism . While much of the red baiting and anti-communist narrative in the corporate media has been centered on how Trump would hypothetically approach Sanders in a general election, the last four years of Russiagate alone have made it painstakingly clear that the Democratic Party is just as committed to Cold War era anti-communism as its Republican counterparts.
Of course, one doesn’t have to study Bernie Sanders very hard to understand where he falls on the socialist political spectrum. Sanders very proudly calls himself a democratic socialist and compares his agenda to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s . Whenever asked about his affiliation with the word socialism, Sanders very clearly defines his ideology as a commitment to the social welfare of working people rather than the profits of the rich. But he rejects Venezuela, Cuba, and the rest of the non-Western world’s vision of socialism. Socialism is not a revolution in the economy, it’s a revolution in the way that bourgeois Western governments address the needs of workers. Sanders truly believes that the bourgeois right to elect political representatives within the capitalist state can coexist with the socialist right to healthcare, a living wage, and the right to decent standard of living. He has even suggested that a preemptive military strike on the DPRK or Iran would be appropriate if these nations exercised their right to defend themselves from imperialism by way of nuclear weapons.
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“The Democratic Party is just as committed to Cold War era anti-communism as its Republican counterparts.”
Democratic socialism is thus another way of saying social democracy. Social democracy retains capitalism and imperialism as the motive forces of society. Socialism, on the other hand, is a completely new stage of economic development. Socialist societies are controlled and directed by the formerly exploited classes through the mechanism of the state. However, the state under socialism does not retain the same form as its capitalist predecessor. Socialist states institute a planned economy to meet the needs of all of society and are governed by a political organization truly representative of the masses. In the last century, the predominant organization of the masses within socialist countries has been the Communist Party. The state under socialism not only carries out the economic, social, and political imperatives of the people but is also tasked with suppressing the ability of the disempowered capitalist class to reassert its control over the means of production."
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"In other words, we’re walking through a fog of uncertainty. We have to be self-aware enough to acknowledge that every time we make a prediction about the general election, we’re guessing.
Let me suggest something else, particularly to the Democrats now losing their minds. For the past year, you were the ones saying most emphatically that voters should stop thinking about which candidate they like and instead decide their vote by imagining which candidate other people might like. It’s absolutely terrible advice, and it’s precisely what gave Democrats a string of general election losses.
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