We need more loud, assertive, aggressive activists who aren’t afraid to speak their mind, and now one of the loudest has faded away.
I remember when Jackson was a goad to the Democratic establishment. He was mostly ignored. Now look at what the country thinks of the establishment.
Sad. Especially that last guy, a victim of conservative paranoia about immigrants.
I am not sure which phylum the Dem leaders belong to. Hemichordata? Or wossname those weird small parasites that live inside the mouth of fish?
And nothing will change anytime soon. In two years time, assuming the country is still here, we’ll likely be holding our noses and casting a vote for the corporatist, moderate Democrat Gavin “Billionaires are part of the Big Tent” Newsome for president.
Walter Solomon @ 2
Agreed. But at the local, regional, state and national level you have the tool of primaries. Keep the Ferengi out!
Defeating fascism is a full-time job. Your politicians must not get distracted by insider trading.
.
Fuck Schumer and Jeffries. And Newsome is not yet the candidate. Keep reminding people of the problem with homelessness at Newsome’s home turf.
Myself @ 1
Crinozoa! They sit on their asses and wait for some juicy morsel/ campaign contribution to drift within reach.
@4 birgerjohansson
Priapulida
The Dems “strategy” seems to be let Trump make a huge mess and hope the voters come running back. That way, they don’t actually have to run on any policy that might divide their collation or offend their donors. However, as morally satisfying as voting against Trump is, what exactly am I voting for besides a system that didn’t really work all that well?
Face it folks, America is done. Regardless of party, one with power wants to fix anything because they profit from the system and the politicians don’t give a shit what us peasants want or need.
Edit: …no one with power…
Tying a string around my finger so that I remember to vote local down here in Texas. I may be Gerrymandered to hell, but I’ll still do what I can on that front.
Alongside direct action, of course: I’m more interested in things like a general strike or the continued demoralizing of ICE.
Walter Solomon @ #2 — And Gavin isn’t even the worst of the Dems.
My personal fav is AOC. She’s speaking some truths.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/partial-government-shutdown-drags-on-amid-immigration-oversight-battle
Totally spineless!
The New York Times was prescient here:
And so he remained. Jackson was the forerunner of Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, and the like, who seem to be good at corralling popular energy and safely funneling it into the dead end that is the Democratic Party.
Yeah, she is good.
Another one is Jasmine Crockett, the Representative from Texas 30th. She is outspoken and voluble.
LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) is the U.S. Representative for New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District, Indicted for trying to get into an ICE concentration camp, which is her right as a member of Congress.
Kat Abughazaleh is one of the Democrats running in the Illinois 9th district. She is a secular Palestinian American and progressive with a grass roots campaign.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington has a lot to say.
Governor Pritzker of Illinois is good.
Gavin Newsom is OK. The bar may be low here but he has fought the fascists effectively.
Seeing the pattern here?
Most of the visible resistance are..women.
And most of the large number of visible fascists are men.
It is the same at the local level.
Our active local resistance is almost all led and organized by…women.
So now beholder is trashing ACTUAL PROGRESSIVE-LEFT DEMOCRATS as blah moderates, while not mentioning any of the actual moderates, like Biden, Harris, or either Clinton? Doodyful trollbot doing its doody I guess…
Don Rose, the public relations man [for whom?]…claims it was decided that Jackson could be sold to the press as the new King.
Any corroboration for that claim?
I would have said facade.
The establishment Democratic politicians see the country’s politics much like a child alone in a yard with nothing to play with except for one swing. The child can wander around. The child can take a nap in the grass. The child can sit in the swing and not move. But eventually if the child wants to play, it will sit in the swing and push backward and forward. Republican or Democrat. The harder the swing is pushed in one direction the more force will accumulate to go back in the other direction. Even if the swing is pushed scarily far in one direction it will only ensure a return to the other side.
This is a wrong and very foolish way to look at politics. But it’s why they’re nothing but a facade. They say the right things, which is better than the Republicans. They don’t completely betray the things they say (usually), which is again better than the Republicans. But they give up and they sell out in a myriad of small and large ways so very little worthwhile actually gets done. Unless it’s to give money to or protect the interests of very wealthy people.
The simple truth is we need to vote against these aspiring seat warmers. But the only safe time to do so is in the primaries. By the time we reach the general election we’re almost uniformly voting between a democratic system and someone who will enable an authoritarian coup and shrug off the immense destruction needed to make that work.
@1. birgerjohansson : “I am not sure which phylum the Dem leaders belong to. Hemichordata? Or wossname those weird small parasites that live inside the mouth of fish?”
Their phylum is Chordata, their class Mammalia, their order Primates, their sub-order Haplorhini, their family Hominidae, their genus Homo and their species sapiens just like the rest of us.
Because they are human and people should NOT be dehumanised.
Erm, in two words I describe the Democratic Party currently as ‘house minority’.
The US two-party system with a little help from Citizens United has simply produced two options – shitty and shittier.
But what else did you all expect? You do know that your country is the paragon of predatory capitalism where money = power, don’t you? But I guess one consolation is your evident hatred of your own country – maybe you can all use it to drive for substantive change.
StevoR @ 16.
Yes. A pity it needs to be pointed out, eh?
@11. The Trump enabling bad faith troll “”beholder” (TEBFTB) : More questions you’ll never have the decency or honesty or courage to actually answer for ya that destroy your lying bullshit here.
If the Democrats are a “dead end” what does that make the Greens and anti-science Stein?
If the Democrats are such a “dead end” then why did they win with Biden and come within a tiny %~age of the vote – and maybe in reality actually won being robbed by voter suppression and perhaps Musk manipulation with Kamala?
If the Democratic party are a “dead end” then what does that make the Repugliklans – the Trump fascist party that you clearly prefer?
I guess at least we now have the answer to a question asked of you ages ago about which Democratic candidate you preferred to Kamala – none.
There are clearly no Democratic people you would ever support – whether more centrist or strongly progressive – and your pretence of being in the tiniest, least, little bit actually progressive is exposed as the lie it always was.
Shall we take your #11 above as your admission as such and all understand that you are in reality a Trumpist scumbag commenting here in bad faith to do as much damage to the progressive left wing of politics as you could? I think we should.
PS. Note again that the Trump enabling troll has not provided aa link and only a very general source and that he has cherry-picked the words of a PR man to support his extremely pitiful alleged “evidence” re Jesse Jackson supposedly not being a threat.
[StevoR, link is trivially easy to find: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/09/archives/jesse-jackson-i-am-audience-i-am-jesse-somebody-audience-somebody.html — just paste a chunk and Google does the rest]
beholder’s strategy might work in Canada, where we actually have 4 viable national parties, although the Greens have never gotten much farther than electing their leader Elizabeth May, and the NDP took a giant hit in the last election.(The Party Quebecois, the 5th major party, doesn’t run candidates outside Quebec.) But in the US putting your energy into any other party besides the Democrats as a candidate won’t work. An independent will either be ineffective, or be a de facto Democrat if they have enough profile. Bernie Sanders is an exception the proves the rule, and of course he’s generally sided with the Democrats.
@10
Apparently you missed this fact – while the Democrats can, and have been, running their own closed shadow meetings over all the crap that has been going on, the literal way in which the f-ing system is set up means that the asshat that the GOP has put in charge, as the majority, can just keep playing, “Well, I don’t like this, so I am taking the ball and leaving.”, and there is not anything at all they can do about it. Why? Because that little troll is the “leader” of the whole process, so long as the GOP is the majority, and so long as its not possible, for similar reasons, to throw his ass out. He has final say in whether or not they get to do jack shit, no matter what anyone wants, including his own party members, who have started to, at least on some things, apposed the President. As long as Dickhead, err,,, I mean “Johnson” is sitting in command of the process, no one can vote on legislation, pass legislation, vote to impeach people, or literally any f-ing things else, at all. All the shit head has to do is say, “Nope! I don’t like anything going on here. Lets recess for another week, and maybe when we come back you will start obeying the President, like I do.”, and its all f-ing over – because there are not enough people actually against him to override this bullshit.
Like so much else we have managed to set up in the hierarchy of our system, we managed, by giving one asshole the “control” of a process, unintentionally rigged the whole damn thing so that one single person, if corrupt enough, can derail any and all attempts to get jack shit done, unless its in lock step with a dictator. My biggest worry, and its a very real one, is that, assuming the President doesn’t somehow succeed it just getting all results thrown out, when the Democrats have a majority again they will do jack all, of any kind, to reform the process, or adjust the system, even when/if we get a new President in that isn’t GOP, to implement processes, or fundamental changes, which prevent such “single person bottlenecks”, and the ability of the next lunatic that comes along to just pull the same crap all over again, by using the systems flaws to stack the whole process against legitimate resistance to corruption, never mind curtail it to begin with.
But, no, is not “spineless” to be literally unable to do any f-ing work, because the current boss keeps sending everyone home, and refuses to even have meetings in which anyone actually does their jobs. That is called, “Intentional obstruction of the process by the person in charge of the meetings, to prevent anything from being done.” I am, not sure what the F you expect anyone to do about that exactly.
I will, however, say one thing which we likely can both agree with – the current regime spent years planning for a take over, and how to completely fuck over our government, including a detailed study of just how to attack its every weakness, then actually implemented it – all very Sith/Palpatine, but the Democratic parties idea of “long term planning” is always, “We know some things everyone wants, and will promise to try to do them, but until we actually get elected we won’t bother doing detailed anything, having a clear plan, or strategy to really do so, never mind spend years coming up with anything.” This has led to the current mess, where everything the Dems have been doing, or trying to do, when they are doing anything, is purely reactionary to the insane, detailed, very carefully, and maliciously, laid out plan of the freaks running the current regime’s dismantling and rearrangement of the whole system for their own horrific ends. The literal only thing that we haven’t gotten yet is some twisted statement about how they are going to, “Dissolve the Senate, and allow each state to be controlled entirely by its regional governor, as long as they, of course, obey the emperor’s mandates.”