Follow @Uncle-Ernie
Visit me on Face Book

Lying Donald's Attack On The Poor, The Sick, And The Elderly

By Ernest Stewart

"I think it's important to note that the chained CPI was originally a McConnell demand in negotiations back in December. But it was a bad idea then, and it's a really bad idea now." ~~~ Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)

"A doomsday future is not inevitable! But without immediate drastic action our prospects are poor. We must act collectively. We need strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities to ensure a sustainable future for humankind." ~~~ Adm. Chris Barrie ~ a member of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change and former chief of the Australian Defence Force

"Perez's doctrine, if followed, would certainly reduce the Democratic Party to permanent minority status. The Democrats can ill afford to lose 24 percent of its membership to either form a third party or to join the Republicans. Perez has forgotten the political truism that elections are won by addition, not subtraction. That means a tolerance of allies who might believe in things that one finds abhorrent, so long as widespread concurrence is present on most importance things." ~~~ Mark Whittington

"When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed." ~~~ Maya Angelou


I see where Lying Donald is about to attack the poor, the sick and the elderly to pay for his trillions of dollars of gifts to the uber wealthy. A new study released Tuesday shows just how insidious Lying Donald's administration's proposal to change the way the federal government measures poverty actually is. In short: millions could lose health and food benefits! They'll do this by replacing Consumer Price Index with the aptly named chained CPI.

Here's part of what the Rethuglicans want to happen...

* More than 250,000 adults would lose health insurance through Medicaid.
* More than 300,000 kids and some pregnant women would lose health insurance through the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
* Millions of people would receive fewer subsidies for purchasing health insurance on the Obamacare marketplace, making it more expensive to do so.
* More than 250,000 seniors and people with disabilities would lose or receive less access to the Medicare Part D subsidy program, forcing them to pay more for prescription drugs.
* More than 150,000 seniors and people with disabilities would lose premium assistance for Medicare Part B, meaning they'd have to pay over $1,500 to see a doctor.
* Over 200,000 people would lose food benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
* More than 100,000 students would become ineligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and more than 100,000 would lose free meals but remain eligible for reduced-price lunch.
* About 40,000 infants and young children would lose access to care such as breastfeeding support and healthy food through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

As terrible as that is, it's only the beginning of Lying Donald's plans for the poor, the sick and the elderly and you thought I was joking about those Happy Camps, huh? For the rest, Lying Donald is about to do in Obama Care and replace it with his own money making scheme. The worst is being held back until after he wins, or steals, the 2020 election.

In Other News

Back when I first came aware of the dangers of global warming in the late 1980s science warned that we could start having severe effects by 2100. No cause for alarm as long as we started to control global warming by 2050. By the late 90s scientist warned that if we continued to do nothing we would see the effects by 2050 and the cut off date was set at 2025. Trouble is by the turn of the century those effects were here and growing worse each year. Those effects were hotter days, wetter or drier years depending where your live. More forrest fires, worse floods, more tornadoes and hurricanes, more total climate disruption and it's not 2100 it's 2019 and now a lot of us are hanging on for our lives. Sad to say, it's only getting worse!

Unless nations quickly muster the political and social will to engineer an emissions-free industrial system, the impacts of a warming planet are likely to be so great as to cause "human civilization to collapse by 2050."" That's the scenario put forward in a May 2019 report published by Breakthrough-National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think tank based in Melbourne, Australia.

Calling many reports created for climate policymaking purposes "conservative and reticent" with their risk assessments, (or in Lying Donalds case global warming is just a Chinese plot to destroy our economy) the report's overview declares that "climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization." It defines an existential risk to civilization as one "posing permanent large negative consequences to humanity which may never be undone, either annihilating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtailing its potential."

The report, "Existential Climate-Related Security Risk: A Scenario Approach," was authored by David Spratt, a research director at Breakthrough, and Ian Dunlop, former chairman of the Australian Coal Association and chair of the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading. They argue the greatest threat lies "disproportionately in the 'fat-tail' outcomes" of the risk curve, i.e., the more extreme possible outcomes-scenarios that had previously been understated.

The 11-page report lays out a scenario by which climate change causes catastrophic impacts to human society. Key to its proposition of a potential 2050 doomsday is inaction by policymakers to take steps between now and 2030 to reduce the degree of warming. Under this scenario, if global human-caused greenhouse emissions continue to climb until 2030, that would cause "at least 3 degrees C of warming" - a rise considered by some scientists to be catastrophic.

Meanwhile, Lying Donald is doing everything in his power to make it happen by getting rid of all the environmental protection laws, just to keep feeding his bottom line no matter the consequences to the entire world. Yes, the rich will live longer than everyone else, but not for long!

And Finally

The DNC is at it again trying snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. You remember the DNC, they're the folks that got Lying Donald elected instead of Bernie Sanders by shoving Hilary down our throats, that worked out well, didn't it?

Well, Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez is doing two things that may give it all to Lying Donald again! The first is trying to shove Joe Biden down our throats when the base wants Bernie again, the second is totally ignoring the greatest threat that mankind has ever faced, Global Warming.

Biden who is a little to the right of... wait for it... Darth Vader. A man who hates black folks and women and who as a Senator spent his life holding both back while selling his soul to Wall Street and is going to be the Demoncratic nominee for the president if it drives the base away to voting Green or not voting at all, I'm having a deja vu again, are you?

Tom won't allow questions for the would be 20 dealing with Global Warming a thing so dangerous that it may kill us all in 25 to 30 years from now. I ask you WTF, America. Of course, if this puts Lying Donald back in office he may kill us all sooner than that!

Ergo, Tom Perez wins this week's Vidkun Quisling Award!

Keepin' On

It looks like our June 21st edition will be our last full magazine. With half a magazine we will continue on until the 2020 election, providing Lying Donald hasn't killed all of us by then. Not only haven't we been able to pay the last of last years bill, but a new bill comes due on June 24th.

You will notice some of your favorite authors will be missing as we have to pay their publishing rights in order to publish them. You'll have to look them up yourselves and may have to pay to read them on their sites. The same goes for some cartoonists.

We'll still keep fighting the good fight like we always have as we're in it to the end. If you think that what we do is important and would like to see us keep on, keeping on, please send us whatever you can, whenever you can, and we'll keep telling you the truth!

*****


02-12-1923 ~ 06-15-2019
Thanks for the film!



*****

We get by with a little help from our friends!
So please help us if you can-?
Donations

****** We've Moved The Forum Back *******

For late breaking news and views visit The Forum. Find all the news you'll otherwise miss. We publish three times the amount of material there than what is in the magazine. Look for the latest Activist Alerts. Updated constantly, please feel free to post an article we may have missed.

*****

So how do you like Trump so far?
And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it?

Until the next time, Peace!

(c) 2019 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter.

The mysterious mines that blew up two tankers, one of them Japanese-owned and operated, on Wednesday, sent a frisson of fear through the Gulf, since it was clear that Trump warmongers would blame Iran and then use the incident as a springboard to war.

Despite the confident pronouncements of "Benghazi Mike" Pompeo at his brief news conference, the fact is that US intelligence hasn't had time or access to come to a firm conclusion about the author of the mine attack.

Pompeo's people put out grainy video of some sort of small ship coming alongside one of the tankers and then leaving peacefully. Since this doesn't look very much like an attack, they are alleging that the Iranians were taking away an unexploded mine. That doesn't make any sense at all, and the video again needs to be carefully analyzed.

Pompeo alleged that only the Iranians had the expertise to deploy these mines.

We heard this crock for 8.5 years in Iraq - all shaped charges had to be Iran-backed, even those of al-Qaeda, because Iraqis didn't have the expertise. Shaped charges are a simple WWII technology and the US invaded Iraq out of fears it was so sophisticated that it could construct an atomic bomb. But Iraqi Sunnis couldn't make a shaped charge. Sure. Had to be Iran, helping those hyper-Sunni al-Qaeda. Very likely story.

In Iraq War days I was told that the Rumsfeld Department of Defense put out so much such arrant nonsense as anonymous news articles planted in the Iraqi press that some Defense Intelligence Agency analysts used to read my blog, confident that I would suss our the psyops horse manure and give an accurate picture. The Bush administration produced so much fake news about Iraq that Bush analysts were in danger of being fooled by it and recommending policy on the basis of it!

So about the allegation that no other forces could have deployed mines in the Gulf area.

Just last December, 86 mines were swept in the Red Sea, the planting of which was attributed to the Houthi rebels of Yemen. The Straits of Hormuz might see far away. But once they're already on the sea in a small ship, all they'd have to do pack some mines and ply the waters off southern Yemen and Oman over to the Straits of Hormuz, and they could have easily committed this act.

The Houthis have been intensively bombed for four years, with about a third of the targets having been civilian.. Most of the sorties against them have been flown by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the aggressors in the war on Yemen. They do not have an air force and have had to watch helplessly for 48 months as fire fell on their women and children. Some 233,000 Yemenis have been killed in the war, and while the Houthis are responsible for some of those deaths, the Saudis and UAE are responsible for the lion's share.

The Houthis have in recent weeks tried increasingly to take the fight to the enemy. They droned an oil facility, struck an airport with a rocket, and made incursions over to the Saudi side of the border, claiming, at least, to have taken some villages. That to accompany this pushback and press the Saudis to stop bombing and dicker, they might also try to target some tankers is perfectly plausible.

Despite what the Saudis and blowhards like Benghazi Mike keep alleging, the Houthis don't take orders from Iran and don't have that much to do with one another. Zaydi Shiites like the Houthis don't even have ayatollahs; you can't just read off politics from common Shiism, anyway, but in this case they aren't even from the same sect. It would be like assuming that all Methodists would line up politically behind the Baptists because both are Protestants. Iran has slipped some help to the Houthis, maybe a few million dollars worth. Trump says he's selling $110 billion worth of arms to the Saudis. So US help to Saudis is probably on the order of 10,000 times greater than Iranian aid to the Houthis.

Anyway, I admit that Houthi activity over in the Arabian Sea near the Gulf is a bit of a stretch, but it just isn't impossible.

I don't allege false flag attacks. They are rare, since too many possibilities for someone to blab or blow the whistle exist. But that the Houthis would and could take such an action would make sense.

It could also be by Iran, of course. I disapprove of violence, and denounce the attack on civilian tankers. But any reporter who reports that Iran might be the culprit is dishonest to Trumpan depths if they neglect to mention that that the US is stopping 100% of Iran's oil exports with no warrant of international law, no resolution from the UN Security Council, and in direct contradiction of US obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Trump breached. A physical blockade of Iran would be an act of war. I don't see why a financial blockade should be looked at as any different. Trump has committed numerous acts of naked aggression on the Iranian people. I don't condone a violent response, but anyone should be able to understand it.

(c) 2019 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

Friends often ask me why I spend so much time reading print versions of newspapers. I respond with the usual general reasons about learning what is happening, worsening or improving, in the world. I also point out that I send people helpful clippings.

Unfortunately, my responses do not get many people to expand their print newspaper reading time. Some recent topics that caught my attention might encourage you to revisit the printed version of your newspapers:

"It's the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to?" The Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler says this is not true. With his screen off, he showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled his data in a single week. Shame Apple and CEO Tim Cook. You lied.

"Take a Page From Kids Who Care" - The Washington Post's Christina Barron starts with the now famous Greta Thunberg's weekly protests on climate disruption before the Swedish Parliament and goes on to reference eight new books "in which kids engage, in ways big and small, to better the world."

"Why I'm Swearing off Trump's Nicknames," by Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post. About time a writer did this. When will reporters stop being Trump's bullhorn for his scornful, ugly nicknames, without printing rebuttals or nicknames coined by Trump critics- like "Draft-dodging Donald," or "Lying Donald," or "Corrupt Donald," for example.

"MacKenzie Bezos Pledges to Give Half of her $36 billion Fortune to Charity," by Washington Post's Rachel Siegel. One very rich couple's divorce may mean better lives and saving lives for many people if Ms. Bezos spends money to promote justice and we might need less charity. Her Foundation is coming.

"The Shadow Banks are back with another Big Bad Credit Bubble," by The Washington Post's incomparable Steve Pearlstein. With weak or no regulation of these speculators/lenders, there may be a replay of the 2008 financial crisis.

"Many teens sleep with their phones, survey finds-just like their parents" by The Washington Post's Craig Timberg. This practice undermines "cognitive function and mental health while increasing obesity rates" and causing household conflicts.

Joshua A. Douglas is out with a key book, Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting. Reclaiming the electoral process is crucial for our democracy and -to improve the quality of life in our country.

"Why We May all Have to Give Up Pork"-letter to the editor of The Washington Post by Patricia E. Perry. She cites documented infectious diseases and Trump's move to sideline federal inspectors and allow even more self-inspection by the meat packers wanting to speed up the slaughter-processing assembly lines. Ugh!

"Hogan Will Not Challenge Trump, Leaving Trump's GOP Critics with Limited Options," by The Washington Post's Robert Costa. Like Maryland governor Larry Hogan, other fearful, viable challengers like Senator Mitt Romney, former Ohio governor John Kasich, Arizona ex-Senator Jeff Flake, and former U.S. trade representative Carla Hills aren't going to challenge Trump. Trump is clearing the Republican primary field with foul mouthed intimidation. No matter these Republican politicians really believe Trump is a clear and present danger to our Republic and to the future of the Republican Party. Only the laid back former governor, William Weld, has his hat in the ring.

"The NFL Has Finally Been Consumed by the Concussion Issue. Why Hasn't the NHL?" by The New York Times' John Branch. Consumed, that is, after years of cover-ups. The Hockey bosses literally stage fights between players kept on the team just to fight for the boisterous crowds. Head injuries have taken the lives and diminished the brain functions of scores of players over their shortened lives. This is criminal and sets a bad example for youthful amateur sports where concussions are not taken seriously enough. See our Leagueoffans.org.

"Art Festival is Welcome, But Not the Huge Crowds," by The New York Times'Helene Stapinski. The 13th annual free "Figment Arts Festival" on Roosevelt Island is overwhelmed by 30,000 visitors. "Huge crowds forced the tram to shut down and the bridge to close, overwhelming the subway platform." Makes you wonder why civic conferences, open free to the public, dealing with the most precious matters of livelihood, peace, and justice beg to fill the empty seats.

"If Trump Doesn't Warrant Impeachment, Who Does?" by The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. It's useful to have Robinson list many of Trump's impeachable offenses in one place. He still left out several serious acts such as blatantly, openly dismantling the enforcement of health and safety laws in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the law and conducting illegal wars without Congressional declarations and appropriations.

"The Cybersecurity 202: Democratic Base Fired Up by Effort to Ban Internet-Connected Voting Machines." By Joseph Marks of The Washington Post. Why not an easy solution? While we are at it, why not adopt the Canadian system of paper ballots fully counted by 11pm on election day in that vast country with no proprietary software and corrupt procurement of voting machines.

"When will the Republican Silence on Trump End?" An op-ed by William S. Cohen, former Senator from Maine and Secretary of Defense. Hmm, when will Mr. Cohen decide to practice what he preaches and run against Trump in the Republican primaries?

"Why are so many doctors burning out? Tons of real and electronic paperwork," by Daniel Marchalik in The Washington Post. Physicians are quitting because they have too little time to practice medicine. Not so in Canada where they have Medicare for all and almost no billing nightmares for themselves and their patients.

Newspaper publishers want readers to discover that print versions of newspapers can expose you to content that you don't already agree with or like online. You aren't likely to go searching for an article saying "You can't stop Robocalls, You Shouldn't Have to." The New York Times put Brian Chen's article on this topic on a page for you. By reading the print edition of a newspaper, you might just see something that your online news alerts or search engine algorithms don't automatically present.

Nothing changes on the electoral scene, and little at the grassroots level, unless the structure of capitalist hegemony over political discourse in the U.S. -- the corporate duopoly -- is broken.

Long, long ago -- in the late 1970s, to be more precise - I spent a Washington-to-New York AMTRAK ride talking politics with Black Detroit Congressman John Conyers, whom I considered a friend. The Congressional Black Caucus numbered only sixteen members at that time, less than a third its current size, and Conyers was among its most left-leaning members, along with the Bay Area's Ron Dellums and Gus Savage, the former labor activist from Chicago. There were no right wing members of the Black Caucus.

Since Conyers had no problem describing himself as a "socialist," and routinely won re-election with more than 80 percent of the vote in his overwhelmingly Black district, I asked him why he remained in the Democratic Party, which was - then, as now - dominated by warmongering servants of capital. Conyers seemed shocked at the question. "The party would destroy me if I ran outside of it," the Congressman replied, a look of horror on his still-youthful face, as if I had proposed that he go swimming in a shark tank.

I remember that conversation as the moment when a light went out in my head, leaving a deep foreboding. My own journalistic project, which I dubbed, "Merging the Media, the Masses and the Movement" was riding high. "America's Black Forum," the first Black nationally syndicated news interview program on commercial television, which debuted the same week as Alex Haley's Roots miniseries, was making U.S. and global news every week and consistently beating Issues and Answers, Face the Nation and Meet the Press in the Washington, DC ratings, despite -- or more likely because of -- its very Left perspective.. My weekday employer, the Mutual Black Radio Network, provided hourly newscasts to 85 radio stations, about the same number of affiliates as claimed by our competition, the National Black Network. Together, the two networks reached almost the whole of Black America -- a truly national Black information system.

Vietnam had been fully liberated a few years earlier, and Marxist-led movements were triumphing in the former Portuguese colonies of southern Africa, with decisive assistance from Cuba -- victories that were savored and shared by the still-active remnants of the African American liberation movement. The CIA had just been bludgeoned by the Church Committee of the Senate for its role as global hit man, followed by months of House committee hearings on the domestic assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and others. It looked like the spooks had lost their mojo.

But within a decade, one of the radio networks that had filled Black America with hourly news broadcasts would be gone, and the other vastly shrunken. Ultimately, Black radio news would go extinct, replaced by pockets of uniformed talk that young people mistake for news. The Soviet Union tottered and then disintegrated, depriving global socialist movements of sanctuary, aid, arms and international infrastructure. Republican Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign in blood-stained Neshoba County, Mississippi, so that every cracker in the country would know where he stood on the color line. Reagan then proceeded to systematically roll back the New Deal and Great Society, a vandalization joyously joined by the next Democrat to win the White House, Bill Clinton, who kicked off his campaign in the Klan's hallowed ground of Stone Mountain, Georgia. Lest anyone mistake what time it was, campaign photos showed "New Democrat" Clinton with a backdrop of Black prisoners in chains.

Soon, half the Congressional Black Caucus would say Yes to a "crime" bill that greatly accelerated the Mass Black Incarceration regime that was already in high gear when John Conyers and I had our late-Seventies Amtrak chat. Back then, there was no identifiable pro-corporate faction within the Black Caucus because labor union contributions made up the bulk of members' campaign chests. But by the turn of the 21st century, Black incumbents were no longer "safe," as the corporate Right set its sights on Black Democratic districts, ousting Alabama's Earl Hilliard and Georgia's Cynthia McKinney in 2002, replacing them with Black rightwing Democrats, and almost installing the private school voucher-pushing Cory Booker as mayor of Newark, New Jersey. By 2005, the Congressional Black Caucus was voting with the corporate telecomsin greater proportion than the Democratic House Caucus as a whole - and the next year the corporate Right succeeded in putting Booker in Newark's city hall.

John Conyers and about ten other "left-liberals"-- hardly anyone mentioned the word "socialist" anymore -- were a distinct minority in a Caucus that had swollen to more than 40 members (now 53, plus two senators). Black America had achieved numerical representation in the lower chamber of Congress roughly equal to its percentage of the U.S. population, but bearing no resemblance to Black America's actual political makeup. The "representationist" imperative of Black politics -- the desire that Black people be "represented" in all aspects of U.S. society -- had triumphed, but Black left, self-determinationist politics had lost its voice, almost entirely.

When the racialized disaster capitalist Katrina apocalypse uprooted much of Black New Orleans in 2005, Black America was horrified, outraged and ready to fight. Virtually every Black church, civic and social organization sprang forward with a Katrina outreach, aid or protest project. A true national Black political mobilization was possible, but was smothered by the corporate-dominated Democratic Party, which has infested every nook and cranny of the Black polity. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, fearing that a Black national uproar over Katrina would harm the Party's chances of winning control of the House in 2006, not only refused to hold Democratic hearings on Katrina, but ordered the Black Caucus to boycott Republican Katrina hearings, as well. When Rep. Cynthia McKinney - who had briefly recaptured her Atlanta seat -- violated Pelosi's edict, she was shunned and isolated by most of the Black Caucus, including John Conyers, who hoped to assume the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee in a Democrat-controlled House.

Conyers got his chairmanship with the Democratic sweep in 2006, but Black people were now deep into their fourth decade without a grassroots movement. Two generations of Blacks no longer had even a memory of what a mass movement looks like, or how to make a demand. But the worst was yet to come with the advent of the First Black U.S. President. His election was the ultimate achievement of Black "representationist" politics, ironically made possible by the geopolitical disaster in Iraq, which required that U.S. imperialism put on a radically different face (in symbolic racial, not political terms). For the first time since the post-civil rights era, Black Democrats abandoned their old stand-by "Marshal Plan for the Cities" so as not to encumber Barack Obama with even a pro-forma demand. It appeared that Black politics, at least of the kind practiced within the bounds of the Democratic Party, was dead - as if senatorial candidate Obama was being prophetic when he told the 2004 Democratic convention, "...there is no Black America, only the United States of America." (Now that Obama has left the White House, Black Democrats have resurrected the "Marshal Plan.")

Obama proved, in the flesh, that any Black politician deemed acceptable as president by the corporate chiefs of the Democratic Party can get away with more crimes against African Americans and the world in general than white presidents. Obama continued George Bush's wars and started some of his own, completed the military occupation of the African continent, and fielded vast legions of jihadists as U.S. imperial foot soldiers in Libya and Syria, while rescuing the financial criminal class from the ruin of their own creation. He did absolutely nothing to save Black folks, who lost half their collective wealth. Any white Democratic president would probably have responded more positively to the Black economic disaster, if only because Black people would have brought more pressure on a white chief executive.

But a change of color cannot arrest the objective decline of the U.S. imperial order, at home and abroad. Organized discontent did manifest itself in the Obama era, directed at "the 1%" and the cops, the domestic army of Black occupation. The mobilizations of the Occupy Movement and what came to be known as Black Lives Matter both immediately collided with cops nominally overseen by Democrats. Occupy was shut down in 2011 on Obama's orders in coordinated actions of mostly Democratic local governments and the FBI, while most of the sites of Black anti-cop protests were also Democrat controlled. Although the Democratic National Committee made a show of endorsing Black Lives Matter, Black Democrats fought tooth and nail to derail the first Black grassroots movement in two generations. But thanks to these two movements, the legitimacy of the rule of the rich and their police - and of Black Misleadership Class operatives like Al Sharpton - was severely eroded.

In the 1980s, Rep. John Conyers held hearings around the country, tracking police brutality. Today's Black Caucus sleeps, eats and votes with the enemy. Eighty percent of the Caucus voted in 2014 to continue the Pentagon's infamous 1033 program that distributes military weapons, gear and training to local police - a program that President Obama increased 24-fold. Last year, 75 percent of the Black Caucus supported a bill to make police a protected class and treat assaults on cops as hate crimes.

The more Black Democrats get elected to Congress, the worse they get. Except for Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar, every Black Democrat elected in 2016 and 2018 is a party hack and servant of capital.

Thanks to the Occupy Movement, an old white leftish politician found his voice and ran for president in 2016 on a New Deal reform program he called "socialist," putting the term back in polite conversation. But you can't "occupy" the oligarch's party; you can only be co-opted by it. The best thing that can come out of Bernie Sanders' second attempt to force the Democratic Party to disobey the Lords of Capital would be a breakup of the Party, leading to significant desertions of leftish activists and rank and file. Nothing changes on the electoral scene, and little at the grassroots level, unless the structure of capitalist hegemony over political discourse in the U.S. -- the corporate duopoly -- is broken.

Sanders' platform - Medicare for All, $15 wage, free public college, Green New Deal - is supported by super-majorities of 80 percent and more. These reforms would bust the austerity regime wide open, an absolutely unacceptable outcome for a ruling class that is trying to prepare the people for a future of mass precarity. That's why the Lords of Capital have allowed/instructed Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and others to pretend to support Medicare for All and other Sanders proposals -- to confuse and dilute super-majority sentiment. Cory Booker took more money from Big Pharma than any other senator in 2014, and will return to his sugar daddies' pockets when his 2020 election season diversion is over.

If four out of five voters support Medicare for All, then upwards of 90 percent of Blacks want to see the program passed into law. But only 32 of the 53 Black lawmakers in the House have signed on to Rep. Pramila Jayapal's companion measure to Sander's Senate bill. And half of them are lying, following Booker's lead, as an election season scam.

Most coverage of Donald Trump's re-election campaign to date has focused on polls, specifically two: a Fox survey that showed Trump losing to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in a hypothetical one-on-one (but beating other Democrats) and Trump's own internal polling that, to the glee of reporters, leaked, showing him trailing Biden by a ton in a head to head matchup.

The latter revelation was particularly humorous given that Trump later tweeted that "only fake polls" showed him behind the "Motley Crew," his new term for the Democratic field.

Polls aside, Trump's launch is already notable for the themes he's choosing to stress. He released a video Monday re-hashing his 2016 populist formula. It's not often that a sitting president promises to take on Washington, but he did it. "We're taking on the failed political establishment and restoring government of, by and for the people," it says. "It's the people, you're the people, you won the election." We should expect more rhetoric along these lines tonight.

Last time, it was an awesome display of chutzpah when the billionaire scion of inherited wealth ran and won as a champion of the common voter. If he manages to repeat the feat this time by running from inside the White House as a political outsider - while doing one-hour ABC specials bragging about how awesome it is to travel by Air Force One and Marine helicopter - it might be time to admit Trump's only peer in the annals of con artistry will be the guy who sold the Eiffel Tower twice.

That Trump continues to present himself as a populist isn't surprising, since it worked last time. What's interesting is that much of the Democratic field appears to be gearing up to use the same strategy. This would be a departure from 2016, where the battle lines coalesced around a theme that ultimately cut against Democrats: experience and competence versus change and upheaval. Trump ran on blowing it all up and won.

This time around, Democratic campaigns seem to recognize voters are still in detonation mode. Yahoo Finance just ran a piece describing the 2020 race as likely to be "competing visions of economic populism between Senator Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump."

This doesn't mean the general election will be between Trump and Sanders. It does however suggest that the substantive issues of next summer's national debate will revolve around whose campaign provides the most plausibly sweeping corrective to the failures of modern American capitalism.

As Yahoo puts it: "In a development that experts say is a reflection of the public's increasingly fraught relationship with unfettered free markets, virtually all major Democratic contenders have pushed populist platforms."

If there's an early theme to the Democratic stumpery in places like Iowa, it's been the idea of using the government to intervene in the markets to correct systemic inequities, using policies that would have been non-starters just a few years ago.

With the proposal of his "Economic Bill of Rights," Sanders has planted a flag firmly on one side of the debate, offering guarantees for housing, a job with a $15 per hour fair wage, single-payer health care, and retirement.

Numerous candidates have proposed some version of a "Green New Deal," with Washington governor Jay Inslee stressing the issue the most. His spokesperson Jamal Raad calls Inslee's plan a "full-scale mobilization of the federal government to defeat climate change," one that includes a plan to create 8 million jobs over 10 years.

Former Housing Secretary JuliAn Castro toured a trailer park in Waukee and talked about spiking rents, promising relief.>Calling affordable housing a "human right," Castro has proposed tax cuts for anyone paying more than 30 percent of their income toward housing.

On the education front, 18 of the 23 Democratic candidates have come out in favor of some form of free college tuition, with Castro, Elizabeth Warren, and Sanders promising free tuition at all public higher institutions. Multiple Democratic candidates have endorsed a federal jobs guarantee program, with Sanders, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and New Jersey's Cory Booker being the most vocal. This comes on the heels of polls showing majorities of voters in all 50 states being in favor of some kind of jobs guarantee program - even states won by Trump.

On health care, many of the candidates claim to be in favor of Medicare-for-All, including Booker and California's Kamala Harris, both co-sponsors of a Sanders Medicare-for-All bill (although those two have walked back their support somewhat).

A few candidates have gone to places even Sanders has not. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang's plan is to pay $1000 a month in Universal Basic Income or, as he calls it, a "freedom dividend."

"Who can be against a freedom dividend?" he's said. "What kind of asshole do you have to be?"

The Trump version of interventionist populism is a little less ideological and a little more opportunistic, similar to an Asiatic khan who hands out camels when he hears grousing inside a tent. Earlier this year, Trump was on his way to visit an LNG plant in Louisiana and had to cross a bridge over the Calcaisieu River. Unimpressed with what he saw, he ended up offering Louisianans money for a new bridge if elected. He just signed a bill for $19 billion in disaster relief for the Florida panhandle, and when his trade war with China resulted in a threat of retaliatory tariffs against American agribusiness, Trump doled out $16 billion in aid to farmers.

Trump's populist credentials owe a lot to his omnivorous borrowing from the rhetoric of countless anti-establishment campaigns, past and present - from the anti-interventionism of Ron Paul, to the "outside the box" campaign of fellow non-politician Herman Cain, and even to Sanders, whom he often praised on the trail, seemingly as a way to tweak Hillary Clinton (Trump said at one point in April of 2016 that Bernie was "telling the truth" about Hillary).

Since becoming president, Trump has been touting his commitment to "forgotten Americans," a theme ironically culled from another insurgent campaign that targeted angry white middle class voters: the late 2008 primary run of Hillary Clinton. The Mark Penn-designed "invisible America" stump theme helped Hillary win Pennsylvania and nearly turn things around against Barack Obama.

"Invisible Americans" was itself an echo of Bill Clinton's "forgotten middle class" concept, which in turn was an echo of Richard Nixon's "silent majority," etc. Campaign faux-populism is so constantly recycled, it's often difficult to trace the original author of the false promises.

In 2015-2016, Trump's prescriptions for change often involved pledges to get on the phone and alter history with the force of his Trumpiness. The Ford motor company planning to move a plant to Mexico? "I wouldn't let it happen," candidate Trump promised.

Trump also promised to take on the Wall Street guys who were "getting away with murder," and jack up their taxes. "The hedge fund people make a lot of money and they pay very little tax," he said as a candidate. "I want to lower taxes for the middle class." He went after both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for ties to Goldman Sachs.

Years later, we know how a lot of this turned out. He didn't raise taxes on the rich, but did the opposite, giving them a historic tax break (middle class voters will see some cuts, just not as much). Soon after election, he put a slew of the same Goldman execs he railed against as a candidate in his White House. As a result you'll see a lot of quotes like one from former Obama official Karine Jean-Pierre, who said voters "just won't buy" Trump as an outsider going forward.

But there's been so much upheaval, conflict, and overall weirdness in America in the last two years that Trump may end up benefitting just from the perception of things being different. A CNN poll from earlier this year showed 76 percent of Americans believed Trump created "significant changes" in the country, and the split on whether those changes were positive versus negative was blurrier than you'd guess - 33 percent in favor, 37 percent against.

Those numbers don't sound all that great for Trump, until one considers that voters last time consistently said they supported change even if they didn't know what the change in question would be. Trump, just by being Trump, has a path to winning the "change agent" mantle in any theoretical general election matchup.

It's why people like Trump campaign manager Tim Murtaugh are able to say, without irony, that Trump "promised to go to Washington and shake things up, and he certainly has." If Barack Obama offered Hope and Change, Trump mostly just offers change - but his underestimated strength as a politician is that he's always understood a lot of America is crazy, pessimistic and depressed enough to settle just for that.

Democrats in 2016 ran on not being Donald Trump, which seemed at the time like it should be enough. There are polls out already this time suggesting the same strategy could work this time. That's probably dangerous thinking. Democrats promising radical action meanwhile are probably on to something, not just as a way to re-take the White House, but because the country needs and wants it. Major structural reform is long overdue in America, and if Democrats don't promise it, just watch tonight - Donald Trump will.