I don't like accurately predicting the future. But it happens to me sometimes. And it's never a good thing.

Not once have I predicted that I would stumble upon a great sum of money or that a friendly squirrel would mysteriously leave a fresh, delicious scone on my windowsill. No, the things I've said that have come true years later have always been utterly awful. And the latest one has to do with California.

This week, Donald Trump has continued to blame the horrific fires in California on forest mismanagement-basically saying that if the parks service had just raked up a few more dry leaves, then countless people, homes and buildings would not have been incinerated. I unintentionally predicted this kind of idiocy. I said something similar in a 2011 stand-up comedy album titled "Chaos For The Weary."

To paraphrase, I said, "You notice no matter how close they say the major effects of global warming are, it doesn't change how we all behave. ... Soon they'll be saying, 'People in California are ON FIRE!' and everyone will be like, 'They probably live in a very fiery area. They're probably storing dry stuff in their homes-like old magazines and elderly people."

And sure enough, here we are. People in California are on fire, and the president is saying it's because they stored too many dry pine needles around their homes. Trump is able to do this because most of the mainstream media are allowing him to fill a void-a void that represents the answer to these questions: "Why is this happening? Why is our nation turning into one of the lower circles of hell?"

Don't get me wrong-the corporate media have extensively covered that California is ON FIRE. They have. They just can't bring themselves to say the words "climate change" very often. No. It gets caught in their throat like a dry falafel puck. They look like they want to say it but just can't-like a dog that wants to tell you it has a thorn in its paw. But it's just impossible.

Take, for example, "NBC Nightly News." You can't get a finer news program anywhere (in the building where they tape). I watched a full six-minute segment last week covering multiple California fires, the destruction, the loss of life; they even had reporters on the ground. And yet throughout the entire report, they never uttered the words "climate change," "global warming" or even simply, "We are fucked." Instead, they made it sound like fires are a tragic yet common occurrence, and the cities will rebuild.

Never speaking the words "climate change" while whole towns literally go up in flames is like covering the drowning death of someone and never mentioning he was being waterboarded at the time. The real cause of these fires is at least half the story, if not more.

NBC host Kate Snow did say these fires are "ones for the history books," but I guess those books are going to get shorter and shorter because "1,000-year fires" are quickly becoming "5-year fires." Saying these fires are "ones for the history books" implies that 20 years from now, the children in California will be reading about the Great fires of 2018.

But they won't.

They won't be in the history books-because in 20 years the history books will be ON FIRE. And the great fires of 2018 will look like nothing but a warm day with a pina colada. Here's an example of what I mean: A headline from HuffPost read, "California's Wildfires This Year Have Been Breaking Records-The state has experienced some of the biggest and deadliest fires in its history this year." Sounds pretty accurate, doesn't it? The only problem is that article is from December 2017. LAST year. Did they go down in the history books? How often does everyone huddle under the blankets and take turns telling scary tales about the 2017 fires?

Acting like each year's fires are a fluke that will never happen again-that in and of itself is denying climate change. It is lying to the American people in order to cover up that we are promoting a system based on big oil, big factory farming and big environmental destruction. A new Media Matters report found the mainstream media only say "climate change" in reports about these recent fires 4 percent of the time.

Now, some of you may be thinking, "You can't prove these fires were caused by climate change." And you're right. I can't. But the Union of Concerned Scientists can.

They said, "The effects of global warming on temperature, precipitation levels, and soil moisture are turning many of our forests into kindling during wildfire season." The scientists also pointed out that wildfires are increasing and that the wildfire season is getting longer in the U.S. In terms of forest fires over 1,000 acres in size, in the 1980s, there were 140. In the 1990s, there were 160. And from 2000 to 2012, there were 250. And as mentioned before, 2017 was California's worst wildfire season. ... Until 2018.

So if they're not willing to talk about the obvious causes of our pop-up infernos, what was "NBC Nightly News" reporting on? Well, they spent a good amount of time on the firefighters-correctly informing viewers that these men and women are heroes, and they're putting their lives on the line to try to save people they've never met. Good job, NBC. You only missed one thing. You somehow failed to say that many of the firefighters you highlighted are PRISONERS LOCKED AWAY IN CALIFORNIA'S CORRECTIONAL SYSTEM!

Estimates are that 30 percent of the state's firefighters are prisoners, and it's clear from the uniforms that many of the ones NBC filmed were indeed inmates. Sure, they volunteered for that job, but many of them are locked up for small crimes and see no way out of the misery and hardship of prison other than to "volunteer" for fire duty. It's kind of like how I "volunteered" to give my wallet and shoes to that guy with a gun when he casually noted that he liked my wallet and shoes.

Furthermore, the inmates are working as firefighters for roughly $1 per hour.

ONE DOLLAR PER HOUR.

They get paid less than the amount of money most people are willing to bend down to pick up if they see it in a puddle. But NONE of this is said by "NBC Nightly News" even as they show video of the inmates fighting fires. This would be like showing Nike sweatshop workers in Indonesia and saying, "These fine craftsmen are making your shoes. Oh man, do they love making shoes. They volunteered to do it."

Are you starting to get the point? Kate Snow's job-like most of those in mainstream media-is to cover up your reality. Her job is to make you think we live in a system that can recover from this carnage WITHOUT large-scale changes, without a new economic paradigm that doesn't reward waste and planned obsolescence and profiting off the lives of others. Generally speaking, the job of mainstream corporate outlets is to ignore the harsh reality that our endless consumption and furious appetite for fossil fuels are burning our country, turning it into a desert wasteland-and the easiest response is to throw slave labor at the problem.

On the other hand, it's the job of you and me to see through the propaganda, through the spectacle and the bullshit, and to fight for a better world.

Maybe it will help if I predict that 20 years from now we all will have woken up from this mass delusion and switched to a sustainable, green, egalitarian economic system.

It's about time I had a positive prediction come true.

(c) 2018Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of the weekly comedy news TV show "Redacted Tonight With Lee Camp" on RT America. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.

Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.

Increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party's mobilized base, that grip has held on with gobs of money from centralized, deep-pocket sources-endlessly reinforcing continual deference to corporate power and an ongoing embrace of massively profitable militarism.

Pelosi has earned a reputation as an excellent manager, and she has certainly managed to keep herself in power atop Democrats in the House. She's a deft expert on how Congress works, but she seems out of touch-intentionally or not-with the millions of grassroots progressives who are fed up with her kind of leadership.

Those progressives should not reconcile with Pelosi, any more than they should demonize her. The best course will involve strategic confrontations-nonviolent, emphatic, civilly disobedient-mobilizing the power of protest as well as electoral activism within Democratic primaries.

Such well-planned actions as Tuesday's "Green New Deal" sit-in at Pelosi's Capitol office serve many valuable purposes. (Along the way, they help undermine the absurd right-wing Fox News trope that portrays her as some kind of leftist.) Insistently advocating for strong progressive programs and calling Pelosi out on her actual positions despite nice-sounding rhetoric can effectively widen the range of public debate. Over time, the process creates more space and momentum for a resurgent left.

There is much to counter at the top of the party. Pelosi still refuses to support single-payer enhanced "Medicare for all." As on many other issues, she-and others, such as the more corporate-friendly House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer-are clinging to timeworn, Wall Street-friendly positions against powerful political winds generated by years of grassroots activism.

Increasingly, such leadership is isolated from the party it claims to lead. Yet the progressive base is having more and more impact. As a Vox headline proclaimed, more than a year ago, "The stunning Democratic shift on single-payer: In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might." The Medicare for All Caucus now lists 76 House members. Any progressive should emphatically reject Pelosi's current embrace of a "pay-go" rule that would straitjacket spending for new social programs by requiring offset tax hikes or budget cuts. Her position is even more outrageous in view of her fervent support for astronomical military spending. Like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who was just re-elected to his post), Pelosi went out of her way last winter to proclaim avid support for President Trump's major increase in the already-bloated Pentagon budget, boasting: "In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense."

Whether our concerns involve militarism, social equity, economic justice, civil liberties, climate change or the overarching necessity of a Green New Deal, the Democratic Party must change from the bottom up. That means progressives across the country should run candidates from precinct levels upward and maintain pressure on all elected officials, including the congressional Democrats with progressive records.

Newly elected House members will raise the total membership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to about 90. A dozen caucus members are in line to chair House committees in the new Congress; another 30 are set to chair subcommittees. The Progressive Caucus is now co-chaired by Raul Grijalva of Arizona and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, two of the strongest progressive lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The contrasts between their advocacy and the meanderings of the caucus's more tepid members are sometimes striking.

During the Obama years, by deferring to top-tier party leaders, many in the Progressive Caucus showed themselves to be unreliable advocates for progressive causes when push came to shove-during the 2009 health care debate, for example. Yet the left-leaning tendencies in the caucus can now be strengthened and reinforced-if constituent pressure is insistent. When necessary, that insistence should include credible threats of launching primary challenges.

While the governing body of the party, the Democratic National Committee, gave ground this year on such matters as internal party democracy (disempowering superdelegates in the process), senior Democrats have retained a firm hold on such powerful mechanisms as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). It is emblematic of a larger problem that in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, an unrelenting series of DCCC emails to millions of recipients featured appeals from such standard party figures as James Carville, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer-none of whom supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primaries. The emails reflect how lopsided and corporate the power structures of the DCCC and top-ranking Democrats in Congress remain.

In sync with such corporate sensibilities, some of the party's big mainline names are now mobilizing to pressure incoming Democrats to support Pelosi for speaker. "Democratic Party luminaries are calling members-elect on Pelosi's behalf," Politico reported this week; they include New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former Vice President Al Gore and former Secretary of State John Kerry.

This year, many progressive individuals and organizations have moved beyond the false choice of either building movements or seriously trying to win elections. We can and must do both-simultaneously, not sequentially-to the benefit of both parallel tasks. The Republican Party's loss of the House was largely due to decisions by substantial numbers of people on the left to engage with the electoral process as never before. Moving forward, we need to strengthen social movements, as well as electoral capacities, so we can end Republican rule and replace it with genuinely progressive governance.

The Democrats and their media have fashioned a trap for Blacks and browns: accept endless foreign wars and domestic austerity in return for the representation of dark faces in high places in the governing hierarchy.

The Kenyan proverb tells us, "When elephants fight, the grass suffers." In contemporary capitalist circumstances, the raging split in the U.S. ruling class, now in its third year, tramples simple truths and common sense beyond recognition, stupefying the whole corporate herd. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except that the common folk, including self-styled "progressives" and "resisters," have been imbibing the same mind-deadening media brew as the rulers are drinking, as can be expected under a corporate communications dictatorship. When the media moguls go mad, as they have been for the last two years, the insanity becomes general.

It is also true that, when the slave adopts her master's vocabulary and shares his enemies, she no longer requires an overseer, but will whip herself into obedience. If Malcolm X were alive, he would tell us that Black Democrats are playing a fool's game. There is no fundamental disagreement within the white ruling class on the necessity of endless war and austerity in order to maintain their grip on global power.The split arises over HOW to sustain that white supremacist, capitalist order.

Donald Trump threw his class brethren into a panic when he succeeded in assembling an Electoral College majority, in 2016. His formula for victory was to promise the nation's largest effective political bloc -- white people that prioritize racial dominance, and who accurately called racists -- that their "America" would be made great again, with all the imagined advantages to their group. It is a tried and true rich white man's strategy, one that was never fully abandoned by either of the two corporate U.S. political parties -- the Republican "wolves" and the Democratic "foxes," as Malcolm dubbed them.

Trump gave the still politically potent white racist masses red-meat rhetoric to satisfy their hunger for palpable evidence of the continued sanctity of white skin privilege and status, as guaranteed to them by their "forefathers." Since U.S. elections are, by careful design, contests between factions of the ruling class, Trump's strategy was to demonize the rich folks that had sold out "good American's" jobs to China and were wasting national treasure and lives in wars of "regime change" and "nation-building" in "shit-hole" countries. Thus, in championing domestic white supremacy, Trump blamed the Democrat-aligned factions of the ruling class for endless wars and a job-draining austerity regime that, somehow, elevated Black and brown people.

This was very bad corporate manners, and sufficient to galvanize most of the ruling class behind Hillary Clinton and the Democratic "foxes," who were fully aware that U.S. imperialism was, indeed, losing its global contest with the command economy of China, and had already lost its proxy jihadist war against a Syrian government buttressed by Russia. Trump's snipes at U.S. war and trade policy marked him as an undependable imperialist, at best, and a class traitor, at worst.

The Democratic ruling class faction, already dependent on Black voters for one quarter of its national base and eager to solidify its hold on Hispanics, had long been reconciled, albeit grudgingly, to the necessity of a "rainbow party" electoral strategy. But Black and brown representationwithin the party does not - must not - mean retreat from the core strategy of endless wars and austerity, the only future that late-stage capitalism envisions for the planet. Therefore, in order to both rescue the imperial project and reclaim a domestic electoral majority, the Democrats -- now the most aggressive "War Party" and the true party of the ruling class -- portray Trump as an ally of Russia and themselves as the party of "diversity."

They have fashioned a trap for Blacks and browns: accept endless foreign wars and domestic austerity in return for the representation of dark faces in high places in the governing hierarchy. This is the puropose of the Democrats' Trump vs. Anti-Trump equation: Black and brown collaboration with white corporate rule in the twilight of ever-consolidating capitalism -- a regime that requires the maintenance of the Mass Black Incarceration State. It means reducing Black politics to accommodation with the purported "rainbow" faction of the ruling class, assisting in Jeff Bezos's infinite acquisitions, Silicon Valley's relentless intrusions, Citibank's all-consuming thievery and gentrification, and the military industrial complex's ever-escalating holocausts.

That's a "Satan's Sandwich," to borrow the words of Black Kansas City congressman Emanuel Cleaver, when asked to endorse President Obama's "Grand Bargain" with the Republicans of trillion dollar social spending cuts. Obama's bipartisan deal remains in effect, because austerity is Democratic Party policy, just as it is Republican policy under Donald Trump - austerity for the masses plus gargantuan tax cuts for the rich. Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have no plans to roll back Trump's tax cuts, and 60 percent of Democrats supported giving Trump an even bigger military budget than he asked for. Pelosi is keeping her promise to oppose spending measures that are not "pay-as-you-go," requiring tax hikes or cuts in other programs. And Democratic leadership will do everything in its power to throttle Medicare-For-All single payer health care, a program for which there is a national consensus of at least 70 percent -- 85 percent of Democrats and even majorities of Republicans! - because the ruling class opposes it.

Given that virtually all Democrats want single payer, as do half of Republicans, the effective opposition to Medicare-for-All are the corporate congressional Democrats that thwart the will of their party base. The same goes for issues of war and peace. The reality of U.S. political alignments is that the white racist voting base -- about half the white electorate -- appears irreducible unless white supremacists are presented with a stark and substantive choice between their family's physical well-being and the imperative to express hatred of non-whites. Such legislative initiatives cannot come from the Republican Party, which is the White Man's Party, dedicated to racist reaction, but they are determinedly strangled by corporate Democrats. The inescapable conclusion, therefore, is that the Democratic Party is the primary mechanism that suppresses progressive thought and action in the United States. The party is a finely tuned ruling class tool, whose greatest accomplishment in the post-civil rights era has been to contain and harness the Black electorate, the most pro-peace and leftist polity in the nation.

And now they have succeeded in further strangling this progressive bastion -- with a fake "Russian" noose. The duplicity of the Democrats, and the Democratic corporate media, is obvious in their reaction to Donald Trump's firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the die-hard, deep-fried Alabama segregationist and law-and-order cracker who was Trump's earliest supporter in the U.S. Senate. Every decent person should have been celebrating the dismissal of this miscreant as the top cop of the country - whatever Trump's reasons. But top Democrats and pundits reacted as if Session's exit was a disaster because it might endanger the Mueller investigation into Trump's alleged "collusion" with Moscow and Wikileaks. The ruling class priority -- and, therefore, the Democratic Party's main concern -- is not to battle white supremacy, but to gin up anti-Russia hysteria and thus justify endless war and the austerity that accompanies it.

Accordingly, Democrats see no contradiction in their glee at word that the Trump administration is planning to prosecute Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, possibly on espionage charges stemming from leaks during the Obama administration. If Trump and Wikileaks conspired with "the Russians" to sabotage Hillary Clinton's campaign, then why is Trump preparing to prosecute his supposed co-colluder? Wouldn't that be an invitation to Assange to rat Trump out?

But of course, there was no collusion; if there were, then some smidgeon of proof would have been presented over the past two years, yet there has been none. It's all about war and austerity, and keeping the lid on growing discontent and despair among the populace in the imperial headquarters country. And especially about making Black people believe that Putin is an ally of their arch enemy, Trump, and that the Democrats are their friends.

As Malcolm told us (take your pick, they're all relevant and true):

"Don't you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who's depriving you of your rights. They're not your friends, no, they're your enemies. Treat them like that." "The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."

"[The Negro] should realize that he is living in a war zone, and he is at war with an enemy that is as vicious and criminal and inhuman as any war-making country has ever been."

A week ago, I received a call from Stacey Abrams' lead attorneys. The Palast investigations team had "gold," as they put it, for litigating the election in Georgia: expert analysis proving 340,134 voters were wrongly purged by her opponent when he was secretary of state. Plus, we had, on camera, victims of the purge, including the 92-year-old cousin of Martin Luther King.

But I'm a journalist, not a campaign operative. So, I could only offer my reports and my affidavit filed in federal court in Common Cause v. Brian Kemp.

With Stacey Abrams no longer in the race for governor, we now are free to open our files to her new voting rights group, Fair Fight Georgia.

Abrams, in her I-won't-concede speech on Friday, cited one victim of the purge: 92-year-old Christine Jordan. I filmed Jordan on Election Day at the polling station she'd voted at for 50 years - until this year, when her name was simply wiped off the voter rolls.

That should give "Governor-Elect" Kemp pause. Because that's Abrams' signal that this heartbreaking story will become the hammer to smash the Kemp-created Jim Crow machine.

(And Ms. Jordan is up to the task, telling me she's willing to take the fight into federal court, "If somebody will help me walk there.")

The immediate weapon will be litigation against the state of Georgia to show that the election was hopelessly tainted. Under Georgia statute, this could result in a court throwing out the whole rotting dung-heap of an election. That is why Abrams technically did not concede but rather dropped her claim to office. (Lawyers will understand that she has to maintain "standing.")

Abrams vocally took up the issue of the massive purge of voters - and intends to defend those purged. This is what's really historic about her candidacy. Yes, Abrams is the first African American woman nominated for governor by the Democratic Party. More revolutionary is that she is the first Democratic candidate to demand an end to racist ethnic cleansing of the voter rolls. (If Al Gore had taken that stance in 2000, maybe Abrams would be governor today - and, hey Al, they'd be calling you Mr. President.)

Our team's investigation produced the facts - and the names and addresses of the 340,134 voters wrongly purged for supposedly moving out of Georgia or out of their congressional districts - but never moved an inch.

We are now free to hand over those lists to the Abrams litigation team, the NAACP, the SCLC, ACLU and others who are opening courtroom fronts. We are working with them all.

And my own suit against Kemp and his successors continues in Atlanta federal court with my co-plaintiff, Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples Agenda. That group was founded by the Rev. Joseph Lowery, now 97. When I described to him the details of Brian Kemp's voter-roll trickery, he said, "It's Jim Crow all over again."

Co-plaintiffs Palast and Helen Butler are suing Brian Kemp.

If Rev. Lowery, Helen Butler and Christine Jordan are up for it, can we do anything but join?

And the battlefront is wide. While we sued in Georgia, attorneys for the Palast Investigative Fund have also filed notices of suit in 25 other states that employ the Kemp-Kobach voter-erasing games. (Yes, Kris Kobach is the man in Kemp's shadow. Kobach provided Kemp with 106,000 of the names Kemp wrongly purged. Surprised?)

Kemp's "Getaway" Scheme

Why did Stacey Abrams have to end the fight over the count? Because Kemp not only planned his crime carefully - and make no mistake, knowingly preventing citizens from voting is a crime - Kemp also had a brilliant "getaway" scheme.

I saw it firsthand in Atlanta on Election Day. I knew that some portion of the 340,134 voters wrongly purged would attempt to vote anyway as is their right under federal law. Any American that signs a statement that he or she is a citizen and provides a local address has the right to vote "provisionally."

This was Abrams' hope. If courts would order the counting of provisional ballots of those wrongly purged, she'd be governor. The GOP clearly thought of that, too. So, they simply refused to count the provisional ballots cast. But worse - and this is as brilliant as it is evil and illegal - officials simply refused to give voters provisional ballots.

So, you have to hand it to the Kemp forces: You can't have a court order the counting of ballots that were never cast - for example, the ballot never cast by Yasmin Bakhtiari. She was illegally refused a provisional ballot though she wouldn't leave the polling station for two hours - until her third plea for a ballot was rejected.

And this is where our work is also helpful to rights litigants: We have gathered the names of victims and their stories. We even have an official caught on camera refusing a legitimate request for a provisional ballot.

I have been investigating Brian Kemp for five years. And I remember in 2014 shocking a legislator, Stacey Abrams, with Kemp's purge lists. She told my Al Jazeera audience that she was furious that "our secretary of state" was spending his time attacking the voter rolls.

Little did I imagine they'd be squaring off years later, and Kemp's voter-roll deceit would be decisive in the ugliest way.

Back in 2014, Abrams was most concerned that Kemp was operating vampire-style, "stealthily" purging voters in a secretive operation.

And that's where investigative reporting comes in - and I'm not talking about insider gossip and leaks - but the years of work to extract the secret purge files, and to analyze reams of data that can tell a story. And today is when it pays off... not whether it helps this candidate or that, but whether the facts - those brave bits of truth - can speak.

I know a lot of my Democratic friends will be unhappy that their candidate lost. But don't miss the power of this moment: You can say, you were here when the new rights movement was born.