Millenial Power: Bernie Sanders Is Running a Shadow Campaign

By Leonid Bershidsky

Bloomberg View

Oct 21, 2016 – In Colorado, Bernie Sanders isn’t just acting as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton. He’s also holding separate events to keep his movement and its issues alive in a state he won handily in the June Democratic primary. Now he is urging his followers to support a ballot measure to establish the nation’s first universal health care system. It will probably be defeated, yet his backers, who have settled for a bird in the hand this year, are certain they own the future.

Changing demographics may be on on their side, and what happens in Colorado could be a model for the rest of the U.S. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the European-style changes Sanders has passionately advocated for the U.S. will take place anytime soon.

On Oct. 17, about 2,000 people — few of them older than 25 — gathered on a football field at the University of Colorado Boulder to hear Sanders make an impassioned plea for Amendment 69, which would move the state to a health care system much like the one in Germany, where I live. The students shifted impatiently and made disappointed noises every time a local speaker took the microphone: They’d come to hear Bernie. They did a “Feel the Bern” chant, like the old days, and they surged forward when he appeared. They booed when he did a Donald Trump imitation, ripping into pharmaceutical companies’ “yuuuuge” profits, and they clapped when he said health care is a basic human right.

The Sanders cause is very much alive in a state where, less than eight months ago, I saw caucus organizers attempt to deal with the unprecedented crowds of millennials that turned out for their 74-year-old hero. In the Denver high school I visited, votes were held in parking lots and stairwells. Clinton lost to the Vermont senator by a 19-point margin.

Colorado was expected to be a battleground state this year. It hasn’t been. Most of the time, Clinton has enjoyed a big lead over Trump in the polls. The same people who ensured Sanders’s primary victory could do the same for her in the general election.

Millennial Power

JoyAnn Ruscha, who was political director for the Sanders campaign in Colorado and a Sanders delegate at the Democratic National Convention, recalls bursting into tears when the senator moved that Clinton be nominated by acclamation.

“I’d known for weeks, months, that she would win,” Ruscha says. “But it’s like being in a relationship, breaking up and then seeing that person again. You think you’re OK, but you’re not.”

Now Ruscha is helping the Clinton campaign, though not as a staffer. She says that much of the grassroots activity that took Clinton by surprise during the caucus season has now shifted to her. “Many former staff and big volunteers are building in the Latino community what they did for Sanders,” Ruscha says.

Trump is an important reason why these young people, who mocked Clinton and called her corrupt last winter and spring, are now working for her. Trump has never missed a chance to appeal to Sanders supporters, telling them Clinton hadn’t won fairly — but he hasn’t made inroads with the idealistic young people who turned out in force for Bernie. (Continued)

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Jobs and the Future: Advancing the Next System with Advanced Manufacturing

Isthus Engineering, Madison WI, a robotics and advanced tool manufacturing coop with 50+ workers

By Max Ogden, Nina Gregg et al

The Next System via Portside

Oct 17, 2016 – This essay is a polemic. As such, we argue with broad strokes. We welcome debate on the broad strokes as well as the details, knowing that such an exchange will refine and improve the discussion.1

We are thinkers and practitioners from the United States and Australia. Our views principally reflect where we come from, but we are confident that our themes are an important part of a global discussion.

We are arguing here for the singular importance of advanced manufacturing. Our emphasis on advanced manufacturing is not because we love advanced manufacturing, but because we think it is necessary to achieve a next system that is democratic, equitable, sustainable, and restorative. If we thought free beer would be as important or as necessary, we would be advocating for free beer instead of for advanced manufacturing.

Advanced manufacturing is very different from the popular image of industrial production.

Advanced manufacturing is very different from the popular image of industrial production.  Most modern plants are clean, generate few emissions, and are critical to industries as varied as food processing, sustainable technology in solar and wind energy, and transportation.

Advanced manufacturing requires high skills and continuing education and pays better wages than low-skill work.

Our argument for a key role for advanced manufacturing in the next system is grounded in opposition to three currents of thought:

  • We oppose the current of thought that does not see the need for systemic change in order to build a productive, inclusive, and sustainable society;
  • We oppose the current of thought that sees the “market,” “market forces,” and corporate structures as inherently corrupting
  • And we oppose the current of thought that sees the state as the only vehicle for progressive change.

We believe, on the contrary, that the movement for the next system must institutionalize its values and achieve its objectives within the market, the state, and civil society.

First among those values and objectives, support for social inclusion must be the basis of decisions about building the next system. The world’s poor and marginalized people must be able to achieve their self-interested objectives. To that end, we must make available to everyone the ability to take advantage of local and global opportunities, to participate in community and society, and to contribute to social and cultural life. We recognize that the capitalist economy and its primary institutions have been and continue to be based on the exploitation of workers from whom have been stripped ownership and control of their work activity and their product. Moreover, our current global economy has been constructed around race, gender, and empire in ways that have systematically disadvantaged people of color, women, and nations outside the core. Signs of this living legacy are everywhere, and they must be addressed with conscious intention if we hope to reach a next system that is constructed differently—one that is democratic, equitable, sustainable, and restorative.

Our current global economy has been constructed around race, gender, and empire in ways that have systematically disadvantaged people of color, women, and nations outside the core. (continued)

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22 US House Democrats Press Obama to Adopt ‘No-First-Use’ Nuclear Weapons Policy

Barbara Lee, PDA and the Congressional Progressive Caucus Took the Initiative

By: Joe Gould

Defense News

Oct 13, 2016 – WASHINGTON — Twenty-two more US House lawmakers are calling on President Barack Obama to adopt a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, part of a tide of Democratic lawmakers pushing for restraint on atomic arms as the sun sets on the current administration.

With relations between Washington and Moscow historically tense and unpredictable this week, the lawmakers in a letter to Obama on Thursday expressed worry over the two nations’ launch-under-attack postures and “the risk of catastrophic miscalculation and full-scale nuclear war.”

“As you know, were the United States to exercise its contingency plans to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict against a nuclear-armed adversary, a full-scale nuclear exchange could ensue, killing thousands of civilians,” the letter reads. “For the security and safety of the world, military options that can spiral towards mutually assured destruction should not be on the table.”

Thursday’s letter was led by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the Peace and Security Task Force chair for the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Another signatory was Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. Ellison is the caucus’ co-chair and his party’s chief deputy whip in the House.

A no-first-use policy would minimize the need for "first strike” weapons, they argue in the letter, including the next-generation nuclear-armed cruise missile and intercontinental ballistic missiles, "which could generate significant cost savings and lead other nuclear-armed states to make similar calculations."

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