At the end of 2019 first quarter fundraising for his campaign, would-be Democratic Party 2020 Presidential nominee Bernie Sanders has raised $18.2 million from 525,000 small-money donors (I'm one of them; I also gave to the Elizabeth Warren campaign). Read the rest

Bernie Sanders cut his head on the edge of a shower door, received 7 stitches at the hospital, and will pursue his schedule as planned in South Carolina and Nevada, says to his campaign. Read the rest

When critics want to dismiss Bernie Sanders's bid to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, the say that he is too old and too white, and incapable of bringing young people and racialized people to the polls, the way that, say, Obama did in 2008 (after all, American politics is as much a contest of who votes and who doesn't as it about whom they vote for). Read the rest

Bernie Sanders's latest legislative proposal is the Stop Walmart Act; Sanders describes Walmart as the "poster child for corporate greed" and uses that as a launching point to propose a ban on stock buybacks from companies unless they pay their lowest-waged employees $15/hour. Read the rest

It's a not-very-well-kept secret that elements of the libertarian right believe that democracy is incompatible with capitalism (tldr: if majorities get to vote, they'll vote to tax rich minorities and since rich people are in the minority they'll always lose that vote); and as this persuasive and fascinating lecture and Q&A with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (previously) shows, the feeling is mutual. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis (previously) (the "libertarian Marxist" former Greek finance minister who split with his party and resigned over their embrace of austerity) have announced the formation of a new global organizations called "Progressives International," designed to serve as a check to the rising cult of ultra-nationalist authoritarian groups. Read the rest

Writing in Scientific American (!), Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz (previously) describes the US economy as an "inherited plutocracy" that's "rigged" to shift an ever-greater share of the national wealth to the very richest people: Stiglitz blames the rigging on Ronald Reagan's dismantling of antitrust enforcement, inheritance tax, and other progressive measures 40 years ago -- and says that the orthodox economic apologists for economists who attribute inequality to globalism or other factors are wrong and unsupported by evidence. Read the rest

Everybody knows that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the brutal killing and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi (everybody, that is, except the Trumps, who coincidentally do a lot of business with the House of Saud) and the lurid brutality of that murder has prompted calls for western businesses to reconsider their increasingly cozy relationship with Mohammed bin Salman. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders -- who seems to have kicked off a 2020 presidential bid -- writes about the terrifying global parallels to Trumpism, from Japan to the Philippines to Hungary to Turkey and beyond, and talks about how an international solidarity movement has to advance a positive agenda of how the world can be taken back from looters and environmental crisis as a global tonic to these dictators-in-waiting. Read the rest

In 2008, the Bush and Obama administrations both argued that they had a duty to transfer more than $700,000,000,000 of American taxpayers' money to the largest banks in the country, because these banks were "too big to fail" and allowing them to collapse would do much more harm than a mere $0.7 trillion subsidy. Read the rest

You know the drill: someone proposes something utterly commonsense, that has been done all over the world (say, universal healthcare) and the next thing you know, someone's shown up to shout "Who will pay for it?!" Read the rest

California's Democratic Governor Jerry Brown repeatedly vetoed universal healthcare after the state legislature voted it through; Democratic state majorities in NY, CT and NJ refused to enact legislation to close the "carried interest" tax loophole that makes billions for hedge-fund managers; Rhode Island Democrats went on a slashing spree, taking down pensions for teachers, firefighters and other public servants while the finance-affiliated state treasurer funneled the pension funds into her pals' underperforming hedge funds; Democrats in NJ gutted the tax bill to give millionaires an easy ride; New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the state anti-corruption commission, only to have his top aide busted for being horrifically corrupt. Read the rest

There's one thing that Democratic and Republican leaders agree on: that left-wing policies like Medicare for all are bad news for the Democratic policy -- the only people who disagrees with them are voters, who overwhelmingly support these policies. Read the rest

Who likes socialism and mistrust capitalism? Democrats and young people, who are mostly the same people. Read the rest

Pew's latest very detailed survey of voting patterns in 2016 goes the extra mile, by validating whether recipients actually cast a ballot, thus forming a picture of who voted, who didn't, and what policies nonvoters favored. Read the rest

Six weeks after Bernie Sanders rallied Disneyland employees to call for a $15/hour minimum wage, the company has announced that the minimum wage will rise from $11/h to $13.25 today, and again to $15 on Jan 1, and again to $15.45/h in June 2020 -- homelessness is rampant among Disneyland employees, and Disney had engineered a longrunning complete takeover of the local government, raking in hundreds of millions in breaks and subsidies, until, finally, anti-Disney candidates attained a majority in 2018. Read the rest

Two competing (or, possibly, complementary?) proposals for resolving income inequality and the hole that four decades of demand-side Reaganomics has dug us into are Universal Basic Income and a federal jobs guarantee (the former being a kind of "venture capital for everyone" that provides enough money to live without having to work for an employer; and the latter being a guarantee of a good, meaningful job of social value in sectors like infrastructure, education and caring professions). Read the rest