[Update at 1557 on 4 March: As I sat my afternoon meditation I wondered if there were any more scheduled debates and if there were, would Biden get a cold or some other excuse to avoid getting his head handed to him on the stage by Bernie. Well there is a debate, scheduled for 15 March in Phoenix and the Democratic Central Committee is already moving to protect Biden. Via Twitter:

@XochitlHinojosa (March 3, 2020). “We have two more [I only see one. TBA don’t count. JH] debates–of course the threshold will go up. By the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.”

With only two people in the debate—Biden and Bernie—what the fuck kind of threshold could she be thinking of? Hmmm? The fix is in folks. There will be no debate.]

The 1 Percent has declared that Bernie Sanders will not be the Democratic Party candidate for president and they’ve won. Bernie, however, could be 2020’s John Charles Frémont; the Californian Senator who, in 1856, was the first Republican to run for President of the United States of America. He lost. Big. But he laid the foundation for Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election.

Frémont, along with his Vice President William Lewis Dayton, carried most of the northern states, but lost to the Democratic Party nominees James Buchanan and John Cabell Breckinridge. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln—who had lost the nomination to be Frémont’s vice president—became the second Republican candidate to run for president. We all know what happened in 1860, but given today’s political realities most people don’t realize that in 1856 and 1860, the Republican Party was the century’s progressive party.

Bernie can’t win this year, but he can announce now that he is leaving the race for the Democratic Party and launching a third-party challenge. He won’t win and neither will Joseph Robinette Biden who will loose on a scale not seen since 1972. But he can put Henry Ross Perot’s 1992 third-party challenge to shame and create the path for a younger candidate to change American politics and wrest power from the 1 percent in 2024.

This is how we win.

Bonus No. 1: No, I won’t vote for Joe Biden, the more civil fascist.

Bonus No. 2: The Coronavirus Diaries part 1: it could have been the end of the world!

I first heard about intermittent fasting from Leo Babauta. I’m uncertain as to which particular post Leo first wrote about the technique, but I seem to have been reading him most intensely about 12 years ago. He mentioned that he was doing a 16/8 fast—eating all his meals within an eight-hour window and fasting for the other 16 hours each day.

I couldn’t quickly find the post I remembered—Leo, in his Zen way—doesn’t date his posts, but I did find this mention of the practice. Leo wrote:

Intermittent fasting. My last tip is my personal favorite, and it might just go against everything you’ve ever heard about proper fitness and nutrition: fast once or twice a week, preferably before your workouts. Intermittent fasting—going 18-30 hours between meals every once in awhile—can actually stimulate fat burning while maintaining muscle mass and conserving strength. It’s an old holdover from the early hunter-gatherer days, when the hunt wasn’t always successful, but we still had to develop a way to extract enough energy till the next meal. Our bodies always turn to body fat for energy first; in fact, that’s why we store body fat in the first place—to save for energy for later, leaner times. For the person who’s almost lean, but not quite there yet, throwing in a fast once or twice a week can really be the difference maker. I’d even try ending each fast with an intense weight training session and waiting an hour after to eat to really get the full benefit.

In the past week two people have mentioned the practice with me. The first is George, another vet I’ve first met in a mindfulness meditation class a few months ago. George is a diabetic who was 100 pounds over his goal and living on insulin. He heard about intermittent fasting and though, he told me: “Everyone said I was crazy,” he took the plunge. Six months latter the pounds are gone—he’s still not at his new goal, so he continues to work his personal program—and he no longer needs insulin to control his diabetes. Listening to his testimonial and armed with a few of the “more than 2,000 hours of YouTube videos” George watched. I decided to give the 16/8 method a shot.

In the first week I went from 121.3 pounds to 211.4 pounds. (Today, after my regular three-miles-in-under-45-minutes workout—my time this morning was 40:18 or a walking pace of 4.5 mph. When I weighed myself before I got in the shower I was at 207.7 pounds.) I’m still eating a lot of food—breakfast after the shower was an omelet made with four eggs, three-ounces of wild-caught Pacific salmon and a big hand full of fresh spinach topped with half a cup of tomato salsa—and I feel quite full inside my eight-hour (0930-1730) eating window and I’m not hungry outside outside the window. This is the first real progress I’ve had in months and I’m pumped.

Topping off this experience is another class at the Veterans Administration’s Parma Outpatient clinic that George and I also share. The class, part of the VA’s Whole Health For Life program, is taught by Katherine Dignan, the clinic’s outpatient dietitian. This morning’s class, No. 10 in the series, was about: Stress, Adrenal Health & Intermittent fasting. (Emphasis mine, JH) The fates are calling to me, or as Uhtred of Bebbanburg would say: Wyrd bið ful āræd!

In yesterday’s post—WALTER MOSLEY ON DIVING INTO A WRITING ABYSS…, the second bonus link was to: The Aetiology of Obesity Part 1 of 6: A New Hope. Dr. Fung, yes he’s a real, board certified physician and you can check his CV here, was one of the names that George gave me—the whole list is below in the bonus section—and when I mentioned intermittent fasting to my dietician to see how crazy the practice might be, the first name she mentioned for me to check Fung’s.

I’ve started watching Part 1 of the series and Fung is careful, dry and detailed—all qualities that I want in a doctor—and he’s making a lot of sense to me. At the end of each session of the VA dietary sessions, Katherine asks each of us to state what goal we’ll be working on over two weeks before the next session. Mine was to give Intermittent Fasting a full go.

Bonus No. 1: Tuesdays don’t start much worse than this.

Bonus No. 2: George’s list of YouTube channels focusing on Intermittent Fasting.

Back in 2000 I watched what I think of as Sean Connery’s second best movie*—Finding Forrester and in a great movie about writers and writing, this scene should be the one running through all writers heads as they approach the keyboard their morning coffee. As my goddess reminds me each morning: The real writer is one who really writes.

That is a line from the final stanza of Marge Piercy’s For the young who want to found in The Moon Is Always Female and I have kept those lines before me—read down through the sidebar to the right—as I write. Nothing truer has ever been written about writing.

Walter Ellis Mosely, in his latest work of non-fiction also talks about tackling the blank page. In Elements of Fiction, he writes:

What matters is that the emptiness is challenged by concepts and images trying to open a door to your story; trying to reveal some subject, some pathway to the mountain that will rise under you, bringing with it the truth that was forgotten in words crafted by your desires and your faithfulness to the child who has always needed to understand and explain. (page 8)

We don’t have to hack away the jungle to get to the story. We are presented with a pristine landscape on which to create what we will. Mosley continues:

The blank page is the writer’s friend. It is an invitation to discover the words that will guide you to the story. You may have already have a good idea of what your story should be: the blank page will help you sculpt the idea into something real. You might have no idea of what will come from your writing. All you know is that there was a field somewhere that once bore wild strawberries and is now a parking lot. You feel that story and through the blank page you will deliver it. (10)

Yes you will.

Previously…

My further notes on Mosley’s Elements of Fiction may be found in my electronic chapbook.

Bonus No. 1: Motivation Vs. Creativity

Bonus No. 2: The Aetiology of Obesity Part 1 of 6: A New Hope.

Bonus No. 3: Do Not Blame Chinese People for the Coronavirus. No Exceptions.

Bonus No 4: Michigan State students… sic the police on people who offended them.

*The Man Who Would Be King is his finest.

I’ve been an occasional reader of Jacobin since the early days, but this past week I began reading founder Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality and I was intrigued by how his beginnings of a Socialist journey so mirrored my own. We are beneficiaries of Capitalist Andrew Carnegie’s (unintentional?) largess.

Americans know Carnegie primarily for his creation of 2,509 public libraries across the country like the Washington County Public Library where I recieved my first library card at around age 9 or 10 and discovered Karl Marx, Malcolm X, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and so, so much more. That would have been 1964-5 for me. For Sunkara those discoveries would have shortly after the end of the last millennium.

In the preface of his book he writes:

I discovered socialism largely by chance. My parents immigrated to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago with four children shortly before I was born… Like many middle-class kids before me, I found radicalism through books. My local library had heaps of socialist literature, most of them donated by red diaper babies and Jewish cultural associations. By chance I picked up a copy of Leon Trotsky’s My Life the summer after seventh grade, didn’t particularly like it (still don’t), but was sufficiently intrigued to read the Isaac Deutscher biographies of Trotsky, the works of democratic socialist thinkers including Michael Harrington and Ralph Miliband, and eventually the mysterious Karl Marx himself.

I began with Marx—no, I had no idea what the fuck I was reading at 14—but, like Sunkara, I was intrigued and I too began seeking out more contemporary authors at the end of the ’60s. All of this is to say that this morning I ended my freeloading days reading Jacobin and paid for an online subscription, in part, because I think that the subtitle of Sunkara’s book—The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality—is spot on.

The cover story for the current issue is by Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella, writing in Blueprint for a Political Revolution and I’ve begun reading there. Abbott and Guastella lede:

For at least four decades now, workers have been steadily dropping out of party politics. In 1982, nearly half of all working-class voters identified as Democrats, but by 2018, that figure had fallen to less than a third, even as the Republican Party saw no uptick.

In response, the Democrats have attempted to supplement (and in some cases supplant) their traditional base with more and more middle-class professionals. As New York senator Chuck Schumer declared before the 2016 election, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

Schumer was disastrously wrong in that case, but the results of the 2018 midterm elections appeared to vindicate his “Fortress Fairfax” approach.

Both wings of the Pro-War Pro-Business party love the middle because the center is wishy-washy and easily manipulated PWPBians like Schumer understand that if they want to keep their cushy jobs, perqs and retirement cash from lobbying or serving on corporate boards they have to please their corporate masters.

The real message from 2018 was the success of women, minorities and millennials. Abbott and Guastella continue:

Today, the success of even far-left insurgencies is owed largely to the support of the young, educated, urban, and urbane. Democratic socialist freshman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez relied largely on mobilizing well-educated professionals in her upstart campaign.

Sean McElwee, cofounder of the think tank Data for Progress, goes as far as to urge left-wing campaigners to “Forget Trump voters,” on the grounds that “I can take someone who is deeply concerned about patriarchy and… make them understand how patriarchy intersects with capitalism much more than I can take someone who’s mad because GM took their job away and make them understand socialism.” In a similar fashion, the Working Families Party has increasingly relied on an affluent base in liberal metropoles. They scored a 2019 victory in Philadelphia by spending nearly a million dollars to mobilize voters almost exclusively in districts with a disproportionate number of young, highly educated residents. In these cases, despite a policy platform significantly to the left of the Democratic mainstream, even progressives are forced to rely on a middle-class professional constituency.

While this strategy can succeed in getting a few genuine leftists into office, it does little to counteract decades of working-class disenchantment with politics.

So, where do we go? Abbott and Guastella suggest that we not duplicate the strategy of Jeremy Corbyn:

The shocking collapse of Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 election campaign can arguably be chalked up to the contradiction in class composition that [New York magazine writer Eric] Levitz identifies. Wedding middle-class liberals to a working-class base proved to be an unstable coalition. Corbyn, a lifelong Eurosceptic, couldn’t bring himself and his party to respect the Brexit referendum result, contributing to the loss of Labour’s historic strongholds across the Midlands and in the North of England.

Absent a strategy that can not only stop the bleeding of working-class voters but also attract a wide swath of working-class nonvoters, any left-wing insurgency will likely face its own version of Labour’s 2019 conundrum.

Of course, the Labour right has blamed the loss on the party’s radical manifesto, claiming that the Corbynistas were just too extreme for an essentially conservative working class. And similarly, the most common argument we hear from liberals opposed to Bernie Sanders—and by extension democratic socialism—is that his platform is simply “too liberal” for a majority of the US electorate.

However, as political scientists have argued for decades, it is less that Americans are particularly centrist on a right-to-left spectrum, and more that most simply don’t hold political beliefs that could be summarized coherently as either “liberal” or “conservative.” In other words, Americans tend to hold a range of positions that appear contradictory. And our candidates and political parties reinforce this by avoiding sharp ideological positions in favor of catchall slogans (“Morning in America,” “Hope and Change,” “Make America Great Again”).

Here, I think, after some 1,000 words the article gets to the core issue:

Even the term “liberal” has a strong negative connotation for lots of working-class voters, seen by many as little more than a commitment to smashing cultural norms. In a 2018 poll of some eight thousand Americans, 80 percent of respondents agreed that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Such resounding skepticism of “PC culture” is held across all age and ethnic groups. So while a majority of Americans support a liberal culture—as indicated by broad support for religious, racial, ethnic, political, and sexual pluralism—an overwhelming number distrust the culture of liberalism.

In the rest of the article Abbott and Guastella make their case for a solution. This will not be a quick fix. We took more than a century to really screw this up and we might be decades more—if we all don’t roast or drown—to set the nation right again.

Bonus No. 1: Wait what’s that noise? Why it is BANDICOOT SEX NIGHT!

Bonus No. 2: Coronavirus: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

Bonus No. 3: No, I won’t vote for Joe Biden, the more civil fascist.

Bonus No. 4: Hasan Has A Pitch For Silicon Valley: The Cereal Stigma.

Bonus No. 5: Trump-style payback for Bernie.

Mano Singham was one of the founding bloggers here in Cleveland—I’m not certain if he or I started first, but I suspect he did—and even though he has moved to the left coast, he remains a strong and important voice among bloggers. He’s a daily read for me, but occasionally he tops himself as he did yesterday in The strange logic of some anti-Sanders Democrats.

As always, he’s a must read, but I left this comment on his most recent post:

I can understand why the Democratic establishment adopts this strategy because they do not want major change that would alienate their corporate paymasters. What is troubling is when ordinary people internalize that logic by listening to the pundit class in the media that propagates this view and argue along the same lines. They do not seem to realize what any trade union member knows, that you have to start any negotiation with maximal goals if you want to achieve anything meaningful. [Emphasis mine, JH] Starting with what you think the other side will accept is a mug’s game because the other side are not reasonable people who want the best for everyone. They are fiercely protective of the interests of their masters and will try to give away as little as possible.

I have mentioned before that as a nation we seem to really suck at negotiations. When, as an under graduate, I was studying the Soviet Union, Dr. David Williams told a class of how much better the Russians were at haggling than we were. (I’m paraphrasing here.):

When we enter a negotiation we offer a point that we think of as the middle. The Russians seize on that as an extreme and immediately come back with a point that twice the distance away from what they see as the middle.

Williams point is that if you’re willing to pay, say $18,000 for a car, you don’t make that your initial offer. Instead you might suggest $16,500 and go from there.

I think that we, along with the Japanese, may be the only nations that have lost the ability to haggle.

Bonus No. 1: ‘Right makes might’: Lincoln Project takes aim at Trump from Cooper Union

In the same year that I began Have Coffee Will Write—an eon ago, back 2004—Oliver Hirschbiegel directed Bruno Ganz in the role of Adolf Hitler in Der Untergang. Neither Hirschbiegel nor Ganz could have known that one scene would become the most used and repeated film scene in the history of Internet parodies. But they did and this is where we are.

I don’t know if Ralph Nader has ever watched Der Untergang or any of the thousands of parodies that the film gave rise to, but his lede in his most recent essay, American Fuhrer—Corrupt Rampage Against Americans, certainly reads like a pitch for yet another parody. Nader writes:

Delusional, dictatorial Donald Trump is drunk on power. Trump’s monarchical and lawless actions are a clear and present subversion of our Republic and its Constitution. As soon as the impeachment trial ended and Trump was acquitted by the Senate’s supine Republican courtiers (except for Senator Mitt Romney), vengeance flooded Trump’s fevered mind.

Ignoring warnings from his advisors, Trump is lashing out in all directions, unleashing torrents of foul-mouthed tweets. Note with alarm how this American Fuhrer is consolidating control and using his presidential power to smash all opposition. Remember that last July Trump declared “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” He wasn’t kidding, America.

Trump is shocking his current appointees—in addition to those who have quit or been fired in purges. Without evidence, he is accusing the intelligence agencies and the FBI of conspiring against him! Trump has attacked both the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr because of the sentencing recommendations by four DOJ prosecutors for convicted criminal and Trump advisor Roger Stone. Barr, a Trump toady, was shaken. Barr said it would be impossible for him to do his job if Trump kept interfering.

As Mark Green and I depicted in our new book, Fake President, loser Trump always retaliates against opponents by charging fraud, fakery, and crookery. Trump’s intimidation of others is amplified by the media that gives no right of reply to Trump’s targets.

What is most troubling are the silences of the countervailing forces that Americans have a right to rely on to fight Trump the tyrant.

Post acquittal, Trump has doubled down on his numerous impeachable offenses (see the Congressional Record from December 18, 2019, page H 12197). But Democrats, who control the House, are not doubling down on their impeachment investigations. Instead, they are following orders from Speaker Pelosi and standing down.

Trump regularly attacks the judges who rule against him or dare to challenge his illegal acts. Yet there is only silence by the many judge’s associations and the many bar associations. The American Bar Association, which has over 194,000 members, remains asleep. All of its members, so-called “officers of the court,” are attorneys and should understand their responsibilities to uphold the rule of law.

Trump’s Party has a long history of vicious voter suppression (chronicled in the new documentary, Suppressed: The Fight to Vote, by Robert Greenwald). These anti-democratic actions should be considered serious crimes. However, the members of the National Association of Secretaries of State are largely unprepared to protect voter rights and accurate counting of votes. Some Secretaries of State are aiding and abetting these electoral crimes. Current Georgia Governor Brian Kemp used his power as Georgia’s Secretary of State to suppress black voters, cheating his way to the Governor’s mansion in 2018.

Trump is now doing what all dictators do when they take power: he is purging the civil service of any critical voices of those who simply want to do their jobs. These civil servants made the “mistake” of enforcing health and safety laws that the supreme leader wanted to go unenforced to benefit the President’s big corporate buddies and donors. The government employee unions are not doing enough to fight back and explain what Trump the tyrant is doing to harm people—Trump voters and anti-Trump voters alike. Trump and his cronies are making America more dangerous again by scuttling protections that reduce deaths, injuries, and illnesses.

Whether it is the air you breathe, the water you drink, the vehicles you ride in, or the toxins in your workplace, Trump’s corporatist wrecking crew is running federal agencies into the ground. While corporate outlaws fill Trump’s coffers and hotels with riches, he gives them huge tax escapes and starves infrastructure. The word “corruption” cannot fully embrace how this insulting megalomaniac is tearing apart our country, our democratic practices, and our moral norms. Protections for children, the elderly, veterans and workers are all on Trump’s chopping block.

Who will stand up to this horrible bully who is intent on rolling back America’s gains and the anti-monarchy purpose of the American Revolution itself? Some in the media will sound the alarm. Sensing this threat, Trump interfered with government procurement to tilt a large contract away from Amazon because Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, which has run many articles about Trump’s rampage. Trump’s Republican campaign committee just filed a loser suit against The New York Times. Whether Trump wins or loses, the intimidation of the media is his goal.

These tactics are working on Chairman Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, according to former Fed insiders. As a result, the Federal Reserve has stayed committed to lowering interest rates to the detriment of savers. Intimidation is also working on the House of Representatives Democrats, who abhor the lives ruined by the savage sexual predator. Sadly, these lawmakers are not demanding a House Judiciary investigation of Trump’s treatment of women. Credible tort lawsuits are being delayed by Trump’s lawyers.

The cowardly silence of Barack Obama is the most stunning. In his extraordinary new book, The Triumph of Doubt, that names names, former head of Occupational Health and Safety Agency, Dr. David Michaels, documents “President Trump’s desire to reverse anything the Obama administration did—if Obama supported it, Trump would do the opposite no matter what the consequences.”

The results are more mercury and diesel particulates in your lungs, more deadly methane accelerating climate disruption, and more coal ash for your children to breathe. Trump’s administration is even failing to adequately invest in medical science, which could save you. Until the coronavirus came along, Trump demanded serious funding cuts for the Centers for Disease Control; these funding cuts were thwarted by Congress. Even more damning, the Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team to save money! The CDC’s annual budget is equal to a mere three days spending by the Pentagon, whose budget Trump bloats.

So where is Obama? Critiquing music, making movies, attending NBA all-star festivities, and readying for March Madness. Obama is thoroughly enjoying himself. What about also using his high political poll ratings and his massive Twitter following (which is far larger than Trump’s) to combat Trump’s actions? If not for the wellbeing of the American people, Obama should at least want to protect his legacy.

If Obama remains so carefree in the critical months before November, he will need a sign beside the exhibits to be displayed at his forthcoming presidential library: REPEALED BY TRUMP.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve gone—well really Nader has, but I take your point—full on Godwin’s Law here, but I think I’m justified. Despite the hopes of Senator Susan Margaret Collins (R-Maine), President Donald John Trump did not learn the lesson that she had hoped he would.

[Updated at 2036 on 2 March—Now we face a global medical disaster and our president wants Vice President Michael Richard Pence to pray away the virus.]

Bonus No. 1: OPEN LETTER TO THE WOMEN IN CONGRESS.

I have a history with the United Way of Greater Cleveland stretching back to the ’80s. My personal philanthropy has always been to give a little to a lot of people. For instance, when I spent a lot of time walking on city streets, I kept first Eisenhower dollars and later Susan B. Anthony followed by Sacajawea coins in my pocket to help those that needed help.

On a bigger scale I kept literature that arrived in the mail or that I found elsewhere in a pile that I sorted through once a month and picked one or two for a monthly donation. United Way—a club for elites to feel good about their caring about those less fortunate than themselves—didn’t make a lot of sense to me and I stayed out of that world until I went to work for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1984 and I came up against the corporate system of my-company-gave-more-money-than-your-company bragging system.

I don’t recall how I got tapped to give that first time, maybe a memo, maybe a meeting—this was so pre-email—and I just ignored the call for donations. And the abuse began, not so much from the higher ups, but from my peers who had bought into the idea that we were a team competing against other companies teams to show how generous we were. When I explained my personal giving system my words fell on deaf ears. I had to give for the good of the team. The peer pressure sucked so I made a minimum donation and got back to work.
Then the scandal happened.

I should have been done there, but in the ’90s my ex went to work for the United Way of Greater Cleveland and I got a look inside the organization. At her level the mission was all about actually helping people. She implemented policy handed down from the elites. In the interest of marital harmony, I shut up and continued my personal philanthropy.

Reading Sam Allard’s United Way of Greater Cleveland Struggles for Relevance and Financial Survival Under CEO August Napoli for Scene this week showed me that nothing has changed in 30 years and I am so happy to not give a shit about August Napoli and his handlers. Allard ledes:

The United Way of Greater Cleveland will announce Wednesday sweeping cuts to the annual funding it provides to area nonprofits, sources have told Scene. Roughly 70 so-called “partner agencies” and nearly 100 individual programs will be affected.

Though United Way would not confirm when asked directly, internal sources say CEO August “Augie” Napoli is likely to announce across-the-board reductions. All funded agencies, which typically learn their allocation levels in June, are expected to be funded at 50 percent of their 2020 level through the end of the year, after which the funding picture is totally unknown.

These cuts will drain more than $3 million from the region’s nonprofit ecosystem and will likely cause reduced staffing levels and services in programs that deal with hunger, workforce development, violence prevention, financial stability, kindergarten readiness and housing solutions, all of which have been clustered under United Way’s “community hub for basic needs.”

The dramatic cuts arrive less than a year after the organization’s “pivot point,” announced in June 2019, a masterclass in public relations through which significant cuts were framed as a paradigm shift in funding that would allow United Way to focus on both the root causes of poverty and its immediate effects.

During that process, the organization managed to slough off nearly $2 million in annual contributions—in the middle of what partner agencies had been told was a three-year funding cycle—and eliminated five “focus areas” for programmatic funding, including the area which, according to the Urban Opportunity Agenda, would have had the most significant impact on poverty reduction in Cleveland: job access and transportation.

The newly announced cuts will disrupt or dismantle a wide range of area programs, from a food and clothing distribution program at the May Dugan Center ($16,000) to a Step Up to Quality Early Childcare Professional Development Program at Starting Point ($145,000). The plurality of programs currently receive funding in the range of $50,000 to $80,000 per year. But 10 individual programs—including two at the Centers for Families and Children; workforce development programs at Lutheran Metropolitan Ministries and Towards Employment; financial stability programs at CHN Housing Partners and the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cleveland; the Earned Income Tax Credit Coalition at Enterprise Community Partners; a housing stability program at EDEN; and a vocational rehabilitation training program at Vocational Guidance Services—all currently receive annual funding above $100,000.

Sam does his usual great job of digging deep—deep enough, finally, to earn him a few minutes on WCPN’s Sound of Ideas at timemark 41:38 (he should be a regular on the Friday Roundup, but hey, what do I know—and you should read the whole piece, but this bit of history really nailed the story for me. Sam writes:

Under Napoli, his top deputy [Aaron] Petersal, and marketing VP Bill Winans, United Way has pursued three significant projects in the past three years which have had negative effects on the organization’s finances and staff morale. All reflect poorly on leadership: not because the efforts failed, which they did, but because employees questioned and criticized them to no avail. In many cases, the only result of voicing concern was getting booted from the organization.

The first was a major “brand refresh” in 2018 that Winans, who arrived at United Way from the world of for-profit communications with the stated goal of incorporating “e-commerce” tactics, spearheaded alongside Petersal, despite widespread internal skepticism. Regional workplace giving was not declining because of a “stale brand,” many argued.

The rebranding effort entailed contracts with a number of costly third-party vendors, including the local outfit Flourish, which had made headlines in 2017 for boasting about its wins at the American Advertising Awards with a digital promotional campaign featuring Donald Trump parodies, including the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” line. That was enough to lose the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center as a client, but not the United Way, whose leaders reportedly thought Flourish was “edgy.” Members of the marketing department felt alienated during the process, they told Scene, and many of those who questioned the value of the rebrand were summarily fired. That’s why the department was composed mostly of new hires during the 2019 funding pivot.

Another calamitous (and ongoing) organizational decision has been Petersal’s. He has overseen shifting the electronic giving platform from a provider called Frontstream to a small company called Big River, one founded by a man named Ron Cass with whom Petersal is known to have personal ties. The shift to Big River has been an unqualified disaster, per the development department, with so many glitches and crashes this year that major losses in workplace giving are projected. Scene was shown emails of back-and-forths among development personnel from this fall as they stressfully dealt with broken links, faulty software and angry companies. The transition to Big River has been gradual, with a number of major accounts transferring to the platform this year, but Petersal has insisted that everyone must migrate for the 2020 appeal or face punitive fees, a decision that the development team almost universally regards with confusion and concern.

“Why would we punish companies that are trying to raise money for us?” asked one beleaguered former development staffer. “Why wouldn’t we meet them where they are? Shouldn’t we be making giving easier for them, not more complicated?”

(A number of other allegations regarding the Big River transition are not included in this story because we were unable to firmly substantiate them by our print deadline. But we have corroborated, by personally viewing staff emails, the manifold glitches and consequent tension among the development staff as a result of the shift. Multiple employees also stressed that “goals don’t matter” anymore under Petersal. Fundraising numbers are invented every year to appease the board, irrespective of what account managers predict and warn.)

The third and final decision was Napoli’s, and it represents the ill-fated course United Way has been sailing in its effort to transcend philanthropic trends: Napoli has put his faith in Unify Labs, a high-tech “disruptor” that he hoped would rouse the donor base into giving major gifts.

Unify’s VP of communications was abruptly laid off late last year, and the few remaining staff there are restricted by confidentiality agreements, so Scene was unable to confirm the following directly, but the working theory by those with some knowledge of the interactions was that Unify Labs was supposed to not only “power” the Impact Institute but invent an AI algorithm which would revolutionize philanthropy in Cleveland, a promise that set Napoli’s Terminal Tower ablinking.

United Way has previously raised in the ballpark of $40 million per year through its workplace giving campaigns, though that number has declined substantially in recent years. In 2017, contributions totaled only $31.7 million, down from $35 million in 2016 and $40.4 million in 2015. Of those funds, United Way immediately takes a cut (estimated at 15 to 25 percent) to pay overhead costs, including executive salaries like Napoli’s [$332,000 in 2017, the latest year for which nonprofit tax filings are available, according to Sam]. United Way then passes along the rest to the community in the form of designations and allocations. Designations are “donor-advised,” meaning individual contributors select where they’d like their money to go. The allocations are disbursed by volunteer community impact groups who review requests from partner agencies and decide where local dollars would stretch the furthest.

Sam concludes:

What will [Toby] Cosgrove and the skeleton crew at Unity Labs add to this conversation? Will $5 million for an executive think tank and a few-odd million for a downtown office renovation continue to retain “the trust of the public that gives [United Way] the money to support the person in need”? Will they retain that trust more than the $3+ million which is now being slashed from local agencies that provide food, jobs and emergency shelter for the region’s most vulnerable populations?

At the end of the day—this is a controversial statement—no.

I agree.

Before this morning I had never heard of Darrick Hamilton, the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Kara Voght—a reporter in Mother Jones‘ DC bureau—has fixed that bit of personal ignorance for me. Hamilton’s area of expertise is economics and he’s someone Bernie Sanders listens to.

Voght, writing in The economist who taught Bernie how to talk about race and wealth for Mother Jones, ledes:

In March 2018, nearly a year before officially putting in for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders hosted a town hall at the US Capitol Visitor Center on the subject of Inequality in America. The event promised a lively discussion of “the rise of the oligarchy and the collapse of the American middle class”—lively in large part due to the presence of three people onstage who would soon play central roles in shaping the policy contours of the Democratic presidential primary. There was Sanders, hunched behind the glass table, playing the greatest hits of his 2016 insurgency and railing about “how over $13 trillion in wealth has been transferred from the bottom 99 percent to the top 1 percent” over the past four decades. There was Elizabeth Warren, his 2020 rival, telling her now-familiar story about paying for her University of Houston degree on a part-time waitressing job and lamenting the shift since then in “who this government works for and who it creates opportunity for.”

The third person was a fortysomething man, seated next to filmmaker Michael Moore, in a gray suit with a modest Afro and goatee, furiously scribbling notes as his more famous co-panelists held forth. When Sanders and Warren finished outlining their broad-based remedies for inequality, the man spoke up to offer a gentle correction. “I’d be remiss not to point out that these vulnerabilities are more pronounced for the marginal groups—race, gender, disability status, formerly incarcerated,” he said in a jovial staccato of academese. “They face obstacles the general population doesn’t.” The reason, he said, is systemic racism embedded in government policies that kept Black families from accumulating wealth.

How does Hamilton know that and why does Bernie Sanders care?

Hamilton has become the wonk for this political moment because of his talent for quietly reframing the conversation. …[H]e has dedicated his years in academia to “stratification economics,” a field of study he helped pioneer that offers structural and sociological explanations for economic inequality as opposed to behavioral or genetic reasons. [Emphasis mine, JH] Hamilton and his longtime collaborator and PhD adviser, Sandy Darity, are largely responsible for the prominence of the racial wealth gap in the discourse surrounding racism and inequality.

This is the structural prejudice baked into the American economy. This is one of the themes embedded in the Ta-Nehisi Coates cover story—The Case For Reparations—that launched most of the discussions around our racial wealth gap. Both senators Elizabeth Ann Warren and Bernie Sanders listened closely to what Hamilton said at that 2018 panel and while Warren took concrete actions as a result, I think Bernie, because of his history in civil rights took away the most. Voght continues:

Sanders has leaned on Hamilton most of all, not only adding the economist’s federal job guarantee to his campaign platform but also consulting Hamilton on a number of his economic justice policies, including housing, student debt, and education. Hamilton formalized his relationship with Sanders with an endorsement this month, and Hamilton now serves as one of the campaign’s national surrogates. Sanders campaign co-chair Rep. Ro Khanna, who introduced the House version of the job guarantee bill, tells me Hamilton has had a “profound impact on policymakers” and calls him an “intellectual giant of his time,” likening him to Cornel West, another Sanders surrogate.

This is how Bernie wins on Saturday. I know that the poll number still show a huge lead for Joseph Robinette Biden, but compare the numbers this week to where Biden was a month ago. Bernie is gaining hard and I expect the South Carolina Primary to be an upset that will have the Democratic Party elites gnawing on skulls.

In his 2016 run, Sanders’ class determinism alienated some Black political activists, who criticized him for not showing adequate support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and perhaps contributed to his weak showing among Black voters in general. In the 2016 South Carolina primary, the Vermont senator won only 14 percent of Black votes.

Things are different this time around. Last year, the Atlantic declared the racial wealth gap “a new litmus test” for 2020 Democratic hopefuls. Politico described the outreach to Hamilton and other scholars as a behind-the-scenes arms race to win the “wonk primary.” Now, many of those candidates who first consulted Hamilton have faded from view—though Sanders, his chosen candidate, is the closest thing to a 2020 frontrunner, thanks in no small part to policies Hamilton played a central role in crafting.

How Hamilton pegs what I call Catholic School uniform effect—the false idea that students do well in parochial schools because they wear uniforms—particularly caught my attention. Levy writes:

One premise of stratification economics is that dominant groups discriminate as a way of preserving status. This might seem obvious, but consider some of the culture’s shibboleths about race—for instance the notion that racism is an irrational expression of chauvinist attitudes. By contrast, Darity has written, “stratification economics presumes the rationality of discrimination, that discrimination is functional in promoting the privileged group’s relative status.” For years liberal politicians spoke of education as the silver bullet for remedying racial inequality. Stratification economics see things otherwise.

“We exaggerate the functional role of education to the detriment of understanding the functional role of wealth,” Hamilton explained. “If I were to unpack that: Because we observe people with high levels of education, perhaps we have the causality wrong—that it was the wealth that might’ve caused the education as much as the other way around.”

Precisely. There is more here and I encourage you to invest the 30 minutes or so that you’ll need to read her piece. There is a tremendous amount of ignorance—just ask this white boy—about racial politics and economics in the United States and people in the front lines like Hamilton can do much to help those of us in the clueless class.

Bonus No. 1: Private health insurance is in crisis! Help help.

Bonus No. 1: Ben Mora, a casualty in class war.

Bonus No. 2: A Top-Ten list of Soviet songs. This is what I’m listening to while reading Walter Mosley’s newest novel: Trouble Is What I Do, No. 6 in Mosley’s Leonid McGill series.

Bonus No. 3: On Their Radar—Saagar Enjeti: CBS’s debate from hell and Krystal Ball: Did the DNC rig the debate audience?

In his first year in office, President Donald John Trump traveled to Paris observe the commemoration of France’s national day. A big part of the festivities was the annual Bastille Day parade. Trump came home wanting the same on the streets of our nation’s capital. He didn’t get his parade. After his massive greeting in India, gawd only knows what he’ll want now.

We don’t yet know which stadium he’ll want his campaign to rent but looking at the list this morning I found eight college stadiums with seating capacities greater than 100,000. (The list would be longer once you added on-field seating, but you get the idea.) Two stadiums—University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Pennsylvania State University in University Park—top the list at 107,601 and 106,572 respectively and would be in must-win states for Trump in November. I couldn’t find a price tag for either, but, he’s a billionaire right? And besides, the campaign would pick up the tab.

Regardless of the any possible venue, make no mistake, this was a campaign trip with the goal of enticing more than a million Indian-Americans to vote Trump. (Do you think he ditched his trademark red tie for nothing?) Ankita Rao, in Trump views India as another state to turn red on his 2020 campaign trail for The Guardian, writes:

his was not just a diplomatic trip for Trump, who made a visible appearance at the Howdy Modi rally held by the Indian diaspora in Houston, Texas, last year. Nor was it solely a display of solidarity with Modi and his far-right administration at a time when India is erupting in protest and sectarian violence centered around an ongoing lockdown and communications blackout in Kashmir, a controversial national registry bill and a stringent citizenship bill that would favor non-Muslim migrants.

Instead, Trump approached India not as another nation state, but rather another state to turn red, and one more stop on his 2020 campaign trail. And his trip was strategically designed to stoke themes of nationalism and protectionism for those with a foothold in both countries.

The Indian American vote in the US has become something to reckon with. It is 1.3 million people strong, and comprises some of the most educated and wealthy people in the country. This is a community that Trump has heavily courted over the years, most notably at a 2016 Hindu American rally in Edison, New Jersey—an epicenter for Indian Americans—called Hindus for Trump, before his victory.

Hands down the most ludicrous utterance from Trump regarded Modi’s stance on religious freedom. Trump said:

We did talk about religious freedom, and I will say that the prime minister was incredible in what he told me. He wants people to have religious freedom and very strongly.

Except, of course, for Muslims. Hannah Ellis-Petersen, reporting in Delhi rocked by deadly protests during Donald Trump’s India visit for The Guardian, writes:

Donald Trump’s visit to Delhi has been overshadowed by deadly protests that have continued to engulf India’s capital, as Muslim and Hindu groups clashed violently and the death toll rose to 13.

The bloody violence, which has left the streets of north-east Delhi in flames and continued to escalate on Tuesday, has so far left one policeman and 12 civilians dead, and over 150 injured.

Speaking at a press conference in Delhi on Tuesday evening before he left India, Trump said he had not brought up the violence with prime minister Narendra Modi, saying he would not comment on “individual cases”. However, the president said the pair had discussed the rising attacks on the Muslim community and he was satisfied that Modi worked “really hard” on religious freedom.

“I had very powerful answer from PM Modi,” said Trump. “He told me that they are working very closely with minorities in India … PM Modi said that there are 200 million Muslims in India, and that his government is working closely with the minorities.”

Trump did not get a touted trade deal—years ago when I wrote about Walmart’s foray into India I noted that country’s very high barriers to foreign interference—but he did get a $3 billion military arms deal that I’m sure will make Pakistan and China very happy.

Namaste Modi.

Bonus No. 1: Coronavirus is very bad and needs to be avoided… some handy hints…

Bonus No. 2: Former Romney Advisor: Why we need economic populism.

Bonus No. 3: Living Through the Impending Apocalypse and How to Stay Nice Doing It.

Bonus No. 4: Trump and Modi are undermining the pillars of the US-India relationship.

Bonus No. 5: What’s your score for Zqfmgb?

And, a special bonus:

Is Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin mucking around in our elections? Of course he is, but on the grand scale of election interference, his efforts are a flea on an elephant compared to our own internal bullshit blocking voters, spinning lies and protecting the billionaires. We see the blatant, naked avarice wielded by entitled elites and their toadies.

Toadies like former Chief-of-Staff to President Obama, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel who went onto The Late Show last night to fight for his privilege. I’ve never down-voted a Stephen Colbert video, but I (and, as of 0447 on 27 February, 1.7k others viewers as compared to 1.4k who up-voted the video) did so in this case. I left this comment:

I’ve only voted twice for a President—Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980. I didn’t vote for Clinton in 1996 or Barack Obama in 2012 for the same reason, they both failed to deliver in their first term.

I’ve never down voted anything done by Stephen Colbert. I gave a thumbs down to this interview.

This is what the left-center wing of the Pro-War Pro-Business party looks like when someone who believes in democracy challenges their privilege.

These kind of tricks worked in the past when the information pipeline was narrow and tightly controlled. Now we have multiple fire hoses washing away the slime and allowing the electorate to see and hear what is happening in realtime. Campaign books like Emanuel’s are tired and outdated before they’re published Matt Taibbi, writing in Russia Isn’t Dividing Us—Our Leaders Are for Rolling Stone Magazine, understands and calls out the elites sycophants. He ledes:

The latest act in the comedy began Friday, just before voting opened in the Nevada Democratic caucus. The Washington Post ran a story—sourced, I’m not joking, to “people familiar with the matter”—explaining that Bernie Sanders had been briefed that “Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest.”

Sanders was quick to see through the gambit. “I’ll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus. Why do you think it came out?” He pointed to a Post reporter: “It was The Washington Post? Good friends.” The Post after all has spent years dumping on Sanders, a fervent critic of the paper’s billionaire creep of an owner, Jeff Bezos. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Intelligence officials and pundits have been screeching for years that patriotism demands voters reject the foreign agent Donald Trump and the Russian asset Bernie Sanders, and support a conventional establishment politician. Voters responded by moving toward Trump in national approval surveys and speeding Sanders to the top of the Democratic Party ticket. A more thorough disavowal of official propaganda would be difficult to imagine.

Taibbi carefully lays out his case.

the biggest red flag of all was the way in which “Russia” over the last few years became shorthand to describe any brand of political deviance. I wrote this two years ago:

Since Trump’s election, we’ve been told Putin was all or partly behind the lot of it: the Catalan independence movement, the Sanders campaign, Brexit, Jill Stein’s Green Party run, Black Lives Matter, the resignations of intra-party Trump critics Bob Corker and Jeff Flake…

Unnamed “officials” have since added the Corbyn movement in England, the gilets jaunes, protesters in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, militias in Africa, pro-government disinformation campaigns in Hong Kong, the presidential campaign of Tulsi Gabbard, and countless other undesirables to what has amounted to an ongoing, cumulative blacklist.

The extraordinary thing about this campaign to identify basically the entire universe of political thought outside of establishment Democrats in the U.S. as Russian assets has been the obvious projection involved.

The plot running through all of these stories has been the idea that Russia is trying to “undermine our democracy” by “sowing division.” But these charges are coming from the same people who spent the last four years describing Republicans as deplorable fascists, and progressives on the other side as racist, sexist, Nazis, and “digital brownshirts.”

This has resulted in a four-year parade of official cranks muttering about Russian efforts to “divide” us, when their own relentless message has been that America is besieged by a pair of Hitlerian movements on the left and right that must be put down at all costs. The only vision of “unity” they promote is one of obedience to the crackpot anti-utopia of neoliberalism that populations around the world are currently rejecting at the ballot box.

Taibbi concludes:

That this is a dumb story is characteristic. The people pushing it don’t have any smart arguments left for remaining in power. Through decades of corporate giveaways, trickle-up economics, pointless wars, and authoritarianism, they’ve failed the entire population. They are the ones directly threatened by any hint that the population is awakening to its decades-long disenfranchisement.

They are also the ones who benefit most from “disinformation.” Who’s trying to divide us? Our own leaders, and as results like the Nevada primary show, the public now knows it.

Yes we do.

Bonus No. 1: Viral post criticizes Bernie’s math on health care, taxes. It’s wrong.

Bonus No. 2: I laughed so hard that I think I might have broken something…

Bonus No. 3: Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on the Pro-War Pro-Business Party.

Bonus No. 4: … Everything We Were Told About Bernie Sanders Was Wrong.

I just had to have another dose. This is the Rock ‘N’ Roll I cut my teeth on.

Meanwhile, back in the real world…

Bonus No. 1: Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on Bipartisan Elitism and … Their New Book.

It has been far too long since I’ve visited—30 June 2018 to be exact— the stories of pipelines crossing Canada and the United States so that fossil fuel companies can buy bigger jets that burn their product and literally raise the temperature on our climate crisis. The fight never stopped but has shifted north to Prime Minister Justin Pierre James Trudeau’s Canada.

The charismatic and popular young prime minister is in a hard fight in the western provinces of late, getting harsh criticism from some and occasional applause from others. While the story is national, hemispherical and global, the local stories are, in my mind, of greater importance. Alleen Brown and Amber Bracken, in Inside the Wet’suwet’en Protest Camp That Refused to Cede Land for a Pipeline tell that local story:

The weeks leading up to Dr. Karla Tait’s arrest were tense at the Unist’ot’en camp, which for a decade has stood in the way of fossil fuel pipeline construction through the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s unceded territory in British Columbia. On New Year’s Eve, British Columbia’s Supreme Court granted an injunction barring members of the Indigenous nation from obstructing work on TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were authorized to enforce the order, but no one knew when they would come.

Tait’s aunt Freda Huson has lived on the territory since she built the first Unist’ot’en cabin in 2010, directly in the path of at least three proposed pipelines that would stretch across pristine mountain wilderness to export facilities in the coastal community of Kitimat. Unist’ot’en, which has grown to include a bunkhouse, a traditional pit house, traplines, and a three-story healing center, is associated with one of 13 houses that make up the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The camp is the oldest and most remote of a series of Wet’suwet’en camps established along an old logging road as an assertion of the nation’s right to decide what happens on their territory. Until this month, members controlled access to the area with gates constructed in the middle of the road.

One of the proposed pipelines, Enbridge’s Northern Gateway tar sands oil pipeline, was canceled in 2016. The future of a second, the Pacific Trails natural gas pipeline, was thrown into uncertainty after Chevron announced plans to divest its 50 percent share. But TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, has forged ahead with the Coastal GasLink project—despite opposition from the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s traditional leaders, the hereditary chiefs.

The indigenous people are fighting for their homes:

The hereditary chiefs, along with Unist’ot’en camp supporters, object to the pipeline on the grounds that it could contaminate land that is a part of who they are and that they rely on to harvest food and medicines and draw water. The land plays an integral role in programming at the Unist’ot’en healing center, where Tait works, which seeks to help Indigenous patients confront colonial trauma.

TC Energy obtained an initial injunction to force Unist’ot’en members to get out of the way of construction in December 2018. Royal Canadian Mounted Police commanders claimed “lethal overwatch” was required, according to documents revealed by The Guardian, and instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want.” After the RCMP arrested more than a dozen pipeline opponents that January, a strained peace was established. Police maintained a presence in the area, spending more than $3 million to establish a station halfway up the logging road to the camps. Unist’ot’en members negotiated access for pipeline workers as long as they followed an agreed-upon protocol, but TC Energy claimed the checkpoints continued to slow their work.

In the latest court order, the judge argued that the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s title claims and jurisdiction remained unresolved. In response, pipeline opponents abandoned the access agreement, and the hereditary chiefs demanded that Coastal GasLink vacate the territory immediately.

This is yet another example of the grievous error of making corporations people. Here in the United States we like to point to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United V. FEC, but the rot goes far deeper, reaching back to the 19th century. Bugs Bunny had the story right: The sanctity of the American home must be preoyved.

On February 6, Unist’ot’en members watched on social media as the RCMP mounted a dramatic pre-dawn raid on a smaller support camp down the road, arresting six people. But rather than serving to quell the resistance, the arrests inspired a wave of solidarity protests and transportation blockades across Canada. Protesters shut down ports, roads, and railways from Vancouver to Saskatchewan, and a blockade set up by Indigenous-led protesters from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario halted commuter rail traffic between Montreal and Toronto.

Over the weekend the fight increased as evidenced by headlines like Canadian police had ‘no authority’ to search pipeline activists, says watchdog and New train blockade piles pressure on Trudeau in Wet’suwet’en pipeline fight.

The pipeline fight has deeper consequences for Trudeau. Brown and Bracken continue:

While the Canadian government continues to pursue a yearslong effort to heal its relationship with Indigenous people, for many, the arrests of the Unist’ot’en matriarchs were representative of the government’s unwillingness to take meaningful action toward reconciliation — especially when it comes to land rights. Indeed, documents uncovered by journalists and researchers confirm that officials have strategized furiously about how to prevent the Wet’suwet’en people’s assertion of land rights from getting in the way of the message that Canada is open for business.

“The violence of Canada and the emptiness of its commitments to us as Indigenous people were laid bare in their actions, and their forcible removal of us in the midst of ceremony,” Tait said. “The events we experienced leading up to February 10 are another culmination of the efforts of Canada to discredit and criminalize us for simply existing on our land as we always have — for defending our rights to our landbase and our historic economy, our ways of empowering ourselves — because of the threat to the capitalist economy.”

In the wake of the police raids, leaders of the movement declared, “Reconciliation is dead.”

Those of us who arrived here after 1491 have a long historical legacy and deeply disturbing burden. We took all of the land we inherit and pretend to own from people who were here first. We are the invasive species that changed might makes right as we fulfilled our manifest destiny. Short of going back to where we came from, there is no real solution. We have to figure out how we can revive reconciliation in a real way else we are not better than those invaders that Chris Matthews was reading about.

Bonus No. 1: The Raccoons of the Resistance: the inevitable Bernie Sanders presidency.

Bonus No. 2: Chapo is changing left media.

Bonus No 3: Don’t Ignore The Asian Vote… and Hasan Offers A Student Some Advice.

Bonus No. 4: Anastasia Pantsios veers predictably into antisemitism.

Bonus No. 5: A New Plan for Mike Bloomberg: Stay inside.

Our president has spent the last five years—both as candidate Donald John Trump and President Trump demonizing and disparaging Latinx peoples, go so far as to dismiss two of his Republican primary competitors—Rafael Edward Cruz and Marco Antonio Rubio—as Lyin’ Ted and Little Marco. One of his first utterances in 2015 was to label Mexicans as rapists.

How could he not know that he was pissing off the second largest ethnic group in the country—16.7 percent, 32 million of whom are registered voters. And—surprise, surprise—the Pew Research Center reports:

About two-thirds of Hispanic registered voters (68 percent) disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, including 51 percent who disapprove very strongly. The 30 percent of Hispanic voters who approve of Trump includes 23 percent who approve strongly.

So, when the first state with a significant Latinx population caucused on Saturday, the picture was not pretty for Trump. Aída Chávez, writing in How Young Latinos Delivered Nevada to Tío Bernie for The Intercept, ledes:

On Saturday, caucus-goers began gathering around 10 a.m. at the Desert Pines High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. It had started raining early in the morning—a rare occurrence in Las Vegas—and didn’t lighten up until the rain stopped in the early afternoon.

The high school, whose mascot is a jaguar, is located in a predominantly Latino, working-class neighborhood. Almost all the caucus-goers were people of color. The school served as the caucus site for 12 precincts, divided between the cafeteria and the gym. None of the caucuses were very crowded; a precinct chair guessed that it was due to the heavy rainstorm earlier that morning — giant puddles spotted the courtyard — and huge early-voter turnout, with some 75,000 votes across the state coming early, compared with a total 86,000 people who caucused in 2016.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was projected as the winner early by multiple outlets, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg vying for second place. By Sunday night, with 88 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders led every other candidate with 47 percent of the county convention delegates. Biden is a distant second, ending up with around 21 percent of state-level delegates. And entrance polls showed that Sanders was the strong favorite among Latinos, earning 53 percent of their votes.

And the vote tallies were even way stronger.

Those votes didn’t come out of nowhere. Sanders worked hard and his support is historical and deep rooted. Chávez continues:

This year, Sanders redoubled his efforts to win their votes, not only focusing on turnout, but also organizing specifically for the caucuses. Those efforts — such as holding trainings in Spanish and providing translation services at the caucuses — appear to have paid off. One such training — for the “Strip” caucuses located on Las Vegas’s famous main drag so that hotel and casino workers can attend — took place Thursday night at the offices of Make the Road Action, an immigrant-rights group. Conducted entirely in Spanish, a young volunteer explained what a caucus is and how it works. The group concluded the training with a mock caucus, where they voted between prominent Sanders surrogates such as rappers Cardi B and Killer Mike.

In his victory speech from San Antonio, Texas, Sanders highlighted the support his campaign got from the group. “I wanna thank Make the Road and all of the grassroots organizations that helped us win there,” he said.

Sanders’s win is also thanks to young Latinos like 19-year-old Christopher Santoyo, who told The Intercept that he’s been volunteering for Sanders since he was 15 and worked to convince his family to caucus for the candidate.

“At first, they actually didn’t like him,” Santoyo said. “But I think based off the fact that I’ve been so involved in his campaign, and I’m directly reaching out to them telling them to vote, they’re supporting Bernie Sanders.” He walked some of his family into early-voting locations and said he now has elder relatives from coast to coast supporting Sanders.

When asked whether he thought other young people are convincing their parents to vote Sanders, Santoyo said, “One hundred percent.”

“I think these ideas are so radical to them. Like free college or a Green New Deal, Medicare for All. And then when you actually have a serious conversation as to seeing it through our lens, they really start to change.”

“A lot of them, especially my family specifically, they’re Latino so they listen to Telemundo, Univisión, and more corporate media. And they kind of echo those talking points. But when I fight back on it, they’re like, ‘Oh wow, you’re right,’” Santoyo said. “If you really speak to them, their mind will change.”

My generation will be dead and gone before the worst of our sins fully manifest, but young men like Christopher Santoyo and his peers may live to see the next century and they know that what they’ve inherited is not pretty. They’re voting—and encouraging their families to vote—for their lives.

Bonus No. 1: …After Nevada, it’s time for Democrats to unite behind Bernie Sanders.

Bonus No. 2: What seems to be the problem officer? I’m in a hurry to get my land back.

Bonus No. 3: Bernie Sanders’ plans are expensive but inaction would cost much more.