Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fight the Oligarchy
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“I wanted to hear the positive message after all the negative that’s been going on,” another attendee, Matilda Martinez, told me. She is of the Navajo clan Naakai Dine’é and had travelled to the rally from her home on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. She expressed her disappointment in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader. “They are not fighting for us,” she said. “The only ones that I see speaking out are Jasmine Crockett”—a congresswoman from Texas—“A.O.C., and Bernie Sanders.”
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When Sanders took to the stage, he stood between his young protégés, putting his arms around their shoulders like a proud uncle. He spoke of the “other Alexandrias and Alexanders” out there in America, waiting to run for office. Sanders has been warning about the growing threat of an oligarchy for years. Now, he implied in his speech, he no longer needed to explain what it meant to the American people. In January, he said, he’d had a front-row seat to an Inauguration at which the President took the oath of office flanked by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—the three richest men in America—with at least a dozen other billionaires arrayed behind them.
“The truth is that right now in America, the people on top have never, ever in the history of our country, had it so good,” Sanders said. “These guys literally don’t know what to do with their money. They buy one mansion, two mansions, not enough. They’ve got five mansions. They want to get around? They own their own jet planes; they own their own helicopters. Send their kids to the best private schools, the best colleges. Go on vacation, they don’t go to Motel 6. They own their own islands, and just for kicks, the very rich decide to take a trip to outer space.”
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Where does that leave demoralized progressives? After the rally, Sanders spoke with reporters in the high-school gym. He seemed tired but not defeated. For the most recent events, he said, a majority of the people who R.S.V.P.ed weren’t already in his campaign’s database. He brushed away concerns that young adults voted more conservatively in the most recent election than they had before, and he came back to people’s views of the Democrats. “They’re seeing their position on supporting Netanyahu,” he said. “These young people can’t pay rent. They’re earning horrific wages. The standard of living is going to be lower than their parents’. They say, ‘Where are the Democrats?’ ” After Sanders departed, Casar stayed on. He acknowledged that whatever might pass as mass resistance to the policies of Trump’s second term had been slower to materialize than resistance to the President’s policies the first time around. But he suggested that the divide within the Democratic Party was less between right and left than between what he called “fighters and folders,” the latter being “people who say, ‘Well, the Democratic Party should just not do much, they should just fold and let the Republicans look bad.’ But that is playing some sort of political game,” he continued, “where most people don’t think of their lives as a political game. They think of their lives as their only life on earth.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/bernie-sanders-and-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-fight-the-oligarchy
= new reply since forum marked as read
And FAFO to those who believed the Liar-In-Thief.
All the flags, almost as many as the U.N., here:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219770873