David Sirota Quotes

No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly. Most likely, in fact, the answers are murky. But such questions need to be asked.

Personal opinion: I think it would be good for there to be a presidential debate in which the questions don’t come only from millionaires paid by billionaires.

When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela's did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter - and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on. For a flamboyant ideologue like Chavez, that meant him being seen by the transnational elite as much more than an insignificant rogue leader of a relatively small country. He came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism. That, of course, is considered a high crime by the American political illuminati - a high crime prompting a special punishment.

Cheney initiatives that may seem superficially reasonable when calmly uttered by a Cheney usually have an insane ulterior motive. In this case, that truism applies: The Crow-Cheney legislation may sound like it includes reasonable requests, but they are designed to make the Afghanistan deployment permanent. In practice, nobody can predict with 100 percent certainty what will ensue once a nineteen-year ends. What we can know is that it’s a bad idea to continue a policy that isn’t working — and there’s plenty of evidence that it isn’t.

Almost everyone else on the #DemDebate stage: health care is a human right, but we won't do anything to truly guarantee that right.

The first rule for every incoming freshman Democrat in Congress should be that you never work with a Cheney on war policy. The second rule for every freshman Democrat should be: re-read the first rule and make damn sure to follow it.

Half of America lives paycheck to paycheck
Millions can't afford medical care
Fossil fuel execs make bank while creating a climate crisis
While pundits demand candidates look "not angry" at the #DemDebate, the fact is: if you aren't angry, you're probably super wealthy.

There’s an entire media & political industry whose entire mission is to pretend politics is always super complicated. But often times it’s pretty simple & straightforward: wealthy people like the status quo and like politicians who won’t change that status quo....

It would be nice if our political discourse could be rational enough to actually accept the science that says Obama’s historic oil production increases are bad for the planet, instead of looking at that science and just screaming “but Obama is popular among voters!”

Here’s Joe Biden. Note: this is not a speech from a long time ago. This is a speech from mid-2018. This seems very important... Biden explicitly says "Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code...the first thing we have to go after, [w:Social Security|SS]] and Medicare... It's the only way to find room to pay for it"

At the moment Chavez's name is invoked, the conversation is inevitably terminated, ending any possibility of discourse. That is by design - it is what the longtime caricaturing and marginalizing of Chavez was always supposed to do. But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez's easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela's record - and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin.

Something I didn’t know: Beto O'Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress.

Health care premiums are a huge, regressive corporate-controlled tax that enriches insurance CEOs. @BernieSanders' Medicare for All proposal would eliminate that tax, lowering the medical expense burden that is crushing the 99%

It’s almost as if much of the media has a mission to studiously avoid any serious discussion of policies that affect millions of people.

It would help if television shows elucidate the public policy records of the politicians running, so that voters can make policy-based — rather than personality-based — decisions on who to be passionate about. This seems particularly critical in the era of climate change.