David Sirota Quotes

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

Lots of progressives have legit criticism of Obama’s policy record. Much of the response to that criticism has been “Democratic voters love Obama, so anyone criticizing him is politically dumb!”

Politicians often talk about “workers” but many of them do not actually say the word “union.” Bernie has been saying that word for decades and Warren in her opening video also said it. We will see if any other 2020 candidates are EXPLICIT in their support for the labor movement.

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 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!”

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....

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.

I worked for Bernie right out of college... For 20 yrs, this...has made getting any job in politics/media far more difficult.... I speak from experience when I say that the hatred of him & his ideology by the political/media class is very real.

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.

Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father's in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong. It’s not every day that you wake up in your blue state and learn that one of your newly elected Democratic congresspeople is joining with a Cheney to try to prolong the longest war in American history. But that's what happened this week, when Colorado's freshman Democratic Rep. Jason Crow teamed up with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney to advance legislation that would make it more difficult for any president to draw down troop deployments in Afghanistan. I live in the same media market as Crow's district. I can tell you that his 2018 campaign was focused on gun control. It was not a campaign promising voters that he would go to Washington to make common cause with Liz Cheney, and help her efforts to glorify and fortify her daddy's policy of endless war. But that’s exactly what his bill does.

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.

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"