LibertyVoter.Org

By Common Dreams

For Democrats to win both runoff races planned for January 5 in Georgia and secure a Senate majority, they’re going to need a winning campaign message.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shared a suggestion on social media: “If Democrats take back the Senate,” he said on Monday afternoon, “we will increase the minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $15 an hour.”

Sanders’ tweet implied that vocally fighting for a higher minimum wage could be the key to victory for candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, where 47% of workers make less than $15 an hour and 71% of voters support increasing the federal minimum wage.

As Common Dreams reported last week, voters in Florida—despite casting roughly 370,000 more ballots for outgoing President Donald Trump than President-elect Joe Biden—approved a ballot measure to establish a $15 minimum wage with support from nearly two-thirds of the state’s electorate.

After Floridians passed a minimum wage increase by a margin of 61% to 39% while Biden lost the state by capturing only 47.8% of the vote compared to Trump’s 51.2%, progressives criticized the Democratic Party for what some characterized as an inadequate embrace of progressive positions, ineffective communication, or both.

After all, critics noted, it is Biden, not Trump, who actually supports the $15 minimum wage policy that will give nearly 2.5 million low-income workers in Florida a much-needed raise.

With a major potential victory for progressives in sight, Sanders offered a campaign message for candidates Ossoff and Warnock that could prevent the Democrats from coming up short in Georgia and handing Senate control to the Republicans.

His messaging idea, which seeks to excite people about the possibility of a Democratic-led Senate delivering a minimum wage hike, reflects his desire to see Ossoff and Warnock champion a living wage policy that can generate enthusiasm amongst voters and spark a strong turnout for the special Senate elections in Georgia.

As TIME reported last week, Atlanta’s above-average turnout among young voters (18-29 years old), and particularly young Black voters, 90% of whom voted for Biden, was instrumental in securing victory for the president-elect. If Democrats are to win a Senate majority, replicating a high turnout of voters who …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Independent Media Institute

by David Hastings

During his campaign, president-elect Joe Biden declared climate change the “number one issue facing humanity” and vowed a national transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy that he said would create millions of new jobs. Now the question is: Will he follow through?

The last Democratic president, Barack Obama, had a mixed environmental record. He signed the Paris climate accord and gave a modest boost to clean energy production. His administration gets credit for issuing higher standards for automobile fuel emissions, and to reduce electricity in appliances, from dishwashers to walk-in freezers. But under Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency dragged its feet against imposing CO2 standards for power plants and oil refineries, and wasted precious time pushing an ineffective cap and trade system, rather than a badly needed carbon tax.

Certainly, Obama was miles better than Trump, but if we have any hope of really tackling this global challenge, Biden will have to be miles better than Obama. Obama 2.0 will not be enough.

The good news is that the candidate Joe Biden had the most ambitious plan addressing the climate crisis ever proposed by a major party nominee for president. His infrastructure and clean energy proposals included a pledge to achieve 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. To a number of observers, setting 2035 as the target appears unrealistic, but it’s what the science tells us we must do. And a recent analysis by Professor Sonia Aggarwal from the University of California Berkeley School of Public Policy shows that 100 percent carbon-free electricity is achievable by 2035 due to plummeting solar, wind and battery costs.

Candidate Biden also has been seemingly undeterred by the $2 trillion price tag over four years, because he proposes the climate crisis as an opportunity to create millions of jobs, address systemic inequities, and correct environmental problems in communities most heavily affected by climate impacts.

But it’s easy to make campaign promises. Now candidate Biden has to pivot to become President Biden. How feasible is it to achieve these goals? And what does it mean for those living in frontline communities?

It’s an uphill climb, to be sure. To achieve his ambitious pillar for a “clean-energy revolution” means doubling the best rate of solar and wind deployment each year from 2020 to 2029—then tripling it each year from 2030 …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By The Conversation

by Thomas Klassen, York University, Canada

A refrain of American politics is the lack of representation of women, Blacks and Hispanics in the political arena. But almost as striking in 2020 is the exclusion of young people.

Those at the highest levels of the American government have never been older: Joe Biden, the next president, is currently 77 and will celebrate a birthday later this month. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, is 80. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is 78. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is young by comparison at 65, but four of his eight colleagues are older than him.

It hasn’t always been this way. John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama began their terms of office while in their 40s. In contrast, Donald Trump was 70 when he assumed power in 2016 and Biden will be 78.

The age of those holding executive, legislative and judicial power in Washington, D.C., sends a warning. American politicians are much more generous to the old than they are to the young. After all, the country does have public health care, but only for those 65 and older.

Social Security retirement benefits are the third rail of politics that few politicians dare touch. Among the most feared, fierce and well-funded lobby groups in Washington is the American Association for Retired Persons, known as AARP, which advocates for the interests of those 50 and over.

Banned mandatory retirement

The aging of the political class illustrates how (old) age is now accepted in workplaces and more generally in the public domain. The U.S. was the first country to ban mandatory retirement at age 65. This ensures that workers are judged not on their chronological age but, rather, on their performance.

Like politicians, the vast majority of Americans now work in the services sector where most jobs place a premium on social competencies, knowledge and the ability to continue learning, rather than on physical strength.

Whether in politics or outside it, long careers also mean more experience, connections and opportunities to call in favours. Biden ran for president in 1988 and 2008, served for 36 years in the Senate and was Obama’s vice-president for two terms. McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984, and Pelosi to the House of Representatives in 1987.

Older politicians have an advantage at the polls because their fellow older citizens are much more …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By The Conversation

by Regina Smyth, Indiana University and Sarah Oates, University of Maryland

The 2020 election, in which Joe Biden is the projected winner, is not what a rigged election looks like.

Rigged elections are organized. Vote counts certainly don’t play out in front of the country on television screens. When it’s a decentralized, sprawling affair that is broadcast for many days and nights, you can be pretty sure it’s democracy.

If you want to know what stolen elections look like, look at Russia, where we have studied elections and the media for decades.

The early heyday of Russian democracy was very messy. Just after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Kremlin poured money and resources into a Western-looking pro-market party called Russia’s Choice. Despite the money and help it got, the party failed spectacularly in the 1993 election. Meanwhile, nationalists and Communists, parties with strong connections to voters and their beliefs, won their way into power through the elections. But outcomes were unpredictable and the campaigns were chaotic.

How to steal an election, Russian-style

Over time, the Putin regime systematically consolidated its domination over politics, turning elections from a democratic contest into a controlled system that delivered regime victories.

Russian elections are now state-directed performances that eliminate opposition. Random targeted arrests and violence – especially against those who try to lead alternative political movements – are common. Alexei Navalny, leader of a reform movement and now recovering from a poisoning, could tell us a lot about that. So could Yegor Zhukov, a student blogger who was arrested and convicted of extremism and then beaten outside of his home for his political actions.

Even eliminating viable opposition can’t ensure certain victories at the polls. To eliminate all risk, as Russia demonstrates, autocrats must take four additional steps:

1. Dominate the media message by controlling major news outlets through ownership, creating laws that stifle press freedom and repressing outspoken journalists.
2. Assert control over local government officials who then ensure that voters turn out to support the regime.
3. Build a vote tabulation process that allows ballot stuffing and falsified vote counts.
4. Declare victory immediately and allow no questioning of the results.

Emerging from a decade of economic and political chaos in 2000, President Vladimir Putin honed his electoral machine to do just that. The Kremlin used its …read more

Source: ALTERNET

By Alex Henderson

Although some Republicans have congratulated President-Elect Joe Biden on his victory —including Sen. Mitt Romney, former President George W. Bush and former Florida Gov. Jeb. Bush — President Donald Trump is refusing to concede, claiming, without evidence, that he has been the victim of widespread voter fraud. And according to CNN’s Brian Stelter, Trump’s supporters in the right-wing media are encouraging his false claims that he really won the election.

In an article published this week by CNN, Stelter explains, “The reality is that Joe Biden is the president-elect…. (But Trump) and his biggest promoters in the media are in denial about the election results, or are pretending to be. And many Republican Party leaders are falling in line. Today’s lies will have consequences tomorrow, because tens of millions of people are being exposed to this stuff through websites like Breitbart and shows like ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ on Fox News.”

It’s important to note that at Fox News and Fox Business, there is a separation between the hard news divisions and opinion hosts like Carlson, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham. Trump is furious that Fox News’ decision desk called Arizona for Biden on Election Day, but Carlson and Hannity have been promoting the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump through widespread voter fraud — even though there is no evidence to support that claim.

Stelter notes what his colleague at CNN, Oliver Darcy, had to say this week about the claim that Trump really won the election.

“Right-wing media has a firm grip on the Republican Party,” Darcy explained. “GOP senators and other prominent leaders are actively being encouraged to play along with this nonsense. And the ones who don’t actively fuel the fire will likely be less likely to speak out over fear of facing the wrath of people like Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, etc. This is a five-alarm fire.”

Stelter also notes what Carlson said this week: “We don’t know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night. We don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged. We don’t know. We ought to find out.”

Hannity, according to Stelter, has been slamming the mainstream media for reporting legitimate election results —and others on the far right are joining him in that.

“From Mark Levin to Ted Cruz, one of the Trump-might-have-won crowd’s main themes is that the major networks hastily called the …read more

Source: ALTERNET