The meeting is the first major gathering of the institutional left since Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in last week’s presidential election, and, if the agenda is any indication, liberals plan full-on trench warfare against Trump from Day One. Some sessions deal with gearing up for 2017 and 2018 elections, while others focus on thwarting President-elect Trump’s 100-day plan, which the agenda calls “a terrifying assault on President Obama’s achievements — and our progressive vision for an equitable and just nation.”

Yet the meeting also comes as many liberals are reassessing their approach to politics — and the role of the Democracy Alliance, or DA, as the club is known in Democratic finance circles. The DA, its donors and beneficiary groups over the last decade have had a major hand in shaping the institutions of the left, including by orienting some of its key organizations around Clinton, and by basing their strategy around the idea that minorities and women constituted a so-called “rising American electorate” that could tip elections to Democrats.

readmore:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/democrats-soros-trump-231313

Hillary Clinton has given us back our freedom. Only such a crushing defeat could break the chains that bound us to the New Democrat elites. The defeat was the result of decades of moving the Democratic party – the party of FDR – away from what it once was and should have remained: a party that represents workers. All workers. 

For three decades they have kept us in line with threats of a Republican monster-president should we stay home on election day. Election day has come and passed, and many did stay home. And instead of bowing out gracefully and accepting responsibility for their defeat, they have already started blaming it largely on racist hordes of rural Americans. That explanation conveniently shifts blame away from themselves, and avoids any tough questions about where the party has failed.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/20/clinton-gone-silve...

https://off-guardian.org/2016/11/20/soros-60minute-video/

When Vox‘s Jeff Stein reported late last week that Democrats had, at long last, unified around a message for 2018—”A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages”—the immediate reaction was almost universal mockery. “The Democrats’ new message shows they’ve learned nothing from the 2016 campaign,” thundered Mic. The Washington Free Beacon (and seemingly everyone else) noted that the second half of the slogan sounded suspiciously like the Papa John’s motto: “Better Ingredients, Better Pizza, Papa John’s.”

Congressional Democrats have made good punching bags over the last seven months because they’ve been largely powerless to stop President Donald Trump’s bumbling agenda, but slogans are mostly trivia; what matters is what the Democrats plan to do. And on Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) unveiled the economic agenda his party aims to run on next year. While much of what he is promising is not exactly new (even the ill-fated Clinton–Kaine expedition ran on a promise of better skills, jobs, and wages), Schumer’s message is strikingly aggressive in one key area: drawing a direct line between the struggles of the working class and the increasingly monopolistic growth of the country largest corporations:

Right now, there is nothing to stop vulture capitalists from egregiously raising the price of lifesaving drugs without justification. We’re going to fight for rules to stop prescription drug price gouging and demand that drug companies justify price increases to the public. And we’re going to push for empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices for older Americans.

Right now our antitrust laws are designed to allow huge corporations to merge, padding the pockets of investors but sending costs skyrocketing for everything from cable bills and airline tickets to food and health care. We are going to fight to allow regulators to break up big companies if they’re hurting consumers and to make it harder for companies to merge if it reduces competition.

Did you hear that? That’s the sound of Elizabeth Warren tightening her grip on the Democratic Party.

Breaking up monopolistic corporations has not been a big talking point for party leaders over the last decade, even in the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession that got even Paul Ryan talking about “income inequality.” The idea was central to the message of people like Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and former New York congressional candidate and progressive favorite Zephyr Teachout, but an afterthought to the party writ large. In the aftermath of the election, however, as party leaders wrestled with whether to commit themselves to a more populist agenda, there has been a steady drumbeat of anti-monopoly policies, as ably chronicled by Matt Stoller, a fellow at the liberal New America Foundation, in an essay for the New Republic calling for Democrats to return to their “trust-busting roots”:

In the current climate, Democrats oppose antitrust measures at their own peril. During a recent debate over the budget resolution, [Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar] and Bernie Sanders introduced a proposal to allow the importation of prescription drugs, a measure designed to introduce competition into the pharmaceutical marketplace and reduce prices. Several Democrats, including Senator Cory Booker, worked with the Republicans to vote the measure down. Grassroots reformers responded by sending out email alerts, and Booker was deluged by comments from angry voters. A month later, Booker and Sanders proposed a joint bill to allow prescription drug imports.

That Schumer, the archetypal corporate-friendly Democrat, would ape the language of Warren, Sanders, and Teachout suggests that at least on this front, the populists have won the argument. 

read more:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/that-sound-you-hear-is-eliza...

Most of the commentary surrounding the 2018 midterm election season is—surprise, surprise—about Donald Trump. After every special election, whether a Democrat wins or a Republican, prognosticators and pundits habitually steer the conversation towards what the result says about Trump’s longevity. A loss by a Republican in a district Trump won in 2016 is packaged as a political win for the Democrats. And a GOP win in a competitive race is interpreted as a blow to the Resistance movement.

But the 2018 midterms are not all about Trump. There is another senior politico whose record is on the ballot: House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The San Francisco native is everything the modern Republican Party hates. She’s from the West Coast, representing one of the most liberal states in the country. She helped push the Affordable Care Act across the finish line in 2010 without a single GOP vote. She raises boatloads of cash for Democratic candidates and progressive causes: a source told CNN that Pelosi has raised $91 million for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in this election cycle, a pile of cash that would make the Clintons envious. And she led Democrats back into the House majority in 2006 after 12 years in the political wilderness.

A lot of younger Democrats, however, are firmly of the opinion that it’s time for a change. Pelosi has been at the top since 2002, the longest tenure of a Democratic party leader since Sam Rayburn. She has outlasted all of her contemporaries on the Republican side: John Boehner and Dennis Hastert are long gone, and Paul Ryan is retiring at the end of the year. Her record as a vote counter is second to none, as evidenced by her having guided health and bank reform legislation into law.

But to the younger generation, those like Seth Moulton, Tim Ryan, and Linda Sanchez, Pelosi exemplifies the the old way of doing things. While they won’t say it openly on television, they think the California lawmaker is past her prime. They’d like nothing more than for Pelosi to hand over her baton and enjoy her golden years back in the Golden State. This feeling was percolating in parts of her caucus as far back as 2010, when Democrats got humiliated during the midterm elections. Six years later, an obscure rank-and-file congressman from Ohio named Tim Ryan challenged Pelosi and won about a third of the House Democratic vote. Ryan may try again in the fall.

Pelosi’s ostensible allies are also joining the chorus, however mutedly. Congressman Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the third ranking House Democrat, told The New York Times last week that he was interested in running for the top leadership post if Pelosi decides to retire or step down as leader. At 78, Clyburn is not exactly a representative of the next generation. But if Democrats win the House majority and Clyburn runs with Pelosi’s blessing, he would make history as the first African-American speaker.

Pelosi is used to surviving, so she dismisses all this as the murmurings of mutinous brats who are too inexperienced to understand how the House works. Asked by Rolling Stone whether she was concerned about the growing calls for her to step aside, Pelosi essentially laughed at the question: “I’m not worried about that. And I’m certainly not worried about them.”

She may yet pay for being so smug. While no one would dispute her bona fides as a liberal icon or talented party leader, more than four dozen Democrats running for office this year want to see a change in leadership, and nearly half of Democrats surveyed by The Hill newspaper want Pelosi to be replaced. Two high-profile House Democratic candidates—Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania’s 18th district and Danny O’Connor in Ohio’s 12th—distanced themselves from Pelosi during their special election races like she was the Black Plague.

read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nancy-pelosis-last-chance/

Read from top. The fact that Soros is "trying to help" the Democrats, isn't helping.

With Washington paralyzed due to a partial government shutdown sparked by budget squabbles, the House Democratic leader is leading the #Resistance against Donald Trump and his border wall… by vacationing at a fancy resort in Hawaii. According to reports, Pelosi has been spotted at Hawaii’s Fairmont Orchid resort, where rooms prices start from $899 to $4,899 for the presidential suite.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/447676-pelosi-hawaii-vacation-shutdown-trump/

See also: get the russians to build trump's wall....in london and washington knew the crimean question was settled....

Read from top.