Tony Brasunas

When choosing a school, a restaurant, or a licensed contractor, most of us use criteria to make our choice. But very few people actually do this when choosing the candidates they vote for. The media doesn’t help with this either by asking nonsense questions like “who would you like to have a beer with?”

I offer here a set of criteria for progressives to use when choosing a candidate to support in our partly dysfunctional 2019 American political system. Having paid attention to this wild yet somehow predictable 2020 Democratic Primary over the past year, for your reading pleasure, I also score each candidate based on those criteria, although you are invited to tweak the criteria and score them differently if you would like.

There are a lot of candidates and a lot to examine, so this is not a short piece. Grab a coffee or tea and a comfortable chair.

Let’s get two things out of the way before jumping in:

First, basic terminology. I see essentially all politics, politicians, and movements as efforts to control the distribution of wealth and power, and each channels one of three forces:

– Reactionary, seeking to concentrate wealth and power into fewer hands
– Conservative, seeking to keep the distribution of wealth and power as it is
– Progressive, seeking to spread wealth and power more broadly among people

If you consider these strands of political energy and find yourself instinctively reactionary, you might not find much of this article useful. I am a progressive at heart and believe that spreading wealth and power more broadly is beneficial to all and creates a stronger and healthier society, and I consider the grand arc of progressive politics stretching back to Magna Carta to be a good thing and something that I hope will continue. Today, with AI, nanotechnology, weather manipulation, and the rest of the next wave of technology arriving every day, we can and must distribute power (ie decision-making) more broadly throughout the population.

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Smoke from these horrendous California wildfires still blankets the enormous Sacramento-to-the-Bay region of California and poisons its 10 million residents. If you live in California, or only feel sorry for those who do, perhaps it’s worth considering right now how you are contributing to unhealthy air and how you can help us reduce air pollution.

What if a single action you could take today could improve the air in your home and in your community and also reduce climate change? What if that same action could possibly even help prevent more raging wildfires in the near future?

Your greatest contribution to poor air is quite possibly your choice of individual transportation. Transportation is responsible for a huge 40 percent of this state’s greenhouse gas emissions, and it accounts for (more…)

Like christmas trees in windows and jack o’lanterns on front porches, your mailbox swelling with political mail signifies the arrival of a particular season of the year: election season. If you’re living in California, this bizarrely inspiring time is here once again.

I’ve written very little politically since the (unfortunate) political turns of 2016 and the (fortunate) arrival of my son, so take these voting recommendations with a grain of salt and a sprinkle of curiosity. In fact, I don’t have a particularly cheerful outlook on our political situation right now, and, worse, the reasons to believe that your vote will be counted fairly are decreasing, but I’ll discuss that at the end of this piece.

First, I do recommend you vote, and to see how I’ll be voting in Tuesday’s June Primary, please view my full guide here.

Today the Democratic National Committee defeated, once again, even the possibility of the semblance of progressive leadership in the party.

Rather than let Keith Ellison win, the DNC chose Tom Perez, a man who entered the race recently at the behest of establishment leadership, to fill the corrupt shoes of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile.

It’s an awful move, but unfortunately at this point it’s hardly surprising.

This selection basically says to voters and rank-and-file Democrats that yes, the party will give you more of the same, more status quo Wall Street-driven decisions, more superdelegates choosing nominees before races even begin, more tone-deaf weak corporate politics at the top, and more losses and more excuses for the next four years.

The way this all went down — so similar to what I saw in Philadelphia last year at the convention — shows that the DNC is more determined to defeat progressives than to defeat Republicans. Think about that. (more…)

A group of former staff and delegates from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign have joined with hundreds of others this week to launch a campaign called “Draft Bernie For A People’s Party.”

The goal is to convince Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that the Democratic Party is corrupt beyond redemption, and that the creation of a powerful new party is not only possible but one of the best things that could happen for the country and planet right now.

The launch of “Draft Bernie For A People’s Party” is led by Nicholas Brana, former national political outreach coordinator for Bernie 2016.

“People are yearning for something positive and honorable that they can build as their future,” says Brana, adding that the new party intends to capitalize on the desire for progressive change that the Sanders campaign so prodigiously tapped into. “While Trump is busy dividing us, Bernie can continue to do what he did during the campaign—unite us — only this time outside the corporate, neoliberal constraints of the Democratic Party.”

A new People’s Party, with Sanders at the helm, would launch with at least half of the Democratic Party (more…)

A quick test to understand your viewpoint in today’s bizarre political media landscape.

It was a political year in which up was often down, and right masqueraded frequently as left. The year 2016 then wrapped up with a steady stream of diametrically opposed media stories all clamoring for recognition as “the truth.”

The mainstream media featured incessant talk of “fake news,” and pundits propounded conspiracy theories about Russians hacking email servers. The independent media continued to analyze piles of evidence showing collusion on the part of the mainstream media and the two political parties who ran the worst presidential campaign in modern American politics.

With all this news and theory swirling around, some of which must be false, it has become difficult to know at any one time whether you’re reading the news correctly, whether you’re seeing the role of the media itself clearly, or whether there’s a Matrix-like veil obscuring your comprehension of national events.

Here’s a quick test to determine whether

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