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| Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador |
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| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez |
If you're paying even a little bit of attention to the current political climate you would see its warming up along with the planet. All across the globe working people are starting to realize that establishment politics and establishment economics that essentially function as siphoning wealth and resources from the poor to the rich. The inequality has reached a comical level and its getting worse, not better.
For that reason movements have been popping up world wide on the left and right. From the left its all about unions and improving the quality of life for people and making sure the wealthy elite pay their fair share of taxes. On the right its a much uglier beast based primarily on stoking peoples fear of the other whether they be minorities or immigrants or whatever, and crucially, this misdirects the anger from themselves (the wealthy elite) to people on the bottom of the economic ladder, the people with no money and no power.
Just think about this for a moment, how in the great googly moogly are the people with no money and no power the cause of the problems we're faced with? It doesn't add up, I'm exceptionally poor at math and even I can calculate that. The migrant family fleeing from CIA funded paramilitary groups in Honduras or Guatemala didn't have anything to do with the massive transfer of wealth -from the bottom to the top- that just took place under a completely republican dominated government. The migrants, the poor, the blacks, gays, women, trans folk, none of them are the reason why we spend the most on healthcare with the worst results. These people aren't the reason why we don't have high speed broad band across the nation. They aren't the reason that our infrastructure gets a grade of D+. I can go on but I think I've made my point.
So with the basics out of the way, we've established that populism is popping up everywhere from Italy to Greece to the US to Mexico, some from the left, some from the right. We know the "populism" on the right isn't really populism, its the age old "fear of the other" being stoked by the powerful in attempt to save their own hides.
In the Bronx, Cortez literally wore shoes down to rags organizing and campaigning in her district. She completely rejected corporate PAC money on principle so as to stave off the ever encroaching corruption that comes with campaign contributions from the corporate and billionaire sector. Contrast that to her opponent; corporate Democrat Joe Crowley who raised 10 times as much as Cortez from a myriad of corporations you probably buy things from everyday and had no ground game or volunteers to speak of. This was a true grassroots campaign of the left.
However if we take a closer look at Almo as he is sometimes called, we see almost exactly the same thing. Obrador campaigned on ending corruption and giving the masses back their government, as did Cortez. Do you see the trend here? Of course you do, the elites in DC don't, they can't. But its obvious to anyone who lives in the real world not insulated by untold amounts of wealth.
The comparisons to Trump are laughable and as the most recent Citations Needed Podcast succinctly points out; they are an attempt from the establishment to paint anything left of the democratic party leadership as dangerous and unruly as the orange fascist clown we have in the WhiteHouse. This is to be expected from the lapdogs that are corporate media, it means that Cortez and Almo are doing something right.
It is of the utmost importance that we hold Cortez's feet to the fire and that the people of Mexico do the same to Almo, but for the time being, admist a slew of awful news regarding the supreme court or the state sponsored child kidnapping at the border, or the never ending hell that is Palestine or the holocaust times 3 that is the Yemen "civil" war... This is a positive trend we need to keep pushing for if we have any hope to salvage the experiment that is humanity.
