@Snode

It seems like all out "leaders" or anyone who makes it big, never look back to where they came from, politicians, performers, sports stars. They can't turn their back fast enough and forget their life before.

This is hardly new:

"[BRUTUS:] That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend."

-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 1

And it still sucks, of course.

or anyone who makes it big, never look back to where they came from, politicians, performers, sports stars. They can't turn their back fast enough and forget their life before. Any listening tour would be useless, they think they know what our lives our like but it's through briefings, or they have staffers "listen", or some vague memory. When they show up they can't handle the criticism (Pelosi) or you get a song and dance (Schumer) but in the end whatever they hear is not what was said, and somehow the time is never right to address those problems.

In the end the most important thing for them is to have the warm bodies show up and vote d. Everything else is by their discretion.

@doh1304  
enough of them may have been able to concede — at least to themselves if not publicly — that, okay, the man was saying that among immigrants from Mexico there were some rapists and drug dealers and that the formulation with “all” was from people who disliked him putting words in his mouth.

the man who called them all rapists and drug dealers

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-epic-statement-on-mexico-2...

When Mexico (meaning the Mexican Government) sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you (pointing to the audience). They're not sending you (pointing again). They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems to us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people! But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people. It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop and it's got to stop fast.

stayed home or voted for Stein or quit the union? I'm sure they have the stats. I don't think they want to face the answer.
As for the racial turnout, I think the real tellimg stat is the hispanic turnout - under 50%. Why should they turn out? They had a choice, the man who called them all rapists and drug dealers or the woman who sponsored central american death squads. Maybe more people would have come out if she hadn't said to send children to be killed. You think?

@Mark from Queens Bernie told us all the establishment was
bought and paid for, i.e. union leaders, planned
parenthood and you mention the NAACP most likely
the ACLU the list goes on and on, money and CU
trumped good, we are living in times when evil
is winning.

as a very natural outgrowth of Occupy.

It's complicated.

To backup, I canvassed for Obama '08 in three states. With the hindsight of what we know now it would have been different. But I will say this: symbolism is not completely unworthy. And in that sense I don't regret - and remember crystal clear thinking as I dragged myself around so many precincts of PA and one in Ohio - that from now on there will not be a black child born in this country who won't think he can't become president. Given the deep legacy of racism and slavery that meant something to me, and still does. I'm not going to further get into Obama's disastrous legacy. I voted for Jill Stein more than any presidential candidate in my life, for reasons that don't need to be explained here.

One of the major takeaways and epiphanies of my experiences with #BLM was the great awakening that was occurring within the protest movement. I'll never forget packing in to the rec hall of a Bklyn apartment complex to hear some of the young leaders from Ferguson and St. Louis speak, after Mike Brown was gratuitously murdered by a racist thug cop and left in the street uncoverd like a dog to send a message. It was maybe a 10% white crowd and the place was alive with animation and elucidation. One protest leader remarked something that I thought captured the zeitgeist of the movement. Which was that they didn't want to be thought of as the "New Civil Rights Movement," which is why they shunned people like Sharpton and Jackson, but embraced radicals such as Cornel West and Rev. Sekou. They instead referred to themselves as the "Oppressed People's Movement," explicitly seeing the connections between not only institutional racism in America, but the struggles in Palestine, the class struggles of the economically disenfranchised and the LGBTQ movement. It's was very moving and had powerful ramifications. Which is why the RW media still spends so much time trying to malign it.

Regarding the Dems losing their taken-for-granted grip on the black voting bloc, this NY Times piece really captured that.

Four barbers and a firefighter were pondering their future under a Trump presidency at the Upper Cutz barbershop last week.

“We got to figure this out,” said Cedric Fleming, one of the barbers. “We got a gangster in the chair now,” he said, referring to President-elect Donald J. Trump.

They admitted that they could not complain too much: Only two of them had voted. But there were no regrets.

“I don’t feel bad,” Mr. Fleming said, trimming a mustache. “Milwaukee is tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”

(snip)

The biggest drop was here in District 15, a stretch of fading wooden homes, sandwich shops and fast-food restaurants that is 84 percent black. In this district, voter turnout declined by 19.5 percent from 2012 figures, according to Neil Albrecht, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission. It is home to some of Milwaukee’s poorest residents and, according to a 2016 documentary, “Milwaukee 53206,” has one of the nation’s highest per-capita incarceration rates.

At Upper Cutz, a bustling barbershop in a green-trimmed wooden house, talk of politics inevitably comes back to one man: Barack Obama. Mr. Obama’s elections infused many here with a feeling of connection to national politics they had never before experienced. But their lives have not gotten appreciably better, and sourness has set in.

“We went to the beach,” said Maanaan Sabir, 38, owner of the Juice Kitchen, a brightly painted shop a few blocks down West North Avenue, using a metaphor to describe the emotion after Mr. Obama’s election. “And then eight years happened.”

All four barbers had voted for Mr. Obama. But only two could muster the enthusiasm to vote this time. And even then, it was a sort of protest. One wrote in Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The other wrote in himself.

I’m so numb,” said Jahn Toney, 45, who had written in Mr. Sanders. He said no president in his lifetime had done anything to improve the lives of black people, including Mr. Obama, whom he voted for twice. “It’s like I should have known this would happen. We’re worse off than before.”

But Mr. Obama did do something important: “He did give black people something to aspire to. That’s a lot. I’m happy my son was able to see a black president.”

Mr. Fleming, 47, who has been trimming hair, beards and mustaches for 30 years, had hoped his small business would get easier to run. But it hasn’t.

“Give us loans, or a 401(k),” he said, trimming the mustache of Steve Stricklin, a firefighter from the neighborhood. His biggest issue was health insurance. Mr. Fleming lost his coverage after his divorce three years ago and has struggled to find a policy he could afford. He finally found one, which starts Monday but costs too much at $300 a month.

“Ain’t none of this been working,” he said. He did not vote.
…
“I felt cornered,” said Ian Pfeiffer, 25, who works the grill at Jake’s Delicatessen and says he did not vote. “We were stuck between Trump and Hillary. They really left us with no choice.”

I'll just say another thing. Those self-important, Neoliberal clowns at TOP would go into hysterics and denigrate Cornel anytime he was mentioned, such was their frenzied, knee-jerk defense of Obama. It always confounded me. They could never put up another intellectual who was as willing to put his body on the line and get arrested, nor one who could hold a candle to his powers of cogency, brilliance, historical and philosophical skill, and oration gifts.

And one more. I wrote an essay at TOP called (warning: it's a link to there) "Big Turnout for #LawyersMarch To Crooked Staten Island DA, Demand GJ Case Unsealed/Console Garners." In it I observe the protesters not trusting the old guard of the Sharpton wing to be the face of Garner family instead of the #BLM movement. In the end, Garner's daughter Erica broke with the establishment and went with Bernie to became a surrogate of his and denounced the Neoliberal Democratic Party as supporters of blacks.