Notations On Our World (Special Edition): Out & About on the US Political Scene

As the US Election Campaign has begun in earnest, our team released a compilation of thoughts in our perspectives property.   As part of our commitment to educate and help to change the conversation,  we have a commitment to bring to bear alternative views.  We hereby present this courtesy of the team at the National Priorities Project & Esquire: 

Watch what 2020 candidates said at our Moral Budget launch about poverty, racism, militarism, & ecological devastation. Tonight marks the first of two opening debates in the Democratic presidential primary.  Color us cynical, but if these are anything like recent presidential debates, we don’t expect a whole lot of discussion on the $750 billion elephant in the room: the insanely bloated Pentagon budget. We may or may not see anyone acknowledge the 140 million people who are poor or low-income in the richest nation on Earth.  We’d be pleasantly surprised to hear anyone bring up the existential crisis of climate change. But just last week, we got to see nine 2020 presidential candidates directly answer to their stances on addressing poverty, racism, militarism, and ecological devastation when we launched our comprehensive Poor People’s Moral Budget at a Moral Action Congress forum with Rev. William Barber, Rev. Liz Theoharis, and over 1,000 organizers from Poor People's Campaign chapters in close to 40 states.  Watch and share our clips from 2020 candidates! Do these 2020 contenders have the political will to end the endless wars, establish fair taxes on the wealthy, and put our country’s ample resources to work for a truly moral economy? Just in time for the first debates, we’ve rounded up some of the forum answers from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and five other candidates. Please read them, watch the clips, and send them around to anyone else who will be watching tonight and tomorrow! We certainly will be — and starting at 9 p.m. ET tonight, you can join us on Twitter @natpriorities and @ips_dc to follow along, too. We’ll be sharing resources and some of our experts will be chiming in. We’d love to hear from you too! It was amazing to hear the majority of candidates who were at the forum last week, for the first time, say they supported our push to cut military spending. And all of them pledged to make sure that we never again have an election where the official debates ignore systemic poverty. Now it’s up to all of us to hold them accountable to our movements.

See more from our groundbreaking Poor People’s Moral Budget report.   Kamala Harris Was Electric Taking on Joe Biden in the Second Democratic Debate   Well, DNC SummerSlam is over and, after two nights of this stuff, we can conclude swiftly that an actual presidential campaign has broken out. The second night featured an array of candidates from the forceful and commanding (Kamala Harris), to the mild and painfully earnest (Pete Buttigieg), to the utterly otherworldly (The Pompatus Of Love Herself, Marianne Williamson), all of whom had as their goal dressing Joe Biden in a lovely suit of cobwebs for a public mummification in front of a television audience. And it worked, and Biden and his people knew it worked, and that's why there is an actual campaign underway at last. Read More