Bernie Sanders got his one-millionth individual commitment today. (And he kicked off his campaign, when? A week ago, maybe?) As part of announcing that millionth-person fact in a booster e-mail, Bernie also summarized the list of challenges that must be addressed and what stands in the way of each.

In the e-mail (dated February 25, 2019), Bernie laid it all out. Clearly. Succinctly.

He starts off:

“Make no mistake about it. The special interests in this country have unbelievable power and they want to maintain the status quo. They have unlimited amounts of money to spend on campaigns and lobbying and have huge influence over the media and political parties. But while they have the money, we have the people. And that’s important.”

I’ve been hearing a lot about people power lately, and I think it fits well with Bernie’s “not me, us” message.

What Bernie’s People Power Must Overcome

• Medicare for All – take on the insurance companies
• Lower drug prices – take on the pharmaceutical industry
• Universal background checks & assault weapons ban – take on the NRA
• Green New Deal & fight climate change – take on the fossil fuel industry
• Shut down private prisons – take on and defeat a very powerful private prison industry
• Foreign policy that focuses on democracy, human rights, diplomacy and world peace – take on the military industrial complex
• Trade policies that reflect the interests of working people – take on very large and powerful multi-national corporations
• Create an economy that works for all of us and not just the wealthy few – take on Wall Street and the billionaire class in this country

Bernie’s e-mail ended with:

“And the truth is no candidate and no president, not even the greatest president you could possibly imagine, is capable of taking on all of those industries and all of those groups alone. But together, we can create a nation that leads the world in the struggle for peace and for economic, racial, social and environmental justice.”

Altogether, Bernie’s e-mail struck me as a “Bernie in Brief” sort of summary that may become a good starting point for the spreadsheet matrix I expect to end up with as I assess for myself the plethora of policy positions of the presidential candidates people are expected to consider and choose among for 2020. I don’t expect to make posts about all of them, probably not even most of them, but maybe I’ll put my spreadsheet out at some point. Or not. I imagine a lot of journalists will be publishing things like that, so I probably don’t need to do that. I can just keep my posts to my usual personal subject matter: whatever I’m thinking about.

Unfortunately, the state of affairs has become a major distraction from the original mission for Cielem’el and the web log. I never expected to be writing about anything political. I certainly never wanted to. Even while I was getting my grad degrees in economics several lifetimes ago, I hated talking or writing about politics. But things have gotten so messed up, particularly with the climate crisis, that I’ve found myself spending more and more time trying to understand how we got where we are, where we actually are, and how we’re going to get beyond where we are now.

Since I seem to be on a personal evolutionary path toward activism, I might as well write about it.