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David Sirota

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David Sirota, Denver, Colorado, USA (2011)

David Sirota (born November 2, 1975) is an American political commentator and radio host based in Denver, and a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, political spokesperson, and blogger.

See also Don't Look Up

Quotes

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2013

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  • Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
  • According to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez's first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez's brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its "extreme poverty" rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America.
  • When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela's did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter - and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on. For a flamboyant ideologue like Chavez, that meant him being seen by the transnational elite as much more than an insignificant rogue leader of a relatively small country. He came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism. That, of course, is considered a high crime by the American political illuminati - a high crime prompting a special punishment.
  • No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly. Most likely, in fact, the answers are murky. But such questions need to be asked.
  • At the moment Chavez's name is invoked, the conversation is inevitably terminated, ending any possibility of discourse. That is by design - it is what the longtime caricaturing and marginalizing of Chavez was always supposed to do. But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez's easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela's record - and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin.

2018

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  • Beto voted against his own party to pass GOP bills for business tax cuts, Wall St dereg, Trump’s deportation force, and chipping away at the ACA. It’s your right to argue thats totally OK — but let’s not use vague averages to obscure what his specific votes were about.
  • It would help if television shows elucidate the public policy records of the politicians running, so that voters can make policy-based — rather than personality-based — decisions on who to be passionate about. This seems particularly critical in the era of climate change.
  • We... were slammed for publishing a deep-dive into the legislative record of Beto O'Rourke. That’s being courageously followed up by a Washington Post story touting Beto’s height, because apparently nothing matters..
  • It’s almost as if much of the media has a mission to studiously avoid any serious discussion of policies that affect millions of people.
  • It would be nice if our political discourse could be rational enough to actually accept the science that says Obama’s historic oil production increases are bad for the planet, instead of looking at that science and just screaming “but Obama is popular among voters!”
  • Lots of progressives have legit criticism of Obama’s policy record. Much of the response to that criticism has been “Democratic voters love Obama, so anyone criticizing him is politically dumb!”
  • If an asteroid was headed toward Earth, I’d hope the presidential campaign narrative would revolve around who voted to accelerate the asteroid, who voted to slow the asteroid, and who has the best policy to divert the asteroid. In 2020, climate change is the asteroid.
  • For weeks, Beto [O'Rourke] fans have attacked our reporting in an effort to intimidate journalists into not looking into his record. But now the Houston Chronicle is citing our reporting for having prompted a much needed debate about climate policy & his record.

2019

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  • Personal opinion: I think it would be good for there to be a presidential debate in which the questions don’t come only from millionaires paid by billionaires.
  • So far in the #DemocraticDebate, there is @BernieSanders who says the wealthiest country in human history can afford to make sure its people don't die for lack of health insurance and can get a debt-free education, and then there are others who insist that's not possible.
  • Health care premiums are a huge, regressive corporate-controlled tax that enriches insurance CEOs. @BernieSanders' Medicare for All proposal would eliminate that tax, lowering the medical expense burden that is crushing the 99%
  • Almost everyone else on the #DemDebate stage: health care is a human right, but we won't do anything to truly guarantee that right.
  • Half of America lives paycheck to paycheck
    Millions can't afford medical care
    Fossil fuel execs make bank while creating a climate crisis
    While pundits demand candidates look "not angry" at the #DemDebate, the fact is: if you aren't angry, you're probably super wealthy.
  • I worked for Bernie right out of college... For 20 yrs, this...has made getting any job in politics/media far more difficult.... I speak from experience when I say that the hatred of him & his ideology by the political/media class is very real.
  • Here’s Joe Biden. Note: this is not a speech from a long time ago. This is a speech from mid-2018. This seems very important... Biden explicitly says "Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code...the first thing we have to go after, [w:Social Security|SS]] and Medicare... It's the only way to find room to pay for it"
  • Politicians often talk about “workers” but many of them do not actually say the word “union.” Bernie has been saying that word for decades and Warren in her opening video also said it. We will see if any other 2020 candidates are EXPLICIT in their support for the labor movement.
  • There’s an entire media & political industry whose entire mission is to pretend politics is always super complicated. But often times it’s pretty simple & straightforward: wealthy people like the status quo and like politicians who won’t change that status quo....
  • a lot of affluent liberals... hate Bernie & Warren hate them because Bernie/Warren basically reject the idea that we can just go back to the pre-Trump corporate status quo — a status quo that was great for affluent folks, and a crushing dystopia for millions of other people.

2020

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  • Cheney initiatives that may seem superficially reasonable when calmly uttered by a Cheney usually have an insane ulterior motive. In this case, that truism applies: The Crow-Cheney legislation may sound like it includes reasonable requests, but they are designed to make the Afghanistan deployment permanent. In practice, nobody can predict with 100 percent certainty what will ensue once a nineteen-year military occupation ends. What we can know is that it’s a bad idea to continue a policy that isn’t working — and there’s plenty of evidence that it isn’t.

Quotes about Sirota

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  • After brushing aside the frenzied 2020 presidential hype and closely scrutinizing the public voting record of outgoing Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas), Capital & Main investigative journalist David Sirota published a detailed analysis on Thursday showing that the Texas congressman frequently voted to advance President Donald Trump and the GOP's right-wing agenda during his three terms in the House.
    Sirota's in-depth breakdown of O'Rourke's voting record sparked social media outrage from Democratic loyalists, who advanced the familiar claim that critically probing the record of potential Democratic presidential candidates is tantamount to helping Trump win reelection.
  • As David Sirota framed it in The Guardian: “[D]espite the imminent climate catastrophe facing our planet, O’Rourke has often taken the side of carbon polluters.”
    • Houston Chronicle, Beto and Bernie debate raises questions about Texas’ oil economy (30 December 2018)
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