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The Betrayal At The Heart of Sanders, AOC and Corbyn’s Refusal To Use Power

You’ve probably heard of Manchin. Conservative Democratic Senator. With a 50/50 Senate and few Republican Senators willing to cross the aisle, Manchin has been having a field day: he’s been determining much of what can be done by Democrats, since without him they can’t get votes thru the Senate.

Manchin’s mostly using this for evil, but recently he decided to oppose Biden’s budget chief pick, Neera Tanden. Neera’s a famous twitter warrior, who was viciously anti-Bernie, but she also famously shut down Think Progress, a media site she ran, because the workers unionized. She punched a journalist in the chest, and outed a sexual assault survivor.

Now Machin isn’t opposing Tanden because of stuff like the union, but he is opposing her and there’s a good chance she won’t get in. What he’s really doing, though, is trying to stop Hillary Clinton’s primary proxy from being in the Biden administration, because that’s what she is.

Bernie, who chairs the committee she has to get by, has not opposed her even though she’s been his savage enemy, and he is opposed ideologically to her.

Manchin is using his power, and Sanders is not.

Let’s think back to when Nancy Pelosi was running for Speaker. It was a close run affair and AOC and the squad had the votes to stop her. Yes, the person who got in would have been very slightly worse, but the difference is marginal and Pelosi is almost done in politics anyway, given her age. The Squad voted for Pelosi and got nothing for it: they tried to claim that the organizing resolution not including Covid and the environment as requiring budget neutrality was their win, but that doesn’t pass the laugh test, because those are Biden’s priorities. Pelosi’s always been very willing to work with the priorities of Presidents: Democratic or Republican.

They had power, didn’t use it, got nothing. AOC didn’t even get the committee assignment she wanted. It wasn’t Pelosi who made sure she didn’t get it, but she didn’t lift a hand to help AOC either.

Let’s consider a third situation: the first Covid stimulus bill. Progressives could have stopped it. They didn’t. But that bill had the key bailouts for the rich. Once they were done, Progressives had no leverage. Future Covid relief bills, centrists and right wingers didn’t care: it wasn’t important to them if ordinary people got relief, so they’d just hold firm for really crazy stuff.

Sanders and AOC had a chance to hold what the rich needed in order to get something for the poor. They didn’t.

This is a pattern, and a nearly constant one. It is related to Sanders being unwilling to call out Biden on his record because “Biden was his friend.” (Gagging sounds. Their friendship isn’t worth millions of Americans in poverty because a Biden admin won’t help them.)

But what I want to examine now is the use of power.

Here’s a rule: power everyone knows you won’t use, you don’t have.

Left-wingers are not credible because they never use their power. We saw this with Corbyn in Britain when  he repeatedly refused to throw out MPs who challenged him or allow MPs to be re-selected (primaried, in effect.) There was nothing they couldn’t do to his cause or him that would get him to retaliate.

If AOC had taken down Pelosi people would remember. Pelosi did not and does not want her last political memory and piece of  history being defeated for the role of Speaker. AOC and the Squad had the ability to take something away from Pelosi that REALLY mattered to her, and everyone would have noticed that they did so and would take their threats seriously in the future. Including the guy who won the Speakership, who, if they controlled the margin next time would know they’d take HIM down if they didn’t get something important to them.

When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of Britain some Conservative MPs voted against his most important project: Brexit. He immediately threw them out of the party, and went on to resoundingly win the election.

Voters don’t like wimps who won’t use their power and they are correct in this: if you won’t fight, it doesn’t matter what you believe. Corbyn was the man who could take any punch, but would never throw one, no matter what his opponents did.

Using power tells both your enemies and your friends that you are serious, and that your demands must be met or you will make them pay.

Progressives (not necessarily AOC/Sanders/Corbyn, but those who justify their behavior) are like bullying victims who have forgotten that you end bullying only by hurting the bully (win or lose) not by giving in to them. Progressives who support them are often similar, they’re scared “but if we oppose Tanden won’t Biden retaliate?”

Let the fucker retaliate (though he probably wouldn’t much care, she’s Hillary’s servant, not his.) It’s a 50/50 Senate, and Bernie is a powerful committee chairman. He can make Biden’s life Hell AND, more to the point, Biden already isn’t doing most of what Bernie wants despite Bernie being super nice to him. Being nice doesn’t work. Threatening Biden’s legacy might. Sanders can have exactly the power Manchin wields, and more, the second he wants it: the second he decides that making them remember that if the poor people he represents don’t get something, neither do the rich.

A compromise is where you get something and so do I. What progressives do far too often is capitulate: they get nothing.

Use your power, or you don’t have it.

I’m going to return to this and the reasons, which go beyond a misunderstanding of how to use power or cowardice (Corbyn is not in any way a coward) , because it’s important. I like Bernie and AOC, and I admire Corbyn, but their refusal to use power is a betrayal, and I use that word deliberately, of the people they represent and who trust them.


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The Duty and Responsibility of Left-wing Leaders

Let us say that you are leading a movement which, if it wins, will save hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, and will take millions of out of poverty.

The corollary to this is that if you fail, if you lose, those people will die or be stuck in poverty, and generally that many others will fall into poverty.

Your loss, then, occasions a great deal of suffering.

It is often hard to know what to do to win, and there are red lines. Unless a situation has descended to civil war, or you intend civil war, like America’s founding fathers or slavery abolitionist John Brown, you shouldn’t murder, and obviously rape and torture are off the board no matter what.

But because the stakes are so high, you do have a responsibility to play your hand seriously. It isn’t actually a game.

In modern democracies, the most important thing is to control parties. Margaret Thatcher said that her victory was only complete when Labour accepted her ideology. If they hadn’t, when they got into power, they would have just un-done everything she did. John Major, the Tory PM wasn’t her true successor–Tony Blair was.

When Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour party he took over a neoliberal Blairite party. Most of the MPs had voted for most of the worst Tory policies, or abstained from the key votes. They were complicit in a great deal of the evils of austerity.

They were implacable enemies of Corbyn, as were the party bureaucrats. Indeed, a story came out with emails proving that these bureaucrats worked against Corbyn in the 2017 election. Given just how close that election was, they probably cost Corbyn the victory.

Had Corbyn won, he would have refunded the NHS. If it was a majority victory, he’d still be Prime Minister and he wouldn’t have bungled the Coronavirus response like Johnson, a bungling which appears to have about doubled the death rate next to comparable European countries.

Those bureaucrats, then, are responsible for the deaths caused by Johnson being PM. If you don’t understand this, you need to learn how, because this sort of thing is the key driver of why our societies are so bad: The forseeable consequences of evil actions are treated as if they are incidental. Having incompetent ideologues in charge of government who believe that “society doesn’t exist,” and that government isn’t responsible for people’s welfare has consequences.

Corbyn also failed in another important way: He never kicked out MPs who were traitorously constantly attacking him, nor did he support the mandatory re-selction of MPs, a process by which the Labour membership gets to vote for their nominee.

Doing both of these things would have transformed Labour back into a proper left-wing party, and given Corbyn a much greater chance at victory. Even if he lost both elections, his successor would be left-wing and properly supported by the party, and in first past the post democracy, the second party will eventually wind up in power.

Nothing is more important than ideological control of a party.

Now, the thing here is that neither of these strategies required Corbyn to go against his beliefs: Corbyn always said he believed the party should be run by the membership. Re-selections, indeed re-selection every election, is exactly and completely in accord with that.

Corbyn is a truly good man, but like a lot of people of his generation, he has an addiction to being nice, confusing it with being good.

Being nice to bad actors, to MPs who support cutting the NHS and social welfare and bailing out bankers, isn’t good, it’s evil. They need to be removed from power. This isn’t terrible for them, no centrist MP is likely to wind up on the bread lines if they aren’t an MP (which is part of why they were willing to be evil).

Then we have Sanders. Sanders was never as good a man in political terms as Corbyn, his politics are nowhere near as good. Still, he was a good man in American terms.

Sanders is also addicted to niceness. He refused to attack Biden on Biden’s terrible record, a record which is at odds with everything that Sanders claims to believe in, supposedly because Biden was his good friend.

This is dereliction of duty. If he had done it because he believed it was the best strategy, fine. It might or might not be. But to put his friendship with Biden against the welfare and even the lives of millions of Americans is a sickening betrayal of principle and of his followers.

Power has responsibility. Those who work to save millions of lives and make sure millions more are not in poverty, have a responsibility to their mission, and that responsibility does not allow one to put one’s personal desire to be “nice” ahead of the mission.

Good and nice are not the same thing. Niceness is, well, nice, but people who are willing to impoverish and kill millions are evil people and they need to lose their power. The actions taken to remove their power may not be “nice,” but they are good.

I admire Corbyn more than any other British politician of the past 40 years. But he failed in part because he wasn’t willing to be even moderately ruthless against people who were, well, doing a lot of evil. Traitors, in fact.

As for Sanders, well, it appears the same is true. He asked his followers to fight for someone they didn’t know, but he wasn’t willing to fight someone he did know.

A hypocrite, in effect.

Sanders’ and Corbyn’s times are done. They were the best of the Boomers, the last major politicians who hadn’t sold out or sold their soul. Their failures are not theirs alone. Brits and American Democrats genuinely prefer to let people die and live in poverty than vote for a moderate left-winger. That it is older Brits who voted against Corbyn whom Johnson’s policies are killing is ironic.

New politicians will now rise. Hopefully those on the left are people who understand that if one is the champion of the people, one has responsibilities which go beyond being nice to those doing evil. That, in fact, their responsibility is to remove all power from those who use that power from evil.

Doing so won’t be nice to the people who lose their power. It will be “nice” and good to those who are lifted out of poverty or who don’t die due to evil austerity policies, corruption, and incompetence.

Gotta decide what’s more important. Being nice to bad people, or doing good.

And you have to be willing to actually use power when you have it. The right certainly is. The left needs to be.


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Does Bernie Sanders Know What He’s Doing?

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Sanders-021507-18335- 0004

This post by Pachacutec seems worth revisiting (originally published Feb 16, 2016)– Ian

Bernie Sanders is taking a lot of heat for making promises everyone agrees can’t be achieved in today’s Washington. However, Sanders is not just smoking free-love-sixties-dope when he talks about universal health care, free college tuition, stopping deportations, and drastically cutting the prison population.

I used to teach negotiation to MBA students and lawyers seeking CLE credit, and have included negotiation content in executive coaching and other consulting work I do. One of the things I’ve sometimes taught was how to use audience effects to gain leverage in negotiations. The best story I know to illustrate this comes from Gandhi, from his autobiography.

Gandhi Rides First Class

Gandhi’s early years as an activist led him to South Africa, where he advocated as a lawyer for the rights of Indians there. One discriminatory law required “coolie” Indians to ride third class on trains. Soon after arriving in South Africa, Gandhi himself had been thrown off a train for seating himself in first class.

Looking for a way to challenge the law, he dressed flawlessly and purchased a first class ticket face to face from an agent who turned out to be a sympathetic Hollander, not a Transvaaler. Boarding the train, Gandhi knew the conductor would try to throw him off, so he very consciously looked for and found a compartment where an English, upper class gentleman was seated, with no white South Africans around. He politely greeted his compartment mate and settled into his seat for the trip.

Sure enough, when the conductor came, he immediately told Gandhi to leave. Gandhi presented his ticket, and the conductor told him it didn’t matter, no coolies in first class. The law was on his side. But the English passenger intervened, “What do you mean troubling this gentleman? Don’t you see he has a first class ticket? I don’t mind in the least his traveling with me.” He turned to Gandhi and said, “You should make yourself comfortable where you are.”

The conductor backed down. “If you want to ride with a coolie, what do I care?”

And that, my friends, illustrates the strategic use of creating an audience effect to gain leverage in a negotiated conflict. The tactic can be applied in any negotiated conflict where an outside stakeholder party can be made aware of the conflict and subsequently influence its outcome.


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It’s the Conflict, Stupid

A couple of weeks ago, members of the neoliberal wonkosphere and others in the pundit class tut-tutted, fretted, and wearily explained to Sanders’ band of childish fools and hippies that his “theory of change” was wrong. Well, not merely wrong, but deceptive, deceitful, maybe even dangerous. False hopes, stakes are too high, and all that. This was Clinton campaign, and, more to the point, political establishment ideology pushback. When Ezra Klein starts voxsplaining how to catalyze a genuine social, cultural, and political movement, you know you’ve entered the land of unfettered bullshit.

Bernie Sanders, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter before him, wants to use mass appeal audience effects to renegotiate the country’s political and economic contract. The strategy, writ small in Gandhi’s train ride tale, is perfectly applicable–and has proven successful through history–in bringing about successful, peaceful, radical change.

These movements operate by forcing conflict out into the open, on favorable terms and on favorable ground. Make the malignancy of power show its face in daylight. Gandhi and the salt march. MLK and the Selma to Montgomery marches. FDR picking fights and catalyzing popular support throughout the New Deal era, starting with the first 100 days. OWS changed American language and political consciousness by cementing the frame of the 1% into the lexicon. BLM reminded America who it has been and still is on the streets of Ferguson.

One FDR snippet is instructive to consider in light all these discussions–and dismissals–of Sanders’ “theory of change.” As FDR watched progressive legislation be struck down by a majority conservative court, he famously proposed legislation that would have allowed him to add another justice. He failed, but:

In one sense, however, he succeeded: Justice Owen Roberts switched positions and began voting to uphold New Deal measures, effectively creating a liberal majority in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish and National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, thus departing from the Lochner v. New York era and giving the government more power in questions of economic policies. Journalists called this change “the switch in time that saved nine.”

This was a constitutional overreach by FDR, and it caused him political damage, but forcing the conflict created pressure on the Court, making its actions highly visible to the mass of people who wanted change, who voted for change, but did not always see or understand how the elite establishment acts to thwart change.

Your Mistakes are My Ladder

The paths to change for all of these movements are neither linear nor predictable. By nature, they act like guerilla movements. They force conflict and force an entrenched enemy into the open. Then, once exposed and vulnerable, the guerilla tactic is to attack opportunistically on strategically favorable ground. In peaceful social movements, “winning” means winning the hearts and minds of the majority of the society’s stakeholders to the point where they actively choose sides. First make them witnesses, then convert them into participants in the conflict. That’s exactly what Gandhi did with the Englishman in the first class compartment.

This is why calls from pundits and Camp Clinton for Bernie to lay out the fifteen point plan of how he gets from here to there are, at best, naïve. The social revolution playbook requires creating cycles of conflict and contrast, taking opportunistic advantage of your opponent’s mistakes. No one can predict with certainty where and how those opportunities will arise, though you can choose where to poke. If the Clinton campaign wants to know how Bernie can run that playbook in action, it need only review its own performance campaigning against him.

Does Sanders Have a Plan?

So, is Bernie Sanders the underpants gnome of political change? Is his theory: “1) Call for revolution; 2) ?????; 3) Profit!”? Or does he have something else–some other historical precedents–in mind? Everything I hear and see from the Sanders campaign suggests the latter.

Take a look at this ad from Sanders:

https://youtu.be/ptJf3ju3X1g

To me, this ad says that Sanders understands very clearly what kind of coalition and movement he needs to ignite to accomplish the vision he’s putting out in his campaign. It’s an aspirational vision, sure. And neither he nor any movement he helps create can or will accomplish all of it, just as FDR was unable to accomplish all he set out to achieve. Still, accomplishing as much as FDR did, relatively speaking, would be pretty damn good. Democrats used to say they liked that sort of thing.

Or how about this ad, where Sanders is introduced by Erica Garner explicitly as a “protestor,” invoking the lineage of MLK:

Yes, I’d say Sanders has a very clear, and historically grounded “theory of change.” What those who question it’s validity are really saying is either: 1) they lack imagination and can’t’ see beyond the status quo; 2) they lack knowledge of history, including American history, or; 3) they understand Sanders’ “theory of change” very well and want to choke it in the crib as quickly as they can.

They may succeed. Elites may beat Sanders himself but they will not beat the movement he’s invigorating but did not create. However, saying Sanders may fail is not the same as saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or that what he’s setting out to accomplish is impossible.

Because, if history shows us anything, it is, indeed, possible.

There Are No Good Billionaires (Bill Gates Edition)

So, Elizabeth Warren has a two percent wealth tax plan with three percent on people with more than a billion dollars. She’s suggested raising the over a billion percentage to six percent… And Bill Gates says….

I’m all for super-progressive tax systems,” he said. “I’ve paid over $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes. If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine.

“But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over,” he added. “You really want the incentive system to be there without threatening that.”

Mr. Gates is the second-richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine, with a net worth of $106.2bn.

Well, of course, she didn’t say that, she said six percent. A little over six billion in the first year. Bill’s 64, and of course, the actual nominal amount will decrease each year unless he can grow his money faster than six percent, in which case, what’s the problem?

Elizabeth Warren

He’ll never, ever be anything less than a multi-billionaire, in other words. His bullshit about 100 billion is just that, fear-mongering bullshit.

And if he’s paid ten billion on 106 billion, well his tax rate was about ten percent. Most middle class families would love to have that low a tax rate. (Yes, I know it’s on income, not wealth, but the point is he obviously paid very low income taxes. Which, actually, is what the data shows–the middle and working classes pay a higher percentage than the rich.)

Bill, of course, is the “good” billionaire.” But he’s the guy who gave straight-up fascist Modi a reward. He’s the guy who spent millions to change the educational system in the US, then admitted that the model he successfully pushed doesn’t actually work. He’s the guy who used brutal, monopolistic practices to build Microsoft.

And he doesn’t want to pay a six percent wealth tax that will be used to provide universal healthcare.

Billionaires are bad, and, as an even more radical and willing-to-take-on-billionaires candidate, Bernie Sanders, said, they shouldn’t even exist.

As for Billy, he thinks he deserves to be one of the richest people in the world because he created the Wintel monopoly and crushed rivals with practices which were, under black-letter law, illegal.

But one can understand why he might prefer a Republican president. After all, it was George Bush, Jr. who withdrew the anti-trust suit which would have broken up Microsoft and left Bill worth a lot less than a 106 billion dollars.

Trump, of course, massively dropped tax rates on the rich.

Money comes first, ethics come second. Bill’s always understood that.

Republicans have been pretty good to Bill. Performative wokeism and his good image aren’t worth a six percent wealth tax. As for people without healthcare, welll, better they die than he pay taxes which would leave him a multi-billionaire for the rest of his life.


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Bernie’s Heart Problems

Bernie Sanders

So, Sanders had to go to the hospital and have a stent put in.

Sounds bad, but apparently it’s fairly common to be healthy and live for many years afterwards.

I’m unsure of the political impact of this. Certainly it could mean the end of his chances at the presidency.

Nonetheless, if he decides to continue, assuming his released medical records indicate his health is good, Bernie will continue to be my preferred candidate in the race.

What this does indicate is what was always true given Sanders’ age: Who his VP is matters a great deal and that VP cannot be chosen for “balance” but must be someone who shares Sanders’ politics, because the chance they’ll wind up as President is higher than normal.

The obvious person, should Sanders win the nomination, is Warren, but there are other possibilities.

In the meantime, I hope Sanders recovers well and quickly.


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On Stubborn Facts and Partisan Identification

There is vast confusion in the more active left about this, so let’s clear it up by way of Bernie Sanders.

Clinton was more popular with POC and women than Sanders was. She was also more popular with old people.

However, Sanders is well-liked by POC and women. Every survey I have seen shows him with approval ratings in the 60s to 70s from POC. His approval ratings from women are usually 50-something, and higher than with men, but within the margin of error.

Sander is not unpopular with women and people of color, and people of color, in fact, are much more likely to approve of him than whites.

Whites and males are the people most likely to NOT approve of Bernie Sanders.

In absolute terms Sanders is liked by POC and women. In relative terms, it depends on who you’re comparing him to.

None of this is in question, and people who run around pretending Sanders is hated by black people and women are either lying or ignorant. In group terms, he is not.

Next: Clinton did better with Democrats and Bernie did better with independents, BUT Sanders is well-liked by Democrats, this Hill poll had his approval rating by Democrats at 80 percent.

Again, relative vs. absolute.

Another fact, because we have the DNC emails, is that the DNC, run by a Clinton loyalist, put his thumb on the scales for Clinton. This is a fact.

I am not a partisan for Sanders in the same way I am for Corbyn. I strongly approve of Corbyn; I think Sanders was good enough to rate an endorsement, but his stands on, say, Israel, are awful. Corbyn has opposed Israeli apartheid right down the line, just as he did South African apartheid.

I think the best President in American history was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But I think that locking up Japanese Americans was abominable.

My judgments of fact, as much as I can manage it, are not determined by my partisanship. My ethical judgments are not determined by my partisanship.

Rather, as best I can, I seek to have my partisanship determined by the facts combined with my ethical judgment.

This should not be a problem. If you have good reasons for supporting Hillary Clinton, you should be able to acknowledge her actual record and actions and still have reasons for supporting her.

If you must lie about a politician’s record in order to support them, or if you must pretend that evil acts they have committed or endorsed were not evil (Sanders’ Israel Support, Clinton’s Libya adventure), then you have gone deeply wrong, and you are a part of what is wrong with your country and the world.

One can support the lesser evil, or the greater good, and admit that. One can support someone who is more good than bad and still acknowledge the bad.

If one cannot, one is making decisions based on delusional fantasy.

You should be able to do this even for people you love or hate. I hate Obama and Bush, Jr. and Reagan, but where they did something right, I acknowledge it. (Reagan’s work on nuclear disarmament falls into this category.)

If your tribal identification is running your determination of right or wrong, please check yourself out of politics until it isn’t.


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It Is Better to Be Feared than Loved, if You Cannot Be Both

Contra Machiavelli, I prefer ruling through love, rather than fear.

But, if it can’t be love…

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…then fear will do.

For a long, long time, centrist Dems have loathed, despised, and even hated the left-wing part of the Democratic base. (Obama was quite public about this.)

Republican politicians loathe, despise, and even hate their base, too. Be very clear about that. The difference is simple: Democrats weren’t scared of their base and Republicans are (as they should be).

If that’s changing, that’s good news.

Marcotte, of course, is deranged and essentially incapable of reason due to her strong personal identification with Clinton as the avatar of woman. Her understanding of why Sanders was popular and of why Clinton lost are both deficient, and that’s the point. It is precisely those people who cannot be reached through reason who must be reached through emotion; and because they prefer to despise the people, it cannot be love that motivates them.

And so, fear it is.

(Sanders, by the way, appears to be the most popular federal politician in America.)


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On Bernie Sanders

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I am not upset by Sanders endorsing Clinton because I never expected anything else.

What is important about Sanders is that he showed how well a self-avowed socialist can do. He won super-majorities of the young. In four years there will be more. In eight, even more.

The demographics are shifting, real left-wing politics are now viable.

That is what matters.

Four years ago, if you’d told me someone with Sanders’ policies would have come this close to Clinton, I’d have been happy with that result. I am today.

Sanders himself is now irrelevant. He’s an old man; he showed there is a constituency for left-wing politics, now his time is done.

Something similar may turn out to be the case with Trump, if he doesn’t win election: He will have proved that right-wing populism is viable and a more disciplined candidate will step in and execute it better.

Chill. Sanders run isn’t a victory, but it did show the tide of history is turning in favor of those who favor a kinder and far better-run world.


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