Glen Ford of the highly recommendable Black Agenda Report talks about what the American progressives need to do and avoid in an interview with The Real News (transcript) (you can avoid running non-free Javascript by using youtube-dl to download the video and watching with a free software video player).

There is no such thing as a progressive movement that is also pro-war. And there is no such thing as a progressive movement that is aligned with the CIA. And yet, that is exactly, exactly the position that the Democratic Party is taking, including its black luminaries, such as Congressman John Conyers, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and even Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who is considered to be the most left-wing person on Capitol Hill. All of them are busy attacking from the right, the very right-wing president, Donald Trump. And any fool should know that countering right-wing politics with even more right-wing politics can only lead to a disastrous and definitively right-wing result. You cannot create a progressive movement out of a McCarthyite, anti-Russian, pro-war propaganda campaign such as the Democrats are waging now and which they have now enlisted the support of lots of people who call themselves progressive. And even some who consider themselves to be radical.

Any movement that takes its cues from the CIA is a danger, not only to world peace, but it is a danger to itself. It’s a danger to the very civil liberties that a progressive movement claims that it’s trying to defend from the likes of Donald Trump. And, frankly, it’s just plain stupid and it’s stupid in a very peculiar and very American imperial kind of way.

We could do a lot of good reallocating billions of dollars away from killing people in wars and toward buying out HMOs (in order to end their dominance against universalizing Medicare), giving the homeless homes, repairing infrastructure (which also includes jobs), establishing a guaranteed annual income, and funding many other projects including free software development and spying-free hardware development (such as POWER-based systems for desktop/server use and low-end systems for high portability) which run on 100% free software.