Monday, March 7, 2016

OBOF TYMHM & MORE Vol. 16 - No. 04


OPINIONS  BASED  ON FACTS (OBOF)

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)

YEAR ONE

YEAR TWO

YEAR THREE

YEAR FOUR

YEAR FIVE

YEAR SIX

OBOF YEAR SIX INDEX
 
 
OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 1
Jan. 03, 2016
 
OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 2
Jan. 25, 2016
 
OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 3
Jan. 28, 2016
 
OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 4
Mar. 05, 2016
 
 
 
 

 


AGENDA

 

1.  FROM FLOYD.


 


2.  Blue-state Bernie and the DNC’s Plutocratic “Victory” Rules.


3.  Why the Critics of Bernienomics Are Wrong.


4.  The End of the Establishment?


5.  The Single Solution to Sanders’ South Carolina and Supreme Court Problems.


 6.  Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s Surprise Endorsement Gives Sanders a Chance to Change the Whole Primary Game.


 


FROM FLOYD


 


A couple of short notes.  Three of the four items are quite long, but in my opinion, are important and worth your time.


 


On a personal note,  I had this real bad fall back on Feb. 05 - 16 and I am not  over it yet.  My thumb and two fingers are numb as a result.  I can us them, but they are really weired.  At the same time I spilled a liquid into my key board.  Had 5o get a new one.  Didn't pay attention to what I was getting and the new one was of the smaller version and I just couldn't use it at all.  Had to get yet another one.   AT ANY RATE, I AM FINALLY GETTING STARTED ON POSTING FOR THE SIXTH YEAR.  HOPE I CAN KEEP IT UP.


~~~


I was just ready to hit the button when I accidentally came across this first article, which is the first utterings I have seen which I think is going to wind up as a "brokered convention."


 


It, like some others in this posting, is long, but I guess I need to make up for lost time.  There is a lot more coming.  This election is going to be the most historic in my 92 years.


 


GIVE IT ALL YOU HAVE AND SPREAD THE INFORMATION. 


 


THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT IN THIS ARTICLE IS THE FACT THAT IF WE DON'T ALL PULL TOGETHER ON THIS, THE MOST POPULAR, THE MOST WANTED CANDIDATE, WON'T GET IT.


 


~~~


Blue-state Bernie and the DNC’s Plutocratic “Victory” Rules


By Rob Hager -

March 6, 2016

 

“DNC rule changes could determine the presidential candidate by relegating Clinton’s ‘victories’ back to the plutocratic mire where they originated.”

 

Hillary Clinton is piecing together a superficially successful campaign on the basis of rotten boroughs, many of them former slave states, where it is certain that there will not be a single electoral vote cast for a Democrat or any party which represents a progressive and diverse electorate.  Clinton also depends upon Superdelegates who have conflicts of interest because they have worked for, received money from, or are otherwise integrated into the systemic legalized corruption of the Clinton political machine.  Clinton has been further aided by obvious disinformation about her electability and experience, and other features of a broken presidential run-off system.  The money-stream media labels this money-bag of tricks “victory.”

Sanders’ campaign has committed itself, as a consolation prize should it fail to secure the nomination, to make some rules changes at the Convention.  Changing the rules should be an integral part of the campaign and a condition of the participation of Sanders’ delegates in the Democratic Convention.  Adopting fair rules for nominating a presidential candidate would be an alternative to a Philadelphia replay of 1968 by Millennials saddled with so much debt they were practically born in default and outlawed by a financialized state.

Michael Moore predicts, “I’m optimistic that the person who is most popular will win the contest.”  But Moore’s political predictions are often wrong or selfcontradictory.  Without democratizing DNC rules it is possible that the most popular candidate will not win. Changes in the rules could determine the Democratic nominee by relegating Clinton’s “victories” back to the plutocratic mire where they originated.  Followers of British Premier League football would understand the concept of relegation to the lower division.  Blue and purple states are the Premier League of the Democratic Party which command all its votes in the Electoral College.  Primary contests held by the relegated red-states would be conducted as straw polls having no impact on the Premier League play.  

Similarly historic rules changes such as those enumerated below were made in 1972 as a result of the 1968 rejection of a boss-ridden Democra1tic Party. The 1972 reforms were significant.  They led to Carter’s outsider victory in 1976.  But they remain incomplete, and Superdelegates were created to let the boss-system back in the door.  The Clintons are the new boss.  Just like the old boss, “Hillary has billionaires galore in her corner.”

A state like Minnesota uses exclusively paper ballots, hand counted by neighbors at the precinct level.  There was no room in Minnesota’s process for the statistically troubling allegation of an 8% Massachusetts discrepancy between exit polls, which showed Sanders winning comfortably as one would expect, and the machine-counted tally to the contrary.

1. Rotten Boroughs

The propagandist mass media has already awarded Clinton the first stage of the run-off election.  This is not based on Clinton squeezing out a narrow one pledged-delegate victory in the reliably blue-state Massachusetts, but rather on her series of victories in states which for more than a generation have not contributed a single electoral vote to a Democrat who was not resident in the region.

Excluding these “rotten borough” states from the scorecard, the current count is that Sanders has won blue states 3-1, with 1-1 tie in purple states, and a virtual tie in Nevada which is purple. Even the one blue state ascribed to Clinton, Massachusetts, might be viewed as a virtual tie, especially in light of the unexplained exit-poll anomaly which argues for a blanket DNC rule change discounting the weight of any ballot from states that are not made on paper, and subject to hand re-count.

A “rotten borough” is a depopulated election district that retains its original representation though hardly anyone lives there any more.  The term was originally used to describe the English voting system that founders like Thomas Paine ridiculed as part of the corrupt system that they revolted against. Before the Civil Rights Era, when the Republican and Democratic parties switched positions on Jim Crow, the southern states were well populated with electoral votes for the party of secession and segregation.  But starting with Nixon’s opportunistic 1968 Southern Strategy response to the landmark civil rights legislation of the middle 1960’s, and especially after that strategy was further refined by Reagan in 1980 and financed by the newly legalized money of plutocrats, there have been effectively no electoral votes for Democrats in the deep South, aside from those for “favorite sons,” Carter and Clinton.  Since then, even that tactic has not broken the solid south.  In 2000, hapless Al Gore lost the election because he couldn’t even borrow a few electoral votes from his home state of Tennessee, or from any other former slave state state.

Like it or not, Americans select their presidents by an indirect Electoral College process specified in the Constitution.  This process enacts a compromise between majoritarian democracy and de-centralizing federalism.“  Despite the media-hyped fascination with election night, there has never been a true national election for President.”  You and I don’t vote for president.  Electors do.  Electors represent states. Therefore delegates at nominating conventions representing state electors, for which the rest of us are only proxies, until elections in each state determine those electors in accordance with state laws.

For a generation, the deep south states of South Carolina and the Super TuesdayGeorgia, Alabama, and Texas have been well-established as deep red. Three of them have not delivered a Democratic electoral vote in two generations. Along with Clintons’ Super Tuesday Arkansas and Tennessee, all these reliably red former slave states are the base on which Clinton is building her supposed (by the plutocratic media) SuperTuesday “major victory” over Sanders giving her “full command” of the race now.

On “Super Saturday,” Clinton continued her string of successes with red former slave states, in Louisiana. But she lost to Sanders in two deep red Plains States, Kansas and Nebraska. In a country that likes to side with winners, her lopsided delegate harvest in the red former slave states makes effective propaganda and will likely shave points off Sanders’ blue state victories, if believed.

It was a wise man [Aristotle] who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.” Dennis v. United States, 339 U.S. 162, 184 (1950) (Frankfurter, J.)  Treating delegates from states who will make no essential contribution to victory in the Electoral College equally in the nominating Convention with those who will is to treat unequals as equals — the greatest form of injustice or discrimination.  Fantasies to the contrary cannot change the fact that red states will in fact represent no future Democratic elector at all.

As Justice Holmes famously said, Frank v. Mangum (1915): “This is not a matter for polite presumptions; we must look facts in the face.”  Democratic votes in deep red states are no more relevant to the outcome of electing a president than if they were never cast. If they did not turn up for the Convention at all, it could only improve the outcome of the election by eliminating an irrelevant distraction.  Their attendance raises no problem; their equal voting strength without contributing equal electoral votes to the Electoral College does.

Rotten boroughs were first declared unconstitutional in the Baker v Carr line of cases.  This is considered one of the great Supreme Court reforms of American democracy.  But the rotten borough system lives on in the Democratic Party to dilute the influence at the nominating Convention of a reliably blue state like Minnesota. This injustice is supported by inappropriately directed sentimentality about inclusion of fellow Democrats in red states.  This may be the product of a logical glitch in the liberal brain.See Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain (2012).

Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Reynolds v Sims (1964), the case that established the democratic principle of one person one vote, that trees or acres” should not be represented in legislatures.  Similarly states should not be represented in making a nomination whose electoral votes will with mathematical certainty be cast not for, but against, the nominee of the blue and purple states.  It is the prospective Democratic electors made by blue and purple states to the Electoral College that must be equally represented.

As Chief Justice Warren said in Reynolds: “Overweighting and overvaluation of the votes of those living here [rotten boroughs] has the certain effect of dilution and undervaluation of the votes of those living there.  The resulting discrimination against those individual voters living in disfavored areas is easily demonstrable mathematically.  Their right to vote is simply not the same right to vote as that of those living in a favored [rotten borough] State. Two, five, or 10 of them must vote before the effect of their voting is equivalent to that of their favored [rotten borough] neighbor.” The “favored neighbor” in the DNC rotten borough system are the red states most susceptible to corrupt plutocratic influence.

A DNC rule change could very simply abolish this undemocratic, and questionably constitutional, system. The rule change would mathematically discount the weight of votes of rotten borough states. Currently, the weight of a delegation’s vote is based on their theoretical contribution to the electoral college. One factor is the variable number of electoral votes in each state.  The adjustment would be determined on the basis of the actual historic, not theoretical, contribution to Democratic membership in the Electoral College.  Voters made irrelevant by state law because they are insufficient in number to support a single elector should not be allowed to dilute the voting strength of delegates from states that do reliably send electors to the College.  In an Electoral College system, electors should be the determining factor for awarding equal representation in the nominating Convention, not individual voters.

Drafting and enforcing such a rule banning discrimination against blue and purple state voters is simple. The Electoral College results in the previous election provides the most relevant evidence whether any potential electors are resident in any state.  The voting strength of a state determined by its number of electors should be cut by 50% if the state produced no electoral votes in the previous election.  The remaining 50% weighted voting strength would be reduced a further 20%, 15% 10% and 5% for each previous election where no Democratic electors show up in the state, for a full generation back in time. Voting strength declines to zero if a state has contributed no Democratic electoral vote in the last 20 years – which is longer than the lifetime of the youngest born-bankrupt Millennial.  A 20-year missing persons statute of limitations would thus run on any continuing pretense that prospective electors are likely to show up in a rotten borough state, and, therefore, should be represented based on that fiction at the next Convention.  This adjustment of voting strength would apply to every deep red state named above that Clinton won and is currently being promoted as supporting her “victory.” The case against counting such red state delegates is even stronger in the Plains States that Sanders won, which have furnished Democratic electors only once in eighty years.

2. Exclusionary primaries

A principal means by which corrupt political parties rig elections is by keeping tight monopoly control over their ballot access privilege.  The United States, more than virtually any other country in the world, is a two party system which structurally marginalizes third parties to the point of irrelevance, or worse.  Control over one of the two ballot slots conveys very valuable duopoly political power. This gives rise to a multiplicity of means by which political parties rig primary elections, mainly for the purpose of excluding the participation of independents.  In this way, the duopoly can consistently provide two bad choices for general election voters, as evidenced by American typically low voter turnout by those who reject them both.

Sanders consistently wins the support of Independent voters in exit and other polls. Independents are 40% of the electorate compared to Democrats who barely reach 30%, a number that will likely continue to decline as the party’s corrupt election rigging techniques become even more visible in 2016. Independent voters determine the outcome of general elections. If they get turned off the Democratic Party due to its transparent election rigging, Democrats will lose in November to Trump who at least keeps a straight face when pretending to be a post-plutocracy plutocrat. Since Independents determine presidential elections, factoring their choices into the run-off process is essential to victory, as it has been to Trumps’.

Different approaches to primary elections range from, say, Minnesota’s, which has an entirely open process requiring little more than future voter eligibility and a signature to participate, to a state like Massachusetts which is not so open, to states like New York that are closed.  In Minnesota, a solid blue state that has consistently contributed all its electoral votes to Democrats for the two generations since 1976, Sanders accordingly defeated Clinton with a landslide vote of 61-38% on Super Tuesday, in a historic turnout second only to 2008.  This was comparable to Sanders’ landslide in his neighboring New Hampshire, and was just exceeded in Kansas.  In Massachusetts, by contrast, Sanders ran almost even.  The Super Tuesday and other states range across this spectrum from open to closed, giving their results variable validity in representing the actual preferences of general election voters.

The DNC cannot by itself change this variable discrimination in different states against Independent voters.  It was unsuccessful in trying ad hoc discipline of state primary practices in Michigan and Florida in 2008.  Discrimination against voters that the party will need to win the general election is usually rooted in state laws which the corrupt parties have created for their mutual duopolistic benefit.                                                               But the DNC rules committee could immediately ameliorate this problem with a rule change demonstrating its commitment to a democratic run-off process. The rule change would compensate for this bias by making an adjustment in delegate voting strength.

3. Disinformation

Virginia is the only state that is not a deep red state where Clinton has crushed Sanders, nearly two to one, as Sanders crushed Clinton in the blue states of Minnesota by 23% and of New Hampshire by about the same margin.  Virginia was previously a red state along with the other former slave states upon which Clinton has built her “major victory.” Virginia shifted to Obama in 2008 and 2012. It can now be called a purple state on its way to claiming blue status, if the trend continues.

The Virginia exit polls tell us that the 52% of Dem primary voters who expressed a preference for a candidate who “Can win in November” or one who “Has right experience” overwhelmingly voted for Clinton.  Meanwhile the 47% of voters who prefer a candidate who “Cares about people like me” or who is “Honest and trustworthy” tended to prefer Sanders by lesser, though still respectable, majorities (56% and 78%, respectively).

One must ask whether the experience of Clinton which is preferred by these voters is that of selling US foreign policy for the benefit of the Clinton Foundation as described by Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash (2015), or the experience of defending herself against an FBI investigation for national security breaches that may or may not be related, or Clinton’s destabilization and warmongering for the benefit of weapons manufacturers who pay her, as described in Diana Johnstone, Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (2015).

When fending off the accusation that her most significant “experience” has been her service to the plutocratic Establishment, Clinton admitted Sanders’ superior experience: “He’s been in Congress, he’s been elected to office a lot longer than I have.”  The non-sequitur that experience in office could be considered interchangeable with serving plutocrats is beside the point of Clinton’s express acknowledgment of Sanders’ superior elected experience.  Clinton is not even close to Sanders’ long-term experience in public service, including executive experience. The experience “advantage” relied upon by Clinton’s voters becomes even more ephemeral when one tries to pin it down to specific accomplishments as opposed to the “blur” of activity that obscures borderline criminality. Clinton Cash 101.

As to the second issue, that of Clinton voters’ preference for winning in November, every poll since December has shown Sanders defeating every Republican with significantly higher margins than Clinton, who some polls show actually losing such match-ups.  This widespread misperception as to electability, which nevertheless motivates many Clinton voters, flies in the face of known fact.

Can anything be done about such Democratic voter ignorance on these two themes?  It is primarily the consequence of pervasive mass media propaganda which is bought one way or another by plutocrats for their favored candidate.  Propaganda cannot be regulated without enacting laws that the Scalia Supreme Court would have ruled unconstitutional. Cf. Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U.S. ___ (2014).

A way for the delegates to exercise their judgment in a way that would add value to the underlying math of the democratic process, so that the process could become more than the sum of its parts, would be to expose the delegates to objective relevant reality as a prerequisite to their exercising their discretion on who to nominate.   A rule change could introduce a citizens jury process for the national conventions.  This is a known technique to overcome the impact of propaganda on public discussion, in the same way that trial jurors make decisions based on an evidentiary process designed to uncover truth, rather than implement jurors’ preconceived biases.

The Clinton “victory” is a congeries of “rotten boroughs,” conflicted Superdelegates, exclusionary primaries, and disinformation.  If the run-off process were conducted in a democratic manner, these devices would all be barred by Democratic National Committee (DNC) rules.

 

The current state-based national run-off system for selecting a president is a hodgepodge of procedures that run the gamut from fair and democratic in some states, like Minnesota which prides itself on clean elections and high turnouts, to easily corruptible and exclusionary in states with low-turnout and unrepresentative results.

 

Rule changes at the level of the DNC could correct or compensate for the lack of minimal national run-off election standards.  Several systemic flaws could be removed by changing Convention rules that are currently designed to tilt the results toward plutocracy, which means Clinton and her “billionaires galore.”

 

Public demand for reform of DNC rules starting now would address these several most important methods by which plutocrats manipulate a corrupt and venal party.  Failure to change the rules may result in the nomination of the least favored and least likely to succeed among two candidates, when the other ofthose two candidates has gained favor among the general electorate by credibly resolving to overthrow plutocracy.

 

Most states assign electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis.  We all know those red states and blue states, where one party has a lock on the electoral votes, and also the few purple states where they do not.  Red and blue states, for purposes of the Electoral College, are rotten boroughs respectively for Democrats and Republicans.  No blue electors have resided in red states for many years.  For example, no Democrat elector has shown up in a Plains State in the half century since the 1964 landslide against Goldwater, when the Republicans ran a candidate who was honest about his right-wing beliefs, rather than tricky, devious, corrupt and therefore capable of reversing that landslide just 8 years later, as Richard Nixon did.

 

Democrats, for all practical purposes, have exactly zero potential for finding a vote from all the deepest red states combined. If Republicans should, after a half century, nominate another honest right-wing politician like Goldwater to enable another Democratic landslide, the otherwise unexpected electoral votes from the red states would not be essential to victory in any event.

 

No one explains why delegates from any of these deep red states, whether for Clinton or Sanders, should have a vote at the Democratic National Convention. To a very high degree of certainty based on long experience, all those red-state delegates together will not represent one single vote for the Democratic nominee when the Electoral College selects a president. Red state delegates are proven by past experience to predictably represent no Democratic constituent in the Electoral College, which is the only vote that counts. Since the rules were made in 1972 the parties have completed their switch of regional loyalties. Then loyalties were still in flux. In 1976, Jimmy Carter carried the solid south that George Wallace carried in 1968.  But since 1980 the two parties have barely wavered across the blue-red divide in typically close elections.  The respective regional bases of the two parties are now clear.  The system must be revised to account for the creation of Democratic rotten boroughs since 1980.

 

It is self-delusion to think that the minority of Democratic voters in red states, whose voting strength for Electoral College electors will predictably be zero, actually count for anything.  By force of winner-take-all state laws, they do not.  Those votes are effectively canceled by law.  Electors represent the state, not individual voters, in the Electoral College. Red states predictably deliver Republican electors.

 

The delusion that red states are anything else but rotten boroughs for Democrats is based on the “polite presumption” that presidents are elected by all the people.  This myth is in denial of the fact that presidents are actually selected by the Electoral College, whose membership is all that matters.  Red states voluntarily construct their winner-take-all presidential voting rules (as almost all states do) to create a Democratic rotten borough for purposes of the Electoral College vote.  There is no valid principle that should require the blue states to give those rotten boroughs voting rights at their presidential nominating Convention in which blue and purple states represent the entirety of the electoral votes needed to win.  Since the rotten boroughs contribute no electors, the eternal principle rejecting treatment of unequals as if they are equal must be applied.

 

For rotten boroughs to have any say in the decision about the best candidate to produce the number of electors that are necessary to win a majority of blue and purple states in the Electoral College is both counterproductive for purposes of effective nomination strategy and also discriminatory toward those who should in all fairness make that decision. The power to nominate should be solely in the hands of those states who will produce the nominee’s victory, shared in proportion to their fairly determined expected contribution to the Electoral College victory.

 

 

The weight of a Democratic delegate’s vote can only fairly and properly be determined by the share of Democratic electoral votes the delegates state represents, as that can best be determined from past experience.  Giving away equal voting power to states who represent no such electoral votes dilutes the voting power of those delegates who do represent electoral votes.  Awarding votes as if every election will be a landslide, shut-out victory for Democrats is a fantasy that results in discrimination.  “[W]e must look facts in the face.”

 

The new formula would end the false pretense that, since a nominating Convention necessarily precedes an election, blue state delegates must suspend disbelief that red state delegates represent anything but a rotten borough devoid of any remote prospect for delivering essential Democratic electors.

 

 The DNC should stop the pretense Clinton won anything in these red states by stripping voting rights from delegates representing rotten boroughs.  In a democratically organized primary system her “big victory” would thus add up to zero delegates, and she would have to concentrate her triumphal celebrations on that one delegate victory in Massachusetts.

 

To repeat one last time, when the only rational conclusion is that no Democratic electors live in a state, since they have not shown up at the Electoral College for a generation, then that state should have no voting delegates at the nominating Convention. Giving voting power for non-existent electors only serves to unfairly dilute the voting power of those states where Democratic electors have resided and voted for more than a generation, or even two, in the case of Minnesota.

 

To give delegates votes where they represent no electors is no different than enfranchising a rotten borough. Aside from being inherently undemocratic by treating unequals as equal, rotten boroughs have always been more prone to corruption and manipulation by powerful interests.

 

Comparable to the proposed remedy for the rotten borough problem, such a rule would handicap each state’s procedures on the spectrum from open to closed.  The adjustment would deduct voting strength to the extent a state party chooses to distort voter preference by restrictive processes which tend to misstate the relative prospects of different candidates in the general election.  Voting delegate strength at the Convention would be adjusted to favor the voting strength of delegates selected by open primary voting, like Minnesota, over those selected by closed primary voting, like New York.  This adjustment would attempt to approximate the likely Democratic general election voters’ actual choice for a nominee rather than a manipulated choice designed to represent a candidate’s share of only 30% of the electorate who Independents might well dislike.

 

Why should a state that runs a tightly controlled primary that deliberately misrepresents the actual preferences of voters have the same weight as Minnesota, which seeks to allow everyone interested to participate, and thereby also more reliably contributes to Democratic electoral votes year in and year out?

 

Failing to make this rule change would continue to condone election rigging by excluding or deterring the 40% of Independents from entering a winning coalition by participating in the run-off process. Manipulating the process to privilege a plutocratic nominee is not a winning strategy in an election year when such political corruption and rigging of the system is foremost in many voters’ minds, especially of the Independents who will decide its outcome.

 

Washington Post exit polls of Virginia voters raise another issue for which the solution is somewhat more elaborate than the other rule changes discussed here.  This issue no doubt also affects Clinton’s other delegates, especially from red states where reliable information about national Democratic politics is far more scarce than in blue states.  Delegates from the red states would be eliminated by the above “rotten borough” rule change in any event. So the analysis in this section will focus solely on Virginia.

 

There is an alternative solution which could be applied by a DNC rule change.  This proposed change proceeds from an observation about the logic of holding extremely expensive conventions attended by voting delegates from all over the country to determine a nominee, rather than just performing an audit of primary results and tallying them up to determine the nominee.  Behind this delegate convention practice is the notion that the delegates are supposed to exercise some form of judgment in selecting a nominee                                                                                               superior to that of the voters who sent them.  This is comparable to elected officials when performing their delegated duties. Absent the concept that representative democracy can sometimes improve upon lesser-informed judgments of direct democracy, the PR Convention extravaganza could be held on its own, without the pretense of a deliberative nomination taking place just for purposes of doing the math.

  

By overcoming the effect of propaganda, exposure to some objective facts about the candidates could only improve the nomination process at best, and be harmless at worst.  This is an innovative idea, of course. But is there 4a better way to counteract propaganda, other than banning it, which is unlikely in any near future in which plutocrats hide their influence behind the First Amendment? Before the delegates go ahead and commit party-suicide by nominating Hillary Clinton, should they not at least be exposed to a presentation by a neutral pollster on the consistent findings that Sanders is more likely to win in November as well as an honest neutral statement of the two candidates’ thoroughly vetted resumes detailing their actual experience and successes? No moderate sized company would hire a CEO without such due diligence. Is it too much to expect some slight gesture toward such diligence from the doorkeepers to the most powerful executive office in the world?

 

One solution to such blatant corruption is a rule binding all super delegates to vote the way their constituents have indicated. This, in effect, would get rid of the Superdelegate remnant of the old party-boss system that the Democratic Party used to select its presidential candidates until it selected Hubert Humphrey in 1968 notwithstanding the fact he had not won a single primary. The Party went into a tailspin from which it never really recovered, due in part to the long-term corrupting influence of Nixon’s four Supreme Court appointments which put the plutocratic party leadership at odds with the traditional Democratic constituency.

 

It is the RBC which would decide upon the four rules suggested here. If the RBC were motivated to facilitate a democratically determined nomination that would win in November, rather than one distorted by conflicts of interest to support the worst candidate, they would adopt these rules. Therefore, application of robust conflict of interest recusal must begin with the RBC itself. 

 

This is the kind of corrupt conflict of interest currently allowed to contaminate a committee that is supposed to make rules designed to fairly yield the best, most democratic and potentially successful choice, not the choice dictated by those obviously conflicted interests and their hopes of sharing in further spoils. 

 

This idea that the Republican Party presidential nomination apparatus is more democratic and less corrupt than the Democratic Party apparatus will make a powerful message to Independents looking for the least corrupt party in 2016, if Clinton wins nomination based on the anti-democratic rules discussed here.  Of course Republicans can afford to maintain a fairer process because whoever it selects will either be a plutocrat promoted by a plutocratic mass media, or a corrupt politician owned by plutocrats. The Republican process does not need to cheat, like Democrats do, to prevent democracy from breaking out inside their Party from an anti-plutocratic base.  Plutocracy is built-in for Republicans.

1. “Well, do the numbers add up?”

Yes, if you assume va 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth.

2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?”

They’re not out of the range of what’s possible.  After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s.

3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?”

His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system.

4. “But yesterday’s New York Times reported that two of your colleagues at Berkeley found an error in the calculations underlying these estimates. They claim Professor Gerald Friedman mistakenly assumes that a one-time boost in growth will continue onward. They say he confuses levels of output with rates of change.”

My esteemed colleagues see only a temporary effect from moving to a single-payer plan. But that view isn’t shared by economists who find that a major policy change like this can permanently improve economic performance. After all, World War II got America out of the Great Depression – permanently.

5. “So you think Bernie’s plan will generate a permanent improvement in the nation’s economic performance?”

Yes. Given that healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy – and that ours is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, based on private for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that spend fortunes on advertising, marketing, administrative costs, high executive salaries, and payouts to shareholders – it’s not far-fetched to assume that adoption of a single-payer plan will permanently improve U.S. economic performance.

This post originally appeared on Robert Reich’s blog.

Step back from the campaign fray for just a moment and consider the enormity of what’s already occurred.

A 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist, who wasn’t even a Democrat until recently, has come within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, of all places.

And a 69-year-old billionaire who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party has taken a commanding lead in the Republican primaries.

Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’ magnetism or Donald Trump’s likeability.

It’s a rebellion against the establishment.

The question is why the establishment has been so slow to see this. A year ago – which now seems like an eternity – it proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoe-ins.

Both had all the advantages – deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want.

A respected political insider recently told me most Americans are largely content. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years. The problem has been the major candidates themselves.”

I beg to differ.

Economic indicators may be up but they don’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans still feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience.

Nor do the major indicators show the linkages Americans see between wealth and power, crony capitalism, declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and a billionaire class that’s turning our democracy into an oligarchy.

These gains have translated into political power to rig the system with bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, trade deals, and increasing market power – all of which have further pushed down wages and pulled up profits.

Americans know a takeover has occurred and they blame the establishment for it.

There’s no official definition of the “establishment” but it presumably includes all of the people and institutions that have wielded significant power over the American political economy, and are therefore deemed complicit.

At its core are the major corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; the billionaires who invest directly in politics; and the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers.

Arrayed around this core are the deniers and apologists – those who attribute what’s happened to “neutral market forces,” or say the system can’t be changed, or who urge that any reform be small and incremental.

Some Americans are rebelling against all this by supporting an authoritarian demagogue who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. Others are rebelling by joining a so-called “political revolution.”

The establishment is having conniptions. They call Trump whacky and Sanders irresponsible. They charge that Trump’s isolationism and Bernie’s ambitious government programs will stymie economic growth.

The establishment doesn’t get that most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

Most people are more concerned about economic security and a fair chance to make it.

The establishment doesn’t see what’s happening because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. It also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in bringing all this on.

Yet regardless of the political fates of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the rebellion against the establishment will continue.

Eventually, those with significant economic and political power in America will have to either commit to fundamental reform, or relinquish their power.

Saturday night my junkmail received its almost daily email pitch from Bernie Sanders titled “An unmistakable message.” It wasn’t clear from its text what he thought that message was. But the “unmistakable message” communicated to me from South Carolina that same night was that Sanders has a black women problem. Other states may not face him, as South Carolina did, with a Democratic electorate that is both 61% black and 61% female to deliver him such a resounding defeat. Only 23% of South Carolina Democrats claim to be very liberal. It would be easy to write off South Carolina as the outlier state it has always been in US history, starting as the most oligarchic and repressive of all the slave states, the home of the very prophet of slavery John C. Calhoun.

What Sanders is missing is the kind of identity symbolism that would communicate the centrality of black women to his movement and that would at the same time be completely consistent with, and an authentic expression of, his core message of restoring democracy from the grip of plutocracy for everybody. It is the weakest members of society, those subject to structural discrimination of any kind, who have the most to gain from restoring political equality. Sanders can be trusted not to pander as the Clintons do as a substitute for that equality. Yet the message Sanders should take from the South Carolina rout, like a wakeup slap in the face, is that he needs to find an authentic progressive action that will at the same time communicate to black women about who he is at a symbolic level and in an unmistakable fashion.

Fortunately events have presented him just such an opportunity.

If Sanders performs well on Super Tuesday, he will have additional political capital to claim, at least in private, that Obama should not send up a nomination unless it is someone that Sanders’ can support. But Sanders should not delay in announcing his own short list of indicative candidates that Sanders would support know and in the future.

The slap delivered to Sanders in South Carolina says, if he chooses to interpret the message, “its now time.”

Therefore this name should be taken very seriously, particularly in light of the historic nature of the appointment. If President Obama is not going to appoint a black woman Supreme Court justice, then who will break this barrier in the foreseeable future?

If Sanders delays his advice on this nomination until Obama chooses such an Identity Plutocrat, it will be too late for him to oppose it. The identity politics message amplified by mass media propagandists for plutocracy will divert attention from the fundamental problem of appointing another plutocrat to the Supreme Court for the tacit purpose of perpetuating the Supreme Court’s “money is speech” jurisprudence. What the country desperately needs as its first priority, as Sanders knows, is instead a justice who will go on the Court with the express objective of overruling Buckley v Valeo at the very first opportunity, with the same spirit of opposition as Lincoln had to Dred Scott.

Without such a new justice, Sanders’ campaign promise to clean up the corrupt campaign finance system, as the prerequisite to achieving any of his proposed economic reforms, is an empty one. A corrupt Congress has proven incapable of defending its legislative powers against their usurpation by means of the Court’s routine violations of the separation of powers. It will be easier for new president with a mandate to win a nomination battle in a Democratic Senate than to give a corrupt Congress a new backbone.

If Sanders is going to get such a new Supreme Court justice that will perform in the public’s interest, not the plutocrats’ interest, on these two issues then he needs to be proactive. Right now he needs to get out in front of a Lynch or any other Identity Plutocrat nomination. Lynch would likely be the strongest such nomination that Obama could make, since she was only recently approved by the Senate as Attorney General and blows the strongest identity politics dog whistles of any alternative. By planning for the worst, Sanders would be prepared for anything.

While each member of this group should have the qualifications to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sanders should ask this group to convene and deliberate on his behalf for purposes of jointly recommending who they think would be the best inspired by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frances Ellen Watkins rolled into one to invade, talk truth to, and conquer the influence peddler Senators of the Judiciary Committee in hearings on a progressive Supreme Court nominee who will proceed to outlaw their plutocratic business model from her position on the Supreme Court.

Sanders’ campaign should provide such a group whatever resources might be needed in order to consult with an even broader community of progressive black women legal professionals. The process should be announced publicly and begin immediately to preempt any contrary action by Obama. But whatever reasonable time is needed should be made available for consultations with the objective of gaining widespread participation and support of black women for Sanders’ ultimate Senatorial “advice” to Obama. A formal model for such a process would be Jimmy Carter’s widely-praised judicial selection process. It would provide practice for Sanders’ eventual search for a VP.

Just as the media, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s landslide win in South Carolina’s Democratic primary Saturday, are predictably writing the obituary for Bernie Sanders’ upstart and uphill campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has handed him an opportunity to jolt the American people awake.

Announcing on “Meet the Press” that Americans need a real choice of commander-in-chief — one “who has foresight, who exercises good judgment,” she announced today her resignation as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee — an organization that has been actively working to promote Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Gabbard, while only a second-term member of the House, is no lightweight when it comes to US foreign and military policy. A major in the Hawaii National Guard who volunteered for two tours of duty in Iraq, she is one of only two female members of Congress to have served in a war zone. (While I couldn’t find a stat for how many male members of Congress have served in a war zone, given that only 25 were even in uniform in the period since 2001, and given that few of those 25 were in active war zones, and finally given that older vets like John McCain are few and far between, it’s a fair bet that there are not many.) She had the courage to introduce a bill in a Congress filled with war-besotted “chicken-hawks” to require the US to end its illegal intervention aimed at “regime change” in Syria.

Bernie Sanders should immediately grab this moment to shake up a primary race that the Democratic Party leadership stacked against left-leaning rebels and boat-rockers like him years ago (by pushing conservative southern states to the front of the primary calendar). He should promptly welcome the gutsy and outspoken Gabbard to his campaign, and announce that he plans to make her his vice presidential choice if he wins the nomination (she would be 35 by next January, and, born in American Samoa to two US citizens, she is thus fully Constitutionally eligible to serve as president in Sanders’ stead). At the same time, Sanders, who has been largely avoiding talking about the country’s military budget and its imperialist foreign policy, should use the opportunity of Gabbard’s defection from the DNC to announce that if he elected president he would immediately slash military spending by 25%, that he would begin pulling US forces back from most of the 800 or more bases they occupy around the world, and that he would end a decades-long foreign policy of overthrowing elected leaders around the globe.

It’s clearly not enough for Sanders to continue his denunciation of America’s “rigged economy.” Almost everyone agrees the US political and economic system is a rigged game benefitting the wealthy and powerful. But when he calls for free public colleges, improved Social Security benefits, expansion of Medicare to cover everyone, massive spending on infrastructure, and other programs, even liberals are asking, “Where’s the money going to come from?”

Sure it’s a gamble. Maybe even most Democrats have been so brainwashed by the terror-and-fear factory in Washington and its 24/7 echo chamber, the prostituted mainstream media, that they will recoil in horror at the notion of America unilaterally cutting back on its military spending. But running for office as a “revolutionary” is by definition a gamble, and successful gambles require making big bets.

My guess is that most people — at least on the Democratic side — are smarter than that. If two articulate candidates — Sen. Sanders and now the eminently qualified Rep. Gabbard — were to go out on the stump explaining that the decades of massive military spending and the decades of illegal wars and subversions initiated by the US have clearly and unarguably done nothing but make the world and the US more violent and unsafe, while meanwhile bankrupting America — people would probably get it, in which case Hillary Clinton’s big win in South Carolina would become little more than a historical artifact.

To overcome that kind of defeatist thinking, Sanders needs to swing for the dollar seats and blow his opponent out of the water, and that means taking on the US war machine and challenging Clinton not as simply a woman with bad judgement (Iraq), but as a dangerous war-monger and a corporate shill who can be counted on to continue with massive military spending and war-mongering.

Gabbard’s surprise endorsement of Sanders, based on what she said is her respect for “his approach to foreign policy and avoiding unnecessary wars,” gives him the chance to take that big swing of the bat.

 

A formal vetting by professionals of a candidate’s resume for claimed experience could be subject to objective standards equally applicable to both candidates. Reporting on polling results can be objectively critiqued. The other two criteria, “Cares about people like me” or is “Honest and trustworthy” are not much susceptible to objective inquiry, barring a John Oliver-style body-slam (ironically recycled by Mitt Romney) in extreme cases. 

4. Conflicted Superdelegates and RBC Members

 The final problem requires a simple traditional rule to guard against straightforward conflict of interest corruption in the nomination process. To use Minnesota as an example again, its congressional delegation Superdelegates all support Clinton except for Keith Ellison who has endorsed Sanders.  Yet their constituents overwhelmingly support Sanders.  There is something wrong here.  In 2008 Obama bought Superdelegates, and no doubt the same has occurred in 2016.

 

Short of scrapping the Superdelegate practice, those Superdelegates who have a conflict of interest as a result of receiving money or other substantial benefit from a candidate should, at least, be subject to robust enforcement of recusal rules, both in the Convention and on the important Rules and By-Laws Committee (RBC). 

 

Just one example of a clearly conflicted member of the RBC is Harold M. Ickes, a long-time Clinton advisor and a senior advisor to the independent “Ready for Hillary” super PAC.  Ickes should not be a voting member of any rules committee proceedings that would affect the Clintons.  Ickes was known as Bill Clinton’s “garbage man” for running interference on Clintonian corruption.  Yet there he sits on the RBC prepared for further duty.  When Ickes rejoined the1 Rules and Bylaws Committee, at least one longtime Democratic strategist raised her eyebrows.  Said Donna Brazile, a4 fellow member of the rules committee: “He predated the Clinton era, but when I saw Harold reappointed to the D.N.C., he surely, in my judgment, symbolizes the return of the Clintons.” 

 

In the absence of proo1f of an express quid pro quo deal, such conflicted persons will often defend, as Clinton herself defends her enormous legalized bribes from special interests, on the ground that he or she personally has superhuman resistance to ordinary human venality.  But conflict of interest recusal does not rely on either proof of quid pro quo deals or disproof of such superhuman powers.  “The reason for disqualifying a whole class on the ground of bias is the law’s recognition that, if the circumstances of that class, in the run of instances, are lik  ely to generate bias, consciously or unconsciously, it would be a hopeless endeavor to search out the impact of these circumstances on the mind and judgment of a particular individual.” Dennis v. United States, 339 U.S. 162, 181 (1950) (Frankfurter, J.). Therefore if, like Ickes, any RBC member or Superdelegate has been on the Clintons’ payroll or a beneficiary of their corrupt political network – the quintessential Tammany Hall operation of the Second Gilded Age – then they must recuse without further evidence.

In response to just such overt Democratic Party corruption the Republican National Committee Chairman has publicized his party’s rejection of the undemocratic practice of Superdelegates. He could accurately characterize his Party to be, in this regard, “unlike on the Democratic side where they have Superdelegates and could give a darn about what the grassroots are telling the party. That’s not how we operate our party on our side.”

 


 

Rob Hager, a Harvard Law graduate, is a public interest litigator [Agent Orange, Bhopal Disaster, Three Mile Island, Silkwood, Joe Harding, Parks Twp., Avirgan v. Hull.  (am'd. compl. & mot.  To dis. only), etc.  Who filed amicus briefs in the Montana sequel to Citizens United and has worked as an international consultant on anti-corruption policy and legislation with the United Nations' and other development agencies.

~~~

Why the Critics of Bernienomics Are Wrong



March 4, 2016

| Op-Ed

They’re wrong.  You need to know the truth, and spread it.


 


Not day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Berney Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up.  (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.)  They’re wrong.  You need to know the truth, and spread it.

~~~

The End of the Establishment?



February 24, 2016

| Op-Ed

Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’ magnetism or Donald Trump’s likeability.  It’s a rebellion against the establishment.


                                                                                                


There’s no official definition of the “establishment” but it presumably includes all of the people and institutions that have wielded significant power over the American political economy, and are therefore deemed complicit.


 


But even now that Bush is out and Hillary is still leading but vulnerable, the establishment still doesn’t see what’s occurred.  They explain everything by pointing to weaknesses: Bush, they now say, “never connected” and Hillary “has a trust problem.”

 

Median family income is lower now than it was sixteen years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top.

Those at the very top of the top have rigged the system even more thoroughly.  Since 1995, the average income tax rate for the 400 top-earning Americans has plummeted from 30 percent to 18 percent.

Wealth, power, and crony capitalism fit together. So far in the 2016 election, the richest 400 Americans have accounted for over a third of all campaign contributions.

This article was originally published on Robert Reich’s blog.

~~~

 


The Single Solution to Sanders’ South Carolina and Supreme Court Problems


By Rob Hager -

February 29, 2016

News Report

 

But a teachable moment would be wasted if Sanders did not take away from his rout in South Carolina the fact that he has a serious black women problem and that he should decide to do something strategic to solve that problem. Black women were 37% of South Carolina’s primary voters.  Clinton won black women by a margin of 78 points (i.e., 89%-11%), and black men by 64 points.  If Sanders had reversed the black women vote, which is a core component of his working class coalition and principal beneficiary of all his policies, he would have won South Carolina, not ignominiously lost it.

 

 This black women problem is strange because Sanders’ opponent was publicly called out by women activists from #BlackLivesMatter for using, in her checkered conservative past, the “super predator” slur. More relevantly, she was also at the same time caught, in her present “progressive” incarnation, promoting highly offensive Jim Crow fake history propaganda.  She was called out for her “chilling” reversion to that pre-civil rights era slavery-by-another-name by no less an authority than the best selling author and columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But as experienced practitioners of identity politics the Clintons know how to dish out symbols, like her opportunistic southern drawl or reading a list of black victims, with an actor dramatizing that “She says their names … and makes their mothers’ fight for justice her own.” Really, its that easy. These theatrical gestures cancel out, like Bill’s saxophone, the reality of a Doughface conservative who has done much more harm than good to black Americans throughout her career.

Sanders, who was arrested as a young civil rights activist, does not deal in identity politics symbolism. People of all identities who are capable of going deeper than superficial symbols and empty gestures to understand the concrete policies that Sanders has consistently backed unfailingly support him. Cornel West instructs that Sanders is “more progressive than … Obama—and that means better for black America.”

West does not have to prove his transcendence of identity politics in pursuit of the truth wherever it may lead. Like West, Sanders does not pander to identity politics. Nevertheless Sanders hired a young black woman, Symone Sanders, as his press secretary, and he also has attracted the support of some of the most dynamic black women in the country. But this has not translated at a symbolic level into a message capable of gaining support from black women generally. And that’s a problem.

Not only does Sanders have a black women problem. He also has a Supreme Court problem. Sanders will not be able to deliver on his promise to take our government back from the “billionaire class” unless he can effectively address that Supreme Court problem. This is where events have intervened. The problem now takes the more tractable form of the pending question about a nominee to fill the Court vacancy left by Scalia’s timely death. A 4-4 deadlocked Court puts a hold on further plutocratic decisions from the Court. Republicans insist that the election should determine the nomination. There is an opportunity to appoint a justice that will turn around the plutocratic decisions already on the books. Sanders has been to date strangely and inappropriately silent about this opportunity, though it concerns him more than anyone.

Sanders’ campaign has made him at the same time both the most prominent U.S. Senator on the Democrat side of the aisle, and the most prominent progressive politician in the country. As President Obama pursues his Kabuki quest to offer a nomination plutocratic enough to entice Mitch McConnell to treat it with courtesy, the country is entitled to depend upon Senator Sanders to provide Obama with Senatorial good “advice” about this nomination. It is Senator Sanders’ own constitutional duty to give Obama such advice. Since he is now a Senate leader, he should take the lead in doing so. If progressive advice is not given by Sanders then who will give it in a way that Obama can hear it? As both the most prominent Senator to advise Obama on this nomination and also the most prominent progressive in the country to deflect Obama from appointing a plutocrat to entice Republican support, Sanders’ silence is deafening.

As one of the most likely prospects to win the new presidency that McConnell would prefer to make this Supreme Court nomination in 2017, Sanders has an even deeper interest in how Obama handles this matter. Obama’s mishandling of the nomination could easily prevent Sanders from fulfilling his campaign promise by resulting in the appointment to the Court of a plutocrat slightly disguised with a thin identity- politics veneer, like Obama himself.

Most of the short lists imputed to Obama, like Obama’s first apparent trial balloon, consist mostly of corporate lawyers and other plutocrats. Most of them have some veneer to satisfy whatever identity politics Obama chooses for his likely Identity Plutocrat nomination. But the identity that would be a true historic first is that of a black woman. This identity lies at the very intersection of the two greatest democratic movements in American history against racism and patriarchy. It thus also represents the convergence of the identity politics played by both Obama and Clinton. These identities are rooted in tectonic political struggles, not just the steady stream of immigration and ethnic adaptation which is the American story. Yet there is an Hispanic woman and two Jewish women sitting on the Supreme Court, but no black woman.

One of the few names of non-judges appearing on some short lists of possible Obama nominees is the name of a black woman. Obama has been separately advised by the ranking member of the judiciary committee, its respected former Chair, Senator Leahy, that “nominees from outside the judicial monastery” would be preferable to judges. McConnell’s politicization of the appointment discloses the deception that Leahy rightly dispels. Appointing a judge sustains the pretense that the Supreme Court has something to do with the law rather than using legal language to disguise political judgments like Scalia did. The Supreme Court, the way it operates under Chief Justice Roberts is a purely political body, and pretending otherwise by appointing a sitting judge is pretense.

Unfortunately the name of the black woman that appears on various short lists is Obama’s revolving door Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has been criticized for being “marinated in the [plutocratic] worldview.” As former corporate lawyer and prosecutor in New York City she is not clearly distinguished from the other plutocrats that populate these circulating short lists as leading prospects for Scalia’s seat.

The second most important, but closely related, issue arising from the justice system is that, while the Court has been illegitimately meddling in elections to legalize their plutocratic corruption, it has also been neglecting its proper official duty to oversee the criminal justice system in a manner so as to maintain the rule of law and due process. As a result criminal justice is a New Jim Crow system possessing significant police state overtones. This is the problem that has created a civil rights crisis. Next to political corruption, it is the most pressing national problem arising from the legal sector. Lynch, as a former prosecutor, now managing the Justice Department component of this broken system, is on the wrong side of this issue. She represents what needs to be reformed, not a reformer. What is needed is a lawyer who has worked the victim side, not the police state side, of the broken system, one who can bring relevant expertise to the MIA Supreme Court on how to fix it. Where is Lynch’s list of publications or best selling book about the broken justice system and failed drug war?

Sanders should be able to immediately find a half dozen qualified potential nominees of the same identity as Lynch, but who are progressive supporters, not plutocrats, and are on the right side of the civil rights crisis instead of on the wrong side of both civil rights and plutocracy. Sanders needs to make public his own indicative list of alternative nominees from which Obama could choose, at the implicit cost of losing Sanders’ support. Such a Sanders short list could include such names as the accomplished legislators Nina Turner and Cynthia McKinney, law professors Anita Hill (J.D., Yale), Michelle Alexander (J.D., Stanford), and Nekima Levy-Pounds (J.D., Illinois), maybe the versatile apparatchik Melody Barnes (J.D., Michigan) from Obama’s own office, plus another nominee to be named by a group of young uncoopted women civil rights activists like Aislinn Pulley of Chicago. Symone Sanders should be fully capable of convening such young activists for the special purpose of appointing their own representative to this group.

Sanders could in this way convert his current black women problem into a solution of his, and the country’s, even greater need for a progressive disinformationCourt. The country cannot afford another Kabuki cave-in by Obama on one of the most important Supreme Court appointments in US history. Sanders needs to demonstrate his leadership capabilities on this issue right now. It is as important as is his election itself to the recovery of democracy. If his chosen nominee does not get a hearing in the Republican Senate, the she should become a part of his campaign to obtain the mandate for when her name is sent to the Senate on inauguration day 2017.

~~~

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s Surprise Endorsement Gives Sanders a Chance to Change the Whole Primary Game



March 2, 2016

| Op-Ed

In a clear dig at Clinton, a neoliberal who has been at the forefront not just in backing President George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, but in pushing for both the illegal and disastrous overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and the current intervention to oust Syrian President Basher Al-Assad, Gabbard said, “There is a clear contrast between our two candidates with regard to my strong belief that we must end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much.” She added, “This is not just another ‘issue.’ This is the issue, and it’s deeply personal to me. This is why I’ve decided to resign as Vice Chair of the DNC so that I can support Bernie Sanders in his efforts to earn the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) has resigned as DNC vice-chair and is endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ run for the party’s nomination, while denouncing Hillary Clinton’s militarism

It’s a fair question, and while much of the dough could come from raising taxes on the rich and on corporations, it wouldn’t be enough. But taking 25% from the flatulent $1.3-trillion military budget and shifting that over to funding programs that support average Americans instead of just wealthy investors does answer that question.

As I wrote in an earlier article, Clinton won in South Carolina because a battered and oppressed black population in that apartheid state, effectively barred from participation in their own state’s governance, and comprising almost two-thirds of a minority Democratic electorate there, desperately wants a Democratic president — any Democratic president. That’s why, despite widely believing Clinton to be untrustworthy, they voted for her: they simply didn’t believe Sanders could win.

~~~

If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk to you again next week.  I'll try not to keep it shorter next week.  I realize this one is long, but if you will just slow down and absorb what is here, I think you will find some real food for thought about our country and it's future. 

God Bless You All

&

God Bless the United States of America.

Floyd

 

 

 

 

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