OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
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OBOF YEAR SIX INDEX
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OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 1
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Jan. 03, 2016
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OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 2
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Jan. 25, 2016
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OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 3
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Jan. 28, 2016
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OBOF TYMHM Vol. 16 No. 4
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Mar. 05, 2016
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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
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
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
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
Michael Moore predicts, “I’m optimistic that
the person who is most popular will win the contest.” But Moore Clinton
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
A state like Minnesota Minnesota ’s process for the statistically troubling allegation of an 8% Massachusetts
1. Rotten Boroughs
The propagandist mass media has already awarded Clinton Clinton squeezing out a narrow one pledged-delegate
victory in the reliably blue-state Massachusetts
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
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
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
On “Super Saturday,” Clinton
continued her string of successes with red former slave states, in Louisiana Plains States , Kansas and Nebraska
“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.
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
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
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
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 Massachusetts
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
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 Virginia
was previously a red state along with the other former slave states upon which Clinton Virginia
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
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 Clinton Clinton
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
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
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 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
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 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
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
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
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
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 South Carolina South
Carolina
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
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
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 Hawaii
National Guard who volunteered for two tours of duty in Iraq 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 US
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
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 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.
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 Montana
~~~
Why the Critics of Bernienomics
Are Wrong
By Robert Reich
-
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?
By Robert Reich
-
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
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 South Carolina Clinton South Carolina
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
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
~~~
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s Surprise
Endorsement Gives Sanders a Chance to Change the Whole Primary Game
By Dave Lindorff
-
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
~~~
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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