The Push to Make Sanders the Green Party’s Candidate

APRIL 29, 2016

The Push to Make Sanders the Green Party’s Candidate

by DAVE LINDORFF

Gino Santa Maria | Shutterstock.com

Philadelphia

Bernie Sanders, to the consternation of critics in the Democratic Party, pundits in the corporate media, and purists on the hard left, has accomplished an amazing thing. Up against Hillary Clinton, surely the biggest, best-funded corporate-backed candidate the Democratic leadership has run since Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984 over three decades ago, the once obscure independent Vermont senator has battled Clinton to almost a draw, down by only some 319 delegates with nearly 900 to go (not counting the corrupt “super delegates” chosen for their fealty to party leaders, not by primary or caucus voting.)

By doing this well, as a proudly declared “democratic socialist” who on the stump has been denouncing the corruption of both the US political and economic systems, and as a candidate who has refused to take corporate money or money from big, powerful donors, instead successfully funding his campaign with only small two and three-digit donations from his supporters, Sanders has exposed not just his opponent, Hillary Clinton, but the entire Democratic Party leadership and most of its elected officials as nothing but hired corporate tools posing as progressive advocates of the people.

But now Sanders faces a truly momentous choice. Defeated by the combined assault of a pro-corporate mass media and by the machinations of the Democratic Party leadership — machinations both long-established with the intent of defeating upstarts and outsiders, like front-loading conservative southern states in the primary schedule, and current, like scheduling only a few early candidate debates and then slotting them at times (like opposite the Super Bowl) when few would be watching them — Sanders knows that barring some major surprise like a federal indictment of Clinton, a market collapse, or perhaps a leak of the transcripts of Clinton’s highly-paid but still secret speeches to some of the nation’s biggest banks, he is not going to win the Democratic nomination.

So does he, after spending months hammering home the reality that Clinton is the bought-and-paid candidate of the the banks, the arms industry, the oil industry and the medical-industrial complex, and after enduring endless lies about his own record spouted by Clinton and her surrogates, go ahead and endorse her as the party’s standard bearer for the general election? Does he walk away and return quietly to Vermont? Or does he instead continue to fight for his “political revolution” by another route?

The first and even the second option would mean the demise of his so-called “political revolution.” A Sanders endorsement of Clinton at this point would be a pathetic betrayal of all the energy and money that his fired-up backers have poured into this extraordinary campaign, and it would send a message that fighting against the nation’s ruling elite is impossible, at least through the ballot box. It would also be pointless. Some 25-30 percent of Sanders backers, according to pollsters, have made it clear that they will not support Clinton no matter what — including if Sanders were to endorse her. That in itself could be enough to doom her candidacy. Furthermore, after all his well-grounded attacks on the corrupt funding of her campaign, and of her horrific record as senator and secretary of state, any endorsement he made would be seen as a joke. He would spend the next three and a half months of the general election running from reporters asking him if he “takes back” the things he had said about her earlier — her crooked speech fees from Goldman Sachs and other big banks, her default advocacy of disastrous wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, etc. Most seriously, endorsing Hillary after all that earnest, heartfelt campaigning, would be a huge blow to his millions of backers and his “movement.”

Just shutting up and going home, with no endorsement for Clinton, would be almost as bad, leaving his movement leaderless and thoroughly demoralized, and he’d still be besieged by journalists seeking to have him either diss or endorse Clinton.

The third option Sanders has though, is to continue his run for president, but not as a Democrat. And that option could be explosive and even revolutionary this election year, depending on how he did it.

Most states have deadlines for candidates seeking to get a ballot line as an independent candidate that are earlier than the Democratic convention in July, so running as an independent would be impossible. And a write-in campaign would be even more hopeless. But there is another option: Running as the presidential nominee of the Green Party, which already has a ballot line on 25 states and which doesn’t hold its nominating convention until August, after both the Democratic and the Republican conventions are over.

Could Sanders run as a Green? Some of his supporters are already talking about the idea. So, it turns out, are members of the Green Party. Apparently even Dr. Jill Stein, a past presidential candidate of the Green Party and its likely candidate this year, as well as Kshama Sawant, the hugely popular socialist city councilwoman in Seattle who led that city’s activists’ successful fight to pass a $15/hour wage law, are writing a letter to Sanders inviting him — urging him — to enter into discussions with the Green Party about running as its presidential candidate. Stein is apparently even willing to step aside and perhaps run as his vice presidential running mate if he were to do so. (Sawant has made an excellent argument for why Sanders and the Greens should do this. She also has a petition online for people to join in the call. It already has over 17,000 signatures.)

Will Sanders seize this opportunity to continue the fight? If he is serious about inspiring a political revolution, he must. He has said he does not want to be a spoiler “like Ralph Nader” and help elect Donald Trump or some other Republican. But would that be the result of a three-way race with Sanders running as a Green? Not necessarily. In the first place, the claim that votes for Nader led to George W. Bush’s 2000 victory over Al Gore is bogus. Gore lost because he embarrassingly failed to win his own state of Tennessee. As well, it is clear that it was a corrupt Republican Supreme Court that by a 5-4 vote halted the count in Florida that handed that state’s electoral votes to Bush. It has been shown that continued counting and challenges to improperly rejected ballots would clearly have given Florida to Gore.

More importantly, 2016 is not 2000. The public this year is clearly sick of the two major parties, and disgusted by the undemocratic nature of the primaries. Incredibly, both Trump and Clinton, the likely winners of those primaries, represent the two most unpopular and disliked candidates in memory, with some 65 percent of Americans saying they dislike Trump and another 56 percent saying they dislike Clinton. Indeed, Clinton, not favored by almost half of Democrats, is so disliked outside the Democratic Party that there’s a strong likelihood — and a fear even among Democratic leaders — that she could lose to Trump or another Republican nominee all by herself, with or without a Sanders endorsement. Meanwhile, the most liked candidate this year continues to be Sanders, whose negative rating is just 36 percent — probably all of them Republicans — and who continues to poll better against all possible Republican candidates than does Clinton. With numbers like that Sanders, if he continued to build his movement and continued to bring in new voters as he has demonstrably done in the primaries, could even contemplate winning such a general election race. He has also demonstrated his ability to attract tens of millions of dollars a month in online contributions. Running in a three-way race, he’d surely collect even more money, making him fully competitive with the two widely-loathed big-party candidates.

As the Green’s presidential candidate, Sanders would have the opportunity, even if he were to lose, to catapult the Green Party, for decades stuck in limbo in the low single digits as simply a protest-vote option, into major-party status as the party of the 99% — the poor, working and progressive people of all races. That’s a standing that would not go away in subsequent elections, but that instead could be built upon — especially with both major parties currently in danger of fragmenting. Given Sanders’ already proven popularity, it would be impossible for the corporate media to deny him a lectern at any general election debates, as was always done to Green Party candidates and independents like Nader in the past.

Sanders and his ardent supporters, in other words, have a unique historic opportunity to shatter the asphyxiating two-party duopoly of two pro-corporate parties that has been the Bermuda Triangle of progressive politics for over a century.

Will he give up on the self-defeating, nonsensical notion of backing Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic Party’s nomination for president? If he does, despite being clearly the most progressive candidate to make a serious run for the presidency since Eugene Debs in 1920 (when he garnered 3.4 percent of the vote running from a prison cell), Sanders will at best be consigned to a brief, dismissive footnote in future histories of the United States. If he runs in the general election as a Green, he has a chance to write a whole new chapter in those history books.

So here’s an call to action:

If Bernie Sanders is reluctant to make the jump to running as a Green, he needs to be pushed by his supporters. He needs to be shown that it can be done, and that his would not be a quixotic campaign, but rather a serious effort to win the White House. How can that pushing be done? Well, think about it a minute. By the time this primary season ends in early June, Over nine million people, and maybe more, will have cast votes for Sanders. Many many more who support him passionately were denied the right to vote for him by restrictive primary rules in states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, rules that limited voting in Democratic primaries to people registered as Democrats (in NY you had to make that decision back in October, 2015 before Sanders was even being considered a serious candidate!). In fact, where the primaries have been open to independent voters, Sanders has usually won. Even last Tuesday, the four primaries that Sanders lost, in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut, were closed, but in Rhode Island, which was open to independents, Sanders won by 10 percent, a crucial difference not mentioned in most corporate news reports). Obviously in the general election, independents will be voting.

Imagine if even a fraction of those millions who back Sanders — his voters and those who were barred from voting for him — were to descend on Philadelphia for the July Democratic convention, which will be held on July 25-28 in, of all places, the Wells Fargo Bank Center (funded and named by one of those notorious too-big-to-fail banks that have been Hillary Clinton’s faves). Imagine those Bernie backers filling the streets of this city where the nation was founded, armed with signs saying “No Hillary endorsement!” and “Go Green Bernie!” And remember, inside that aptly named convention center there will also be hundreds of elected Sanders delegates, who would be demanding the same thing of him.

How could Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old activist veteran of so many popular movements over the years, refuse such a rousing call to action?

Green Party’s Stein Predicts DNC Will Sabotage Sanders, Try to Reabsorb Supporters

"You cannot have a revolution inside of a counter-revolutionary party," said 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

By Barry Donegan -

 

Feb 29, 2016

Physician Jill Stein, who is seeking the Green Party’s nomination for president in 2016, has called Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential campaign “wonderful” and stated that the Green Party “will not attack that campaign.”

However, she told RT on Saturday, “But unfortunately he is in a party that has a track record for basically sabotaging its rebels. It has done a good job of doing that in the past from Dennis Kucinich to Jesse Jackson to Howard Dean, whether they use a PR campaign like the ‘Dean’s scream’ to bring down the Dean candidacy. Also Jesse Jackson was sabotaged by a PR by the DNC. The Democratic Party has its ways of reigning people in if they try to rebel. The bottom line is that we are in political system in the U.S., which is funded by predatory banks and fossil fueled giants and war profiteers. So, we really need to reject that system, we say to reject the lesser evil so we can stand up and really fight for the greater good.”

In a Monday interview on New England Public Radio, Stein said, “What’s been happening in the Democratic Party is you’ll have a good candidate who will run, but then the candidate gets reabsorbed and the campaign becomes reabsorbed back into the Democratic Party. So it’s kind of a fake left while the party becomes more corporatist, more militarist, and continues to march to the right.”

She called the grassroots movement that Sanders has tapped into a “rebellion” that “can’t simply be passed on to Hillary Clinton.”

[RELATED: Sanders Criticizes Two-Party System for Blocking Competition from Third Parties]

Speaking on the current leaders in the Democratic and Republican presidential contests, Stein said that Trump and Clinton have “an awful lot in common” and are “representatives of oligarchy.”

She pointed to their advocacy of a muscular foreign policy as a specific example of a commonality between the candidates.

“We can’t afford to keep doing what’s not working. In my view, we need transformational change under a political party that is of, by, and for the people that’s not controlled by the big money,” said Stein.

In the below-embedded CBS 46 Reality Check video, Ben Swann points out how DNC technicalities enabled Clinton to obtain the same number of New Hampshire delegates as Sanders in spite of the Senator from Vermont’s overwhelming victory in the primary election.

https://www.facebook.com/BenSwannRealityCheck/videos/1052824864782463/

Why Triangulating Neoliberal Clintonites Back Big Business Over People

ELECTION 2016

Gutless Democrats Fear Fights: Why Triangulating Neoliberal Clintonites Back Big Business Over People

Progressives are right and Hillary Clinton is wrong on trade. So why do we run away from a winning hand?

By Paul Rosenberg / Salon

April 25, 2016

Photo Credit: stocklight / Shutterstock

As the Democratic primary heated up to the boiling point, one particular line of attack on Bernie Sanders had the distinctively Karl Rove-ian stench of attacking Sanders’ strength. Vox, Slate and AEI all bought the spin and struck the same theme: “If Bernie Sanders cares about poor people, how come he doesn’t want to trade with them?”

But even more than Rove, we can catch a distinctive whiff of Thatcherism here: There is no alternative; either we do trade on neoliberal terms or else we head back to caveman status. We can’t do things in a more equitable manner, we’re being told, even though history repeatedly shows that we can—replacing monarchy with democracy, abolishing slavery, getting rid of child labor, establishing equal rights for women. All these equalizing advances we’ve come to take for granted were unthinkable once: There was simply no alternative… or, again, so we were told.

Economist Dean Baker debunked the underlying argument on his “Beat the Press” blog as the attack on Sanders first appeared, and elaborated his critique more fully in a piece solicited by the Washington Post—which then declined to run it. Baker first noted that conventional economic theory calls for rich countries to run surpluses with developing countries—supplying the capital they need to develop—and that this pattern prevailed throughout most of the 1990s. “The United States had a modest trade deficit in these years, but Europe and Japan had large surpluses,” Baker recalled, but “This pattern was reversed in 1997 with the U.S.-I.M.F.’s bailout from the East Asian financial crisis.”

That bailout, “directed by the Clinton Treasury department and the I.M.F.,” came with very harsh terms, which led developing countries to decide they had to keep large foreign exchange reserves—meaning U.S. dollars—in order to avoid a similar fate. This in turn required running large trade surpluses, the exact opposite of what conventional, textbook economic thinking had previously assumed. “This was the period in which the U.S. trade deficit exploded, going from just over 1 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6 percent of GDP in 2005, a rise in the size of the annual deficit equivalent to almost $900 billion in today’s economy,” Baker noted. “This rise in the trade deficit coincided with the loss of more than 3 million manufacturing jobs, roughly 20 percent of employment in the sector.”

But it’s not just that American factory workers were sold out. At the same time, professionals (the same class of people who tell us it’s inevitable) were carefully protected. “The arguments on gains from trade are the same with doctors as with textiles and steel,” Baker noted. “The reason that we import manufacturing goods and not doctors is that we designed the rules of trade that way.” Those rules made it easy to off-shore jobs, but retained obstacles to foreign professionals moving here to work. “The reason is simple,” Baker pointed out: “Doctors have more political power than autoworkers.”

Pharmaceutical companies have even greater power, so “free trade” deals have now come to increase protections for them, along with other patent and copyright protections, imposing a huge financial burden on the developing world—not to mention the cost in lives. “Generic drugs are almost invariably cheap; patent protection is what make drugs expensive,” Baker noted.

“In sum, the recent pattern of trade and development is anything but natural. It was imposed on developing countries by the United States and other rich countries. It is just not true that it is their only path to development.”

Indeed, Baker’s think tank, the Center for Economic Policy and Research, provides a couple of additional ways of seeing through the smokescreen, first by examining the real impacts of NAFTA on Mexico, a case study of the grand-daddy of these sorts of deals; and second by examining worldwide data on how rates of development changed over time, which shows a marked slowdown when the neoliberal orthodoxy hit its peak. Both deserve to be more widely known.

In 2014, CEPR’s report on NAFTA’s 20-year record found that not only has NAFTA hurt American workers, it’s also hurt Mexico as well, particularly in contrast to its past development, and to other Latin American countries:

• Mexico ranks 18th of 20 Latin American countries in growth of real GDP per person, the most basic economic measure of living standards.
• From 1960 to 1980, Mexican real GDP per person almost doubled, growing by 98.7 percent. By comparison, in the past 20 years it has grown by just 18.6 percent.
• Mexico’s per capita GDP growth of just 18.6 percent over the past 20 years is about half of the rate of growth achieved by the rest of Latin America.
• According to Mexican national statistics, Mexico’s poverty rate of 52.3 percent in 2012 is almost identical to the poverty rate of 1994. As a result, there were 14.3 million more Mexicans living below the poverty line as of 2012 (the latest data available) than in 1994.

Thus, if NAFTA is a model of how “free trade” helps the world’s poor, it’s a record of abject failure. In addition to everything else, the report found that NAFTA devastated Mexican family farmers, which in turn was a major factor driving undocumented immigration:

• NAFTA also had a severe impact on agricultural employment, as U.S. subsidized corn and other products wiped out family farmers in Mexico. From 1991 to 2007, there were 4.9 million Mexican family farmers displaced; while seasonal labor in agro-export industries increased by about 3 million. This meant a net loss of 1.9 million jobs.
• The very poor performance of the Mexican economy contributed to a surge in emigration to the United States. From 1994 to 2000, the annual number of Mexicans emigrating to the United States soared by 79 percent. The number of Mexican-born residents living in the United States more than doubled from 4.5 million in 1990 to 9.4 million in 2000, and peaked at 12.6 million in 2009.

The second sort of debunking evidence comes from CEPR’s series of “scorecard” reports examining how developing economies were doing in comparison to the decades 1960-1980. The first such scorecard in 2001 reported “a very clear decline in progress as compared with the period 1960-1980.” (Two subsequent reports found improvements after 2000, as the neoliberal consensus was increasingly challenged. More on that below.) The reports looked at indicators including the growth of income per person; life expectancy; mortality among infants, children and adults; literacy; and education. For each indicator, countries were divided into five roughly equal groups, based on the countries’ level at the start of the period (1960 or 1980 in the first report). Thus individual countries were not compared across time periods; rather, groups of countries at similar stages of development were compared.

Growth rates fell for all groups. Most strikingly, “The poorest group went from a per capita GDP growth rate of 1.9 percent annually in 1960-80, to a decline of 0.5 percent per year (1980-2000).” In addition, “For the middle group (which includes mostly poor countries), there was a sharp decline from an annual per capita growth rate of 3.6 percent to just less than 1 percent. Over a 20-year period, this represents the difference between doubling income per person, versus increasing it by just 21 percent.”

The record with other indicators was generally negative as well. “Progress in life expectancy was also reduced for 4 out of the 5 groups,” while the growth rate of education spending—as a share of GDP—slowed for all groups, and educational results suffered as well. “By almost every measure of education, including literacy rates, the middle and poorer performing groups saw less rapid progress in the period of globalization than in the prior two decades.”

Changes during this period reflected widespread adoption of policies identified with globalization: the removal of tariff and non-tariff trade barriers, along with restrictions on international investment, and so-called “structural adjustment policies” imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on borrowing countries, including “contractionary monetary policies (higher interest rates and tighter credit), public spending cuts, privatization of public enterprises, increasing foreign reserve requirements and a long list of ‘micro-interventions’ ranging from user fees for primary education and health care to removing various government subsidies.”

CEPR did not claim the evidence proved that these policies were to blame. “But it does present a very strong prima facie case that some structural and policy changes implemented during the last two decades are at least partly responsible for these declines. And there is certainly no evidence in these data that the policies associated with globalization have improved outcomes for most low to middle-income countries.”

The next two scorecard reports appeared in 2005 and 2011. By the time of the third one, there was enough data to declare that “The past decade has shown a rebound in economic growth as well as progress on social indicators for many countries.” More precisely, “For all except the top quintile of countries—i.e., for the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries, there was a sharp rebound to the growth rates of the 1960-1980 period during 2000-2010.” Health and education indicators also recovered, though a bit more unevenly.

This resumption of progress is welcome news, of course. But it does not represent a magical explosion of progress beyond the rates of the past in the pre-globalization era; it is a merely a return to those rates [chart]. Hence, the underlying broad point remains: There is no simple story of free trade producing global prosperity and lifting the world’s poor. It’s a complicated story of global development, with a lot of moving parts, and the one thing that is quite clear is that simplistic free trade ideology—which dominated development in the 1980s and ’90s—is not the way to go.

But if free trade orthodoxy is not the answer for the world’s poor that Sanders’ critics take it to be, what is the alternative? It may be complicated, but surely some sort of guidance is possible. And, of course, it is.

As I’ve pointed out here recently [with more detail here], only a robust welfare state can effectively fight against systemic poverty, even in affluent countries. Which is all the more reason for developing countries to have them as well, as many millions of their citizens have long believed. This is the alternative that those attacking Sanders don’t want anyone to be thinking about. And it’s not just an idle thought. On several occasions, Sanders has cited the coups against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile as classic examples of mistaken U.S. foreign policy. Both these coups were mounted in part to destroy the threat of model welfare states being established in Latin America—something that was only a threat because people wanted it, and it could work. But to Sanders, that wasn’t a threat—it was an opportunity, an opportunity for whole countries to develop in a democratically self-determined manner, placing themselves on the same sort of path that countries like Denmark and Sweden have taken to virtually eliminate poverty.

Thus, there is a broad underlying consistency to Sanders’ vision—from expanding the welfare state to a collaborative foreign policy and fair trade policies—which combines to present a clear alternative to the tunnel-vision framework of those attacking him. Of course, you can say that Sanders is powerless to bring this alternative about. Even as president, he couldn’t do anything to promote welfare states in developing nations—or could he? He could certainly stop making it harder.

But above all, this is where Sanders’ call for a political revolution comes in. Because the alternative he points to is precisely the opposite of a top-down, heroic one-person creation. And the fact that it both appeals and applies across international borders is what makes it so much of a vision for the future, not—as some would have it—a relic of the past. It is, in a profound sense, precisely the same vision that drove the Arab Spring, along with similar movements in Spain, Greece and elsewhere. Once again, America has the opportunity to decide what side of world history it will be on. Will we cling to the lie that we have no alternative? Or will we commit ourselves to another historic equalizing advance?

Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area. 

Disenfranchising Large Segments of Americans

Disenfranchising Large Segments of Americans

by Walter Brasch / April 25th, 2016

Several hundred thousand American citizens won’t be voting in presidential primary elections—and it’s not their fault.

In Pennsylvania, for example, a registered voter who needed an absentee ballot had to submit the request at least one full week before the election, and then return the ballot no less than four days before the election.

But, what if circumstances changed? What if that person became injured or had to leave the state after April 19, but before the election, Tuesday? If it was April 20, you could not receive an absentee ballot. You could still vote in person, but if you couldn’t get to the polls, you would be disenfranchised. There’s nothing you could do. In one week, you lost the right to vote because bureaucratic rules blocked you from receiving a ballot—even if you could get that ballot to your county registrar of voters by the end of the day of the election.

Let’s say you were injured a day after the deadline to request a ballot, and want to vote in person on Election Day. If you’re now temporarily in a wheelchair, can’t drive, walk, or get into a regular car, you’ll have to use a medical transport. That’s a minimum of $150 round trip from your home to the polls.

Politicians and their political parties say they want all American citizens to register and vote. There are voter registration campaigns at colleges, in bars, at fire halls, and street fairs. But, the politicians really don’t care about your vote.

In Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe issued an executive order to allow felons who completed their sentences to be again given the right to vote. This affects more than 200,000 persons. But, the Republicans are crying “foul.” They say that felons might vote for Democrats, and on that basis alone they want to keep felons from voting rights. Of course, the Republican establishment has no basis for its assumption—especially since there are a lot of Republican politicians who have been convicted of felonies.

Currently, only two states—Maine and Vermont—allow incarcerated prisoners the right to vote by absentee ballot. Twenty-four states allow felons the right to vote after they complete their incarceration and end of parole. Fourteen states allow felons on parole, but who completed their incarceration, to vote. In 10 states, anyone convicted of a felony permanently loses all right to vote, even if it’s decades after completing their sentences, even if they are now model citizens.

Giving the vote to Hispanics also annoys the Republican right wing. They believe people with dark skin and black hair must be illegal aliens and, thus, shouldn’t vote. Even those with legal status who are serving in the U.S. military should be banned from citizenship and voting, say the extreme right wing. Like the Republicans in Virginia, the Republicans in the Southwest vigorously object to citizenship and voting rights for anyone who might vote for those who aren’t Republicans.

It’s the same Republicans who have gone to great lengths to require all forms of identification in order to register and vote. They claim it’s to prevent voter fraud. But, the number of cases of voter fraud in the past two election cycles is about the same as the chance of being hit by a torpedo while rowing in the lake in New York’s Central Park.

It has become obvious in the past few years that voting is no longer a constitutional right—but a political football.

Walter Brasch, during a 40-year work career in mass communications, has been a member of several unions, in both the private and public sectors. He is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the author of 16 books, including With Just Cause: Unionization of the American Journalist, Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution, and his latest Fracking Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at: walterbrasch@gmail.com. Read other articles by Walter, or visit Walter's website.

This article was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2016 at 2:38pm and is filed underDemocrats, Elections, Right Wing Jerks.

Electoral Politics and the Illusion of Control

Electoral Politics and the Illusion of Control

by William Hawes / April 25th, 2016

We have all been told a lie. The lie that says democracy can be maintained only through voting, through purely representative, parliamentarian means. When the founding fathers set up the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were wary of any truly popular, working and middle class control of the United States. Our government was to be run as a republic, designed by elites, for the elites. Our three branches of government were not simply invented for checks and balances: another reason was to stymie any massively popular mandates that would go against the interests of the oligarchy.

Today, the checks and balances used ostensibly to prevent tyranny are being used against us: even though a high majority (65%) is against government surveillance which violates privacy, and 78% want Citizens United overturned, we are stuck with a broken system and statesmen bought off by corporations. Even though 80% of eligible citizens didn’t vote in the 2014 elections, this year our out-of-touch pundits and mass media puppets prattle on unceasingly about our democracy, still misguidedly believing these candidates represent the will of the people.

Just sixteen years ago, our very own electoral system, in the form of a gilded cage, shut down the popular will of the people, as Al Gore won about 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush, yet still lost. Although the decision was made over 200 years ago, we have decided that the antiquated Electoral College system should still be used today.

More broadly, our never-ending election cycle serves as a palliative for ordinary Americans, but does nothing to cure the underlying disease and rot within our political system. Progressive liberals can take pleasure in Sanders’ statements supporting a raise in the minimum wage, debt relief for students, fighting income inequality, etc. Yet Sanders has no broad coalition in Congress to advance his agenda and to fight his “revolution”. Isolationist, non-interventionist conservatives can take pride in Trump’s support of Russia’s fight against ISIS in Syria, and his token rhetoric towards re-working unfair free trade agreements and bringing back jobs. Yet Trump’s pandering towards racists and xenophobes will only accelerate the descent towards fascism that the US has been slipping into for decades.

The second lie we’ve been told, or assumed implicitly, is that we are in control of our national destiny. Through the vote, we can supposedly make a clean slate every four years, to make up for the misdeeds of our past political leaders. The truth is much murkier. Our national security state and intelligence services have been built up to Leviathan levels, and presidential candidates are instantly discredited and marginalized for suggesting even small decreases in military spending. Corporate lobbyists and the conglomerate multinationals control the political landscape, determining the limits of discourse and shutting down anyone who exceeds the boundaries. Absurdly, third party candidates, some of the only ones with fresh ideas to invigorate our democracy, are demonized. Mainstream media coverage reinforces these imaginary limits of discussion, and Independents, Greens, Socialists, and Libertarians are relegated to the sidelines.

As the neoliberal order reinforces and deepens material poverty and intellectual ignorance, public discourse narrows without totalitarian overt manipulation. This makes issues seem as if they are progressing naturally, when public debate and consent is in actuality homogenized and conformist. This is analogous to the concept known to scientists as “shifting baselines”: here it applies to a public that accepts deeper cuts to social services, increases in privatizations, and increased militarization and policing of the public sphere, because the momentum seems inexorable and immutable. The establishment uses rhetorical threats and excuses to further corporate agendas and destroy civil society, all in the name of maintaining “economic growth” and upholding “law and order”.

The truth is that only by staring into the abyss can we collectively begin to dig ourselves out of our self-dug graves. The US has been in an unofficial recession since 2008. Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with minimal society safety nets, leading to insecurity, uncertainty and cynicism towards the future, and crippling anxiety. Politicians routinely show they do not care about the working class and the poor when they speak to the “middle class”, whatever that means anymore. Our leaders are handpicked by Wall Street billionaires, and/or defense and fossil fuel industrialists. Abroad, covert war is ongoing in a dozen or more countries in Asia and North Africa.

With so many minds confined to the hypnotic and myopic gaze focused on high technology, mass media, and our official “leaders”, 21st century man falls further into enslavement every day. As Fromm would say, we Escape from Freedom into self-indulgence and apathy, leaving hard decisions to technocrats and oligarchs. Control over our food, medicine, intellectual property, and basic social and environmental rights are consolidated into a handful of multinational corporations who inundate us with false needs through advertising and propaganda. Computer algorithms tell us what to buy, and social media manipulates our emotions, fulfilling the preaching of techno-dystopian prophets who warn of non-human intelligence guiding humanity towards dark futures.

Revolutionary fervor lurks under the surface, yet whether a popular progressive movement can blossom remains to be seen. Conversely, a missed revolution could easily result in an authoritarian and fascist takeover by the reactionary far-right. One thing we know for certain is that continuing under this two-party charade will only lead us to our doom.

Average citizens have never had any control of the republic since its founding. A complete constitutional overhaul is needed, and forms of direct, consensus, and deliberative democracy must be woven into a hybrid system. Elections should be funded by the public, with no corporate money allowed, shorter election cycles, and no discrimination towards third parties, unlike the current Commission on Presidential Debates. State governments should gain power, and federal programs reigned in and redefined towards streamlined regulation and oversight. Tax subsidies should be stripped from the fossil fuel industries entirely and redirected towards the best scientists and engineers in the field of renewable energy.

What is desperately needed is a shift in worldview to promote government that sees its job as not simply to tax and legislate, but to also support healthy life-world systems. Also, promoting humble and dedicated leaders who are stewards of community and the Earth, who do not insist on blatant exploitation of distant nations and pillaging resources, would go a long way. This cannot be done within the confines of the Democratic and Republican parties, who thrive on domination, coercion, control, and manipulation of public interests.

To break the cycle, we must collectively embrace our frailties and limitations. The deadly, patriarchal energy technologies such as the petrochemical industries and nuclear energy must be shut down. We must learn from the man-made tragedies of Bhopal, Katrina, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and dismantle dangerous plants and factories, and begin to move humanity away from areas susceptible to natural disasters and coastal flooding. The US, Russia, and the nuclear nations must formally apologize for the atmospheric nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties which will kill millions from cancer, and ban nuclear weapons for good.

Learning to relinquish control and learning to keep one’s ego in check are two of the ultimate tests our leaders must accept. As the Tao Te Ching says:

Therefore the sages:
Manage the work of detached actions
Conduct the teaching of no words
They work with myriad things but do not control
They create but do not possess
They act but do not presume
They succeed but do not dwell on success
It is because they do not dwell on success
That it never goes away.¹

1. Tao Te Ching: Annotated and Explained. Derek Lin. SkyLight Paths. 2006.  Translation by Derek Lin. []

William Hawesis a writer specializing in politics and the environment. You can find his e-book of collected essays here. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, and Counterpunch. You can email him at wilhawes@gmail.com Read other articles by William.

This article was posted on Monday, April 25th, 2016 at 6:54pm and is filed underCivil Liberties, Consumer Advocacy, Corporate Globalization, Culture,Democrats, Economy/Economics, Elections, Energy, Environment,Espionage/"Intelligence", Legal/Constitutional, Militarism, Neoliberalism,Nuclear Energy, Propaganda, Right Wing Jerks, Social media.

Why Bernie Must Run as a Third Party Candidate

OPINION

 
 

APRIL 22, 2016

WITH RIGGED PRIMARY, BERNIE SANDERS MUST RUN AS THIRD PARTY CANDIDATE

DIANA PRICE

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS ENTIRELY THE OPINION OF DIANA PRICE AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE INQUISITR.

As the Democratic primary season started, even early Bernie Sanders supporters were ready to fall in line behind whoever won, even if it was Hillary Clinton. Sanders himself has said many times he would support whoever wins the nomination and not run as a third party candidate, but a lot has happened since those first debates and primaries. Now, “Bernie or bust” supporters have gone from a small minority, to a growing tidal wave of angry voters as allegations of election fraud and voter disenfranchisement stack up. Or, to put it in more blunt terms, cheating.

As horrible as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are as potential presidents, neither of them are engaging in voter disenfranchisement and fraud to steal the nomination. The DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are convinced that given the GOP candidates, we have no other choice but to get on board and support Hillary Clinton, no matter how dishonest and corrupt their primary and the candidate.

They are wrong; dead wrong.

First and foremost, if we support Hillary Clinton after the blatant cheating and trampling of our democracy, we will send a message to the Democratic party that they are free to rig an election for whatever candidates they want, which are candidates that do not represent the working class, candidates who are indebted to big banks, fossil fuel companies, prisons for profit, and even the NRA. Candidates like Hillary Clinton.

Sanders supporters understand perfectly well the damage that can be done by a Trump or Cruz over the course of four years, but what is the cost of giving up our very democracy?

By that standard alone, as sickening as it is to Bernie Sanders supporters, they simply cannot vote for Hillary Clinton in good conscience. There comes a time when you have to stand up for principle, and this is that time, no matter how painful it is. Along those lines, since Bernie Sanders got into the Democratic primary race, he maintains that that no matter who wins the primary, he will not run as a third-party candidate because it could help hand a victory to the Republican party. Four months ago I would have agreed, but no more.

Here’s the thing: that principle applies in this situation only when Hillary Clinton wins the nomination fair and square. Or even something remotely resembling fair and square. But as the Clintons become more and more desperate, the cheating and disenfranchisement has become more and more blatant, and it can’t be brushed off anymore as coincidence or crazy conspiracy theories.

It started out with the DNC database leak caused by the management company with ties to Clinton and DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, even though the Sanders campaign had previously warned of security problems. Of course, the Sanders campaign person who was fired should not have downloaded the data, but it smacks of a set up that allowed Wasserman Schultz to try to shut down the campaign and close them out of database access.

After a huge surge of protests and a lawsuit filed by the Sanders campaign, the DNC relented and restored their access to crucial campaign data, and things settled down. If it stopped there, it would’ve been easy to say that maybe the data breach wasn’t a set-up but simply incompetence, to be blunt.

Sanders’ supporters could have maybe overlooked the fact that corporate media outlets who are huge Clinton campaign contributors all but refused to give him any coverage, and the original limited debate schedule meant to draw as few viewers as possible. Irritating, but most Sanders’ supporters could overlook that.

But then things started getting really ugly, with Bill Clinton entering polling sites in Massachusetts and using his security detail to keep polling sites in Sanders-friendly districts closed for several hours. There was no legal action taken against the former president under the guise that as long as he wasn’t directly campaigning for his wife by saying her name, he didn’t violate election rules.

Is there anyone that doesn’t know who Bill Clinton supports? He doesn’t have to say “Please vote for Hillary” for people to know who he’s campaigning for. It was clearly a violation of election rules that was allowed to slide, and the Clintons have continued walking the line in subsequent primaries on keeping the proper distance from polling places.

Many Sanders’ supporters can overlook that, as well. But the Clintons and the DNC didn’t stop there.

In Florida, there were rumors of people not being able to vote with lost registrations, but as Florida was such a landslide anyway it probably didn’t make too much of a difference. But then there were videos showing that Clinton’s campaign representatives in Iowa did everything in their power to manipulate the caucus convention tallies in her favor, calling for endless recounts until they got a number they liked and many people gave up or had to leave.

This is about the time that the “Bernie or bust” movement really started taking hold, and even those, like myself, who did not want to vote for Trump or Cruz started grappling with the very real problem on principle with supporting Clinton if she “wins” the nomination.

And then there was Arizona, the real turning point. This is when the full meltdown began, with reduction of literally hundreds of polling places forcing people to wait in line five to six hours or more. Plus many voters were turned away because they were told that they were either no longer registered, or their party affiliation had been changed from Democrat to Independent or not affiliated at all. Even Arizona’s Secretary of State acknowledged there was voter suppression, yet nothing has been done. This is when Hillary Clinton and the DNC made it clear they would stop at nothing to wrap up this primary election, even on top of stacking the deck with party loyalists and Clinton supporters as superdelegates.

Now we have a lawsuit pending in New York because more than 100,000 Brooklyn voters were purged from registration altogether “by accident” where Sanders grew up and the strongest base of his New York supporters. They were purged by a woman who we now hear received $6.6 million selling a piece of property to the daughter of a Clinton superdelegate two years ago. Please note that it raised eyebrows, even at the time, because it was such an outrageous over-payment for the property in question. Now many see it in a somewhat more serious light.

With an extraordinary number of voters saying that their party affiliation was changed or registration purged altogether, there are also disturbing allegations of polling places not opening on time, and one in Brooklyn opening on time, but missing voting booths. Exit polls showed a close race in New York, but the final result wasn’t close at all.

And now, going back to Illinois, we have testimony about manually-counted voter data being changed to favor Clinton even though the count showed Sanders had won in a precinct. And these are just the voter suppression cases coming to light through small independent media. How many more are unreported? Is it any wonder that Sanders’ supporters are spitting mad and vowing they will never vote for Hillary Clinton?

So how do we choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, when one side means electing a disaster of a president who will get to nominate at least one Supreme Court justice from the looks of things, or choosing someone that the Democratic party crowns the nominee by voter suppression?

Bernie Sanders is a man of his word, and when he said that he would not run as a third party candidate and would support whoever got the nomination, he meant it. He said it because he wants to do what is best for this country, because his candidacy is not about his personal ambition for power and to be the Commander-in-Chief. Sanders cares about people and is a public servant, but that’s the very reason why Sanders needs to reconsider running as an Independent.

When Sanders said he would never run as a third party candidate, he said that in good faith that there would be a fair primary election. That hasn’t happened. And while there is still technically a path to victory in the Democratic primary, with more huge closed primaries coming up in states like California, it’s pretty much a given that there will be further problems and voter manipulation. Why should the DNC and the Clintons stop now when they are getting away with stealing the nomination? Basically, the DNC and Clinton are going to do whatever they have to do to get the delegates needed to win the nomination. But if it isn’t a fair fight, then Sanders is no longer bound to honor his word not to run as a third party candidate.

Sanders said he wanted to do what was best for this country, and what’s best for this country is for Bernie Sanders to run as a third party candidate.

This idea will bring out the DNC and party insiders screaming that that’s handing the Republican party the presidency, but that simply isn’t true. Trump is a weak candidate, and Cruz even weaker in a general election. With Bernie Sanders’ momentum growing, and with the lack of scandal or an FBI indictment looming against him, he will only grow stronger as November comes closer.

Bernie Sanders can beat Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in a general election. This is the only good choice left now for this country. With the Democratic party now irreparably broken and many vowing they will write in Sanders in protest – plus the thrashing Clinton will get at the hands of Trump and the GOP, if she isn’t indicted first — Clinton will not win the general election regardless of what Sanders does. There is only one option to save democracy and to save this country from the disaster of a GOP presidency.

Bernie Sanders must run as a third party candidate. You started a revolution, Bernie, and now we need you to see it through.