Same as the Old Boss? Don’t Get Berned Again

Bernie’s Bribes: Don’t Get Berned Again

by John V. Walsh / September 21st, 2015

By now we have heard chapter and verse, repeatedly so, on the failure of Bernie Sanders to take an antiwar position, much less a stance against U.S. Empire.    (Yes, Bernie, there is an Empire.) Paul Street is a leader in the genre with well-documented dissections of Sanders’s flaws on every front and David Swanson provides the latest addition.

The Pro-Empire Candidate.

We have heard Sanders’s defense of the Israeli atrocities in the bombing of Gaza, his call for Saudi Arabia to do even more killing and his concern about Putin for – well, being Putin and Russian.  Thus Bernie is joining a cheering section that could root us right into nuclear war and oblivion.  Here cited by Chris Hedges is a sample from aninterview with Bill O’Reilly:

The entire world has got to stand up to Putin. We’ve got to deal with sanctions, we’ve got to deal with freezing assets,” and “You’ve got to totally isolate them politically. You’ve got to totally isolate them economically… You freeze assets that the Russian government has all over the world… International corporations have huge investments in Russia, you could pull them out…

Confirmation comes in an NPR interview with David Green:

BS: …..The United States has got to work with our European allies and allies throughout the world to come up with an intelligent, rational approach to deal with Russia, to deal with ISIS and deal with other national security threats.

DG: Sounds like you would intervene less than this president has?

BS: No, I didn’t say that. You’ve got to look at each particular case, obviously.

And, obviously also, there is not a shred of anti-interventionist or anti-imperial philosophy displayed here.

To give Bernie credit, he did vote against the war on Iraq and he has supported the nuclear/sanctions deal between Iran and the U.S., Russia, China, UK, France and Germany. (Certainly the latter is a positive step toward peace in that it removes the Israeli excuse for an attack on Iran, but it remains unclear how Obama and company intend to use the deal.  Is it simply a way to free up resources from the Middle East for an assault on Russia and China? That is the most likely outcome, but we shall see.)  And certainly Sanders’s Iraq vote suggests he is not as reckless or bloodthirsty as Killary, but that is setting the bar somewhere beneath the belly of a viper.

Bernie’s Bribes

The fundamental problem with Sanders’s campaign is that it is based on bribery, and an especially immoral sort of bribery at that.  For Bernie promises more social benefits IF we, the beneficiaries, let him continue the Empire’s warfare – both economic and military.  That is a most unsavory sort of bribe.  Basically he gives us butter if we give him guns to kill innocents.

In fact,  Killary’s campaign is much the same thing, perhaps presented in a more noxious, arrogant fashion as only she can do, but nevertheless the same thing.  So it is not surprising that a few weeks back E.J. Dionne in his weekly cameo on NPR suggested that Bernie’s campaign could help Killary by keeping attention focused on domestic issues.  Unsaid is that such an approach keeps attention off the constant wars and interventions..  And most important, Bernie soaks up support and energy that progressives might otherwise bestow on a genuine anti-interventionist candidate.  In so doing he protects Killary.

Sanders’s stance is the essence of every imperial candidate.  On the Republican side, the goodies promised are tax cuts in return for the electorate’s backing of wars.  In fact, this is the tactic of every Empire.  The British provided unparalleled freedoms at home while they raped much of the globe.  Even in the Roman Empire a citizen had privileges, which non-citizens lacked.  For example, a Roman citizen convicted of a capital crime was not executed by the horrendous torture unto death of crucifixion – unless for treason, that is, a lapse in loyalty to the Empire.  Bernie is only the latest to promise the imperial citizenry more goodies if we are loyal to the Empire.   This does not mean that Bernie is worse than the other candidates – only that he is no different from them.  He is simply more of the same.

Bernie Will Be a Loser With His Present Strategy

But there is something even more troubling about Bernie.  As Obama showed in 2008, Killary’s Achilles heel is her blood curdling, deranged bellicosity.  So Obama paraded as a peace candidate. Unfortunately he was not.  And this would be a winning strategy for Bernie. There is a substantial peace base in the Democratic Party, and virtually every one of his supporters would welcome an anti-Empire position.  It would motivate them and also quiet those many antiwar progressive voices now opposed to him. It is most odd for a candidate to eschew a winning strategy.  The conclusion is that interventionism is Bernie’s heartfelt conviction.

Sanders is an advocate of what was once called in the socialist movement “social chauvinism” in contradistinction to “social democracy.”  Social chauvinism, where loyalty to Empire replaces loyalty to peace and the humanity of all nations, has been a plentiful commodity on the planet since World War I, at least, and Sanders appears to stand squarely in that barbarous tradition.  On domestic matters there is little difference in the rhetoric Killary and Sanders will deploy in the campaign; he is Killary’s doppelganger.  Thus Sanders is unable to distinguish himself sharply from Killary, and politics is all about making clear distinctions for the voters.  So with his present strategy, he will lose.

The Task for Sanders Supporters

To return to Paul Street’s analysis, on one matter he falls short.  He writes in answer to the ever wishy-washy David McReynolds:

I’m really not sure why … (McReynolds) puts the onus on peace and racial justice activists to initiate discussion with Sanders. Those activists are not purporting to run for the White House. Sanders is. If he’s serious about peace (not likely) and racial justice (probably), then it’s on him to reach out to movements.

But that is just the point.  If these activists are working to put Sanders in the White House and he is an interventionist, aka social chauvinist, then it is up to them to either withdraw their support or demand a change in Sanders in return for that support. That seems pretty obvious.  As Nader points out the time to make demands of a candidate is before you give them support, because after they are elected all leverage is lost.  Did these people not learn that when they scurried after Obama in 2008 on the basis of “trust” and “hope”?

So the question must be put.  Is it moral to support a candidate to get some more goodies in return for the sacrifice of ever more lives by the US military machine?  Or if this moral appeal does not move the Sanders supporters, then the prospect of a new World War with Russia and/or China should give them pause.  As a decades long worker for Single Payer, I am not willing to gain Single Payer as Bernie promises at the cost of more war, death to innocents in the developing world and perhaps annihilation of humanity.  The task for Bernie supporters is to demand and get an antiwar stance or drop their support.  Not only is this a winning strategy as opposed to the losing strategy Sanders is now pursuing; it is the ethical position.

So if you are “feeling the Bern,” especially if you supported Obama in 2008, watch out.  Don’t get Berned again.

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com. Read other articles by John V..

This article was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2015 at 4:51pm and is filed under China, Elections, Empire, Obama, Russia.

Republican Leadership? Face It, That's an Oxymoron!

Republican Leadership? Face It, That's an Oxymoron!

by William Boardman / September 19th, 2015

Polls suggest America might elect a joke as President

Making fun of the assortment of Republican candidates for President as some sort of clown show is easy enough to do, which is probably one reason so many people do it. But that sort of ridicule is so insubstantial, so irrelevant, that it ends up serving as a form of endorsement of the motley crew, as if, underneath it all, these are actually serious people. This implied endorsement is reinforced by the tepid questions they are asked in conjunction with media coverage of their mostly foolish answers to pointless questions, as if this charade were somehow a meaningful and sober way to choose a leader.

Actually, it’s all a big joke. The participants must know it’s a big joke, but it works for them, it protects them from answering hard questions with possibly dangerous, relevant answers, AND it lets them throw verbal cream pies in each others’ faces – what’s to hate? And the media know it’s all a big joke, which works for them, pandering to ugly prejudices, treating truth and lie as equals, and getting good ratings from pie-in-the-face lovers of almost all opinions.

None of this is a secret. It’s an open conspiracy. Any of the candidates or reporters involved in this campy superficiality could break it down in a moment with consistent focus on what matters rather than just what gets laughter or emotional outburst.Covering the Republican debate of September 16, the New York Times the next day winkingly gave the game away in its print-edition subhead:

“Talk of Ability to Lead Takes a Backseat to Sharp Attacks”  

Then the story’s lede said, confusingly and contradictorily, treating name-calling as if it were a policy statement: “Determined to prove their mettle, several Republican presidential candidates showed new aggressiveness in lacing into Donald J. Trump on Wednesday night, seeking to elevate themselves as leaders of substance….”

Say that again. “Lacing into” Trump is the equivalent of being a “leader of substance?” So says the Times, speaking as the organ of the permanent ruling class. So you’re on notice: it’s not only a joke, there’s not only nothing you can do about it, but you’re expected to accept this absurdist theatre as an affirmation that these people, no matter how silly or petty or nasty or vacant in style, still have the substance to serve honorably and effectively as President of the US.

They don’t. Seriously, they don’t. Is there anything in the full transcript that makes you think any of them does?

Republican policy: expand military, destroy Planned Parenthood? 

The reality of American military might is pretty simple, and has been for decades. The American military is the most powerful and most expensive military in the world. No one else is even close. China, at #2, spends about a third as much as the US spends on its military. The US is alone in the world in spending more than half its discretionary federal budget on its military. Currently that comes to $610 billion a year. That’s more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, United Kingdom, India, and Germany. (A different calculation puts US military spending at $711 billion a year, more than the military budgets of the next thirteen countries’ military budgets combined.)

Looked at another way, the US accounted for 39% of all the world’s military spending in 2012, while the combined military spending of Iran, Syria, and North Korea was less than 1% of the global total.

US military spending has more than doubled since 9/11. During the same period, US military has participated in the longest war in US history and several others (some ongoing), having won none of them and having little prospect of winning any soon. Judging by recent experience, the military option is not only too expensive, but almost entirely ineffective.

And yet Republicans (and many Democrats) want more and more military, and they want it for no articulable purpose, they want it because they want it, and it polls well. (There is also a longstanding, specious argument about military decay due to the decline of military spending as a percentage of GDP, and the like, none of which changes the reality that the military has been expensive and all but useless – unless one argues the likely truth that using the military option has cost more and caused more devastation than just doing nothing would have cost.)

Anyone here against more war? Nope. 

Never mind any of that. The eleven Republicans in the recent debate all spoke up in 60-second soundbite answers to a simpleminded question, saying that they were all for more military, and more military adventurism (though some were somewhat less aggressively adventurous than others). That’s Republican leadership, lockstep for more war, with some difference of opinion on how much more war. Taking the prize for maximum hawk among the lesser hawks was Carly Fiorina (whose looks got almost as much debate time as militarism):

Russia is a bad actor, but Vladimir Putin is someone we should not talk to, because the only way he will stop is to sense strength and resolve on the other side, and we have all of that within our control. We could rebuild the Sixth Fleet. I will. We haven’t. We could rebuild the missile defense program. We haven’t. I will. We could also, to Senator Rubio’s point, give the Egyptians what they’ve asked for, which is intelligence. We could give the Jordanians what they’ve asked for—bombs and materiel. We have not supplied it…. I will. We could arm the Kurds. They’ve been asking us for three years. All of this is within our control.

None of the ten men on the stage with Fiorina took serious issue with any of this. When the moderator asked about the recent Russian increase of its military presence in Syria, he framed it as “a threat to our national security” and he omitted Putin’s call for talks. No one corrected this deceptive spin, much less did anyone suggest that talking to your adversaries was at least as useful as talking to your friends. No one asked how Fiorina planned to pay for this military expansion, nor even how many billions she thought it would cost. And no one pointed out that arming the Kurds, whose diaspora reaches into Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, looked like a really good way to get a much bigger war going in the region, which is maybe her point.

Rand Paul came the closest to sort of opposing more militarism, pointing out that he would talk to Russia and China and Iran. He reminded people that he had opposed the Iraq War and American involvement in Syria’s civil war. Unlike others, Paul said: “I don’t think we need to be reckless.”

America’s war on drugs creates more Republican ambivalence

Rand Paul expressed outright opposition to the war on drugs, as he has for some time, pointing out that the war on drugs is effectively a war on poor people and a war on people of color. He argued that the federal government should have no role in drug law enforcement, that under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution that role properly belongs to the states, leaving them free to experiment as Colorado is doing (under the shadow of federal intervention). Paul also nailed Jeb Bush, who admits to smoking marijuana, as one of those privileged white kids who never had to worry about going to jail (any more than his drug-using brother George did).

Fiorina supported Paul on the drug war. Last May, in a conference call with reporters promoting her book, she said: “Drug addiction shouldn’t be criminalized.” But she said saying that smoking marijuana was like drinking a beer was a bad message, and that marijuana now was not the same as it was 40 years ago, which drew strong laughter from the California audience. Fiorina referred to the story of her step-daughter in her book, where she spoke of not seeing the signs of the step-daughter’s addiction until it killed her at age 34. Fiorina did not make any connection to her step-daughter’s going into rehab three times and working in a pharmaceutical sales job. Nor did she make any connection between her step-daughter’s situation and her never being arrested or jailed.

When it came to the war on Planned Parenthood, the other half of the Republicans’ two-point consensus, Fiorina was on the front line, firing wildly. She was not alone, Planned Parenthood was named 23 times in all by her and others. She linked attacking Planned Parenthood to attacking Iran, the first as a defense of national character, the second as a defense of national security. Then she cited a controversial, spurious videotape and demagogued it shamelessly, reaping sustained applause:

As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape – I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.

No one at the debate pointed out that the videotape in question was attached to a faked tape indicting Planned Parenthood falsely. No one pointed out that no one knows where the video with the fetus came from or what it actually shows or who is speaking on it. And no one pointed out that Planned Parenthood has adamantly denied the accusations of harvesting. So Fiorina was demonstrating her presidential ability to attack with as much solid evidence as George Bush used to go to war on Iraq.

Republican candidates: is there any there there? 

Given the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump being a showman without qualification to be President, even though he’s the leading candidate in the polls by far, one might have expected at least one of the other Republicans to try a more substantial tactic, like appearing to be the grown-up in the room. Maybe some did try, but none succeeded, since being the grown-up requires the willingness to confront reality honestly and that was rare in this debate.

Perhaps the most hilarious detachment from reality was when Jeb Bush said of his brother the former President: “He kept us safe.” Hello, Jeb? Your brother was in charge when 9/11 happened, your brother chose to take no action when briefed of the imminence of an attack on the US, your brother didn’t keep us safe before 9/11 (when the information needs was available but unconnected), and your brother has hardly made us more safe since 9/11. George Bush squandered thousands of innocent lives and trillions of tax dollars for the sake of strutting puffed up on an aircraft carrier. George Bush took a budget surplus and turned it into a series of devastating deficits that have ballooned the national debt to the point where a former chairman if the joint chiefs of staff called it “the most significant threat to our national security.”

He did not keep us safe, ever.

In a far less serious moment, Fiorina and Trump exchanged accusations that the other was an atrocious business person and a bad manager. No factual basis was introduced to measure the insults. The likelihood seems to be that they were both right.

The absence of any sensible, engaged discussion of what to do about climate change (not all the candidates are outright deniers) provoked some funny comments on the twitternet. One featured Marco Rubio’s comment, “America is not a planet.”

For all their faults, and their absence of strengths, none of the candidates was as baldly unwilling to treat the selection of the next President seriously as CNN. There is no excuse for CNN asking silly, irrelevant, insubstantial questions. There is no excuse for CNN not asking questions about the important priorities of our time. And in this day and age, there is no excuse for CNN not fact-checking in real time, and holding the candidates to account (they don’t all tell the truth all the time). Maybe media responsibility would make no difference, but we can’t know till it’s tried.

Meanwhile, early, unofficial, and unscientific returns after the debate show Trump farther in the lead than ever. The almost instant Drudge poll results put Trump at 53%, followed by Fiorina at 21%. Way behind them at 6% are Ted Cruz and Rubio, then Rand Paul and Ben Carson at 4%. At the bottom, with 1% or less, are Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Scott Walker, and Mike Huckabee.

Another unreliable real world indicator, the tweet count, also shows Trump with an overwhelming overall lead by one measure. An assessment of the debate in Forbes finds Fiorina and Ben Carson in a virtual twitter tie, with Trump a distant third and the rest much farther back. International Business Times also scored it for Fiorina, with John Kasich second.

Some of this is the result of self-fulfilling prophecy, as CNN managed to give Trump the frontrunner more time than anyone else. Surely there’s good reason and many methods for CNN to give the impression of fairness and neutrality by giving candidates close to equal time.

About an hour into the debate, Bernie Sanders tweeted: “War, war, war. When do we get to their other major priority: tax breaks for billionaires?” Hillary Clinton tweeted in Spanish about the right to speak any language in the US.

This debate didn’t get to tax breaks for billionaires, and there was no question about that issue, so people could be left with the impression that these Republicans might at least be willing to let the rich suffer in their present condition. And if the majority of Americans end up believing enough things that are not true, the Republicans will win the presidency in a walk.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This article was first published inReader Supported News. Read other articles by William.

This article was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2015 at 6:08pm and is filed under Iran, Militarism, Politics, Right Wing Jerks.

Salon


THURSDAY, SEP 17, 2015 06:00 PM EDT

Don’t believe the Carly Fiorina hype: Here’s every major problem with her performance in the GOP debate

After the 2nd GOP debate last night, Fiorina was instantly crowned the winner. But you should still be worried VIDEO

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

TOPICS: CARLY FIORINA, GOP DEBATE, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, ELECTIONS 2016, 2016 ELECTIONS, AOL_ON,NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

Republican presidential candidate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is seen at a luncheon hosted by the Derry Republican Town Committee, Tuesday, May 26, 2015, in Derry,NH (AP Photo/Jim Cole) (Credit: AP)

It was Carly Fiorina’s night last night. In the very crowded Republican clown car full of fatuous blowhards and screaming hawks, she stood out by being able to think on her feet quickly enough to use standard lines from her well honed, road tested stump speech to good effect as if they were spontaneous answers to the question. Compared to the others she seemed sharp and well-informed and the media dubbed her the big winner.

Fiorina has come a long way since the days of the “Demon Sheep.”

Last night, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked her about Trump’s rude comments insulting her looks in Rolling Stone. She smoothly used something Trump had said earlier to segue into a prepared line, that she thought “women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.” Then she stood still and stone-faced, staring forward while Trump stammered that he thought she had a “beautiful face” and was a beautiful woman. She never looked at him. It may have gotten the biggest applause of the night.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews seemed especially excited that she was going for Hillary Clinton’s throat in a way that others could not, but he is apparently unaware that this is one of the reasons she’s in the race in the first place. Recall this from an earlier piece I wrote about Fiorina:

A pro-Cruz super PAC controlled by millionaire Robert Mercer (who had written checks for 5 million to Cruz’s effort) sent $500,0000 to Carly Fiorina’s super PAC. How often does it happen that a PAC for one candidate helps one of its rivals in a primary campaign? But New York Times reporter Amy Chozick cleared up the mystery when she tweeted:

“Fiorina finance chairs told me supporters of other candidates have thrown them $$$ to have a woman in race attacking HRC.”

Going hard after Clinton is job number one, and unlike her tenure as CEO of HP (and contrary to her claims about that in the debate last night) she’s doing it well.

But that is not to say she isn’t making a legitimate run for the nomination. She is, after all, a hard core conservative. How often do you find a candidate who has the ability to demagogue on Iran and Planned Parenthood in the same sentence? That’s a skill usually limited to only the best hate talk radio hosts. But Fiorina did it last night to great acclaim from right wingers and the media alike. Without taking a breath, she rattled off this speech in less than a minute:

“On day one in the Oval office I will make two phone calls the first to my good friend Bibi Netanyahu to assure him we will stand with the state of Israel. The second to the Supreme leader to tell him that unless and until he opens every nuclear facility to real anytime inspections by our people not his,we the United States of America will make it as difficult as possible to move money around the global financial system. We can do that we don’t need anyone’s cooperation to do it. And every ally and every adversary in this world will know that the United States of America is back in the leadership business which is how we must stand with out allies. As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes, watch a fully formed fetus on the table, it’s heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation and if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill shame on us.”

Unfortunately, what she said about the tape is untrue. According to Sarah Kliff at Vox, who has watched the entire set of videos, there is no scene like this. (CNN Fact Check claimed the comment was “true but misleading” because the tape has an unrelated and out of context flash of a scene like this which was edited in after the fact by the videographers. That’s what would normally be called “false” or more precisely “a hoax”.) But it doesn’t matter. The folks in the audience loved it and judging by the Twitter commentary so did conservatives. After all, it may have been the most extreme rhetoric of the entire debate.

In fact, much of what Fiorina says is either untrue or incoherent, which her polished style of rapid-fire answers containing long lists of memorized specifics obscures. She is a master at what we used to call “dazzling them with BS.” She claims to have a well thought out plan for everything from dealing with the Ayatollah (only after conferring with her “good friend” Bibi Netanyahu) — by calling him up and demanding that he allows Americans to inspect his nuclear facilities anytime we choose or we’ll start “moving his money around the financial system” — to enlarging the sixth fleet and putting missile defense into Poland. The first bit of magical thinking is so common among the Republican candidates that it’s not worth commenting upon except to say that the presidency would be a part time job if it was that easy. As for her military “prescriptions,” let’s just say they are vacuous nonsense. Here’s what she said she would do about Russia

“What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message. By the way, the reason it is so critically important that every one of us know General Suleimani’s name is because Russia is in Syria right now, because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up Bashar al- Assad.”

That sounds very impressive, except, as Ezra Klein pointed out, the nuclear armed Sixth Fleet is gigantic already, the U.S. is already conducting military exercises in the Baltics and we already have 40,000 troops in Germany. Oh, and Vladimir Putin, General Suleimani and Bashar al-Assad will have been dead for decades, if not centuries, by the time a missile shield is installed in Poland.

Her comments on immigration were likewise factually challenged as was her tedious, mind-numbing list of alleged accomplishments as CEO of Hewlett Packard. (She’s been repeatedly fact checked on this and just keeps on saying it anyway.) She didn’t go into it last night, but in previous interviews her comments on climate change were wrong in every way.

And as an illustration of just how fundamentally dishonest she is, even her own personal story is exaggerated. She often says she started out as a secretary and rose to become the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It’s true that she once did clerical work, but it was in summers during college and for a brief time between dropping out of law school and starting business school. After she got her MBA she joined a management training program at AT& T where she climbed the ladder. It takes nothing away from her accomplishment, which is very impressive, to point out that the image she paints of a plucky gal from the typing pool raising herself up by her bootstraps isn’t exactly how it happened.

Fiorina has proven herself to be a shrewd and talented politician. She is very confident and well-prepared and we can expect to see her poll numbers rise after last night’s performance. But considering her incoherent policy prescriptions, nobody who cares about such things should feel sanguine that she would be any improvement over the other “outsider” candidates, Carson and Trump.

Fiorina is worth over $50 million and didn’t bother to pay the debts from her losing 2010 Senate campaign until she decided to run for president. (One of her former aides said “I’d rather go to Iraq than work for Carly Fiorina again.”)   So considering her very loose relationship with the truth, her failed record as a businesswoman which left thousands of people’s lives in ruins and her cavalier attitude about paying her debts, it’s awfully ironic that the lines she delivers with the most righteous passion are harsh criticisms of Hillary Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness. That’s something else she has in common with Trump — chutzpah.

ELECTION 2016

11 Distortions, Misrepresentations and Outright Lies in the GOP Debate

The three-hour horror show featured whopper after whopper.

By Zaid Jilani / AlterNet

September 17, 2015

Photo Credit: via YouTube

Last night, millions of Americans watched two rounds of Republican Party presidential debates – first a debate among candidates who have failed to achieve more than one percent in national polls, and second a debate among relative frontrunners.

Both debates offered a window into an entirely different world, completely unrelated to the world we actually live in. Candidates made statement after statement that represented distortion, mistruths, and outright lies. Here are 11 whoppers:

1. Insisting That Hispanics Used to Love Republicans: Lindsey Graham scolded the other three candidates in his debate, telling them that Hispanics voted for “us” under previous Republican president George W. Bush. Although it's true that frontrunner Donald Trump has depleted much of what was left of Hispanic support for the GOP, even under Bush, that wasn't a vote they won. At the high point in 2004, Bush won 44 percent of that vote, and Romney won only 27 percent.

2. Ridiculously Saying That Iran Threatens The Whole Western World: Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee wanted the audience to know that Iran threatens the “essence of Western civilization.” Except Iran's defense budget is around $10 billion, a fractionof our own $600 plus billion defense budget. How a country with no weapons of mass destruction and a tiny defense budget can be threatening the United States, let alone our NATO allies, was not explained by Huckabee. Probably because it makes no sense.

3. Implying the U.S. Government Funds Abortion: Over and over, the assertion was made that the United States federal government finances abortions, such as by giving subsidies to Planned Parenthood. While you can make a convoluted argument that money is indirectly spread around, the fact is the the federal government has followed a blanket ban on such funding except in cases of rape, incest, or when it threatens the health of the mother.

4. Claiming Obama Is Trying to Circumvent the Process to Let In Syrian Refugees: Bobby Jindal said that Obama was trying to “short-circuit the vetting process” to let in Syrian refugees, a dangerous dog whistle to imply that the president was going to let in terrorists. As CNN's own fact-check pointed out, the 10,000 refugees – truly a paltry amount – are slated to come in through the exact same process as any other refugees.

5. Saying We Are Almost the Only Ones With Birthright Citizenship:Trump said almost no one else – including Mexico – has birthright citizenship, and moderator Jake Tapper agreed with him. That's true, if you think the entire rest of the world consists of Europe. Almost everywhere in the Americas has birthright citizenship and that includes Mexico.

6. Rubio Telling a Fantastic But False Story About His Grandfather:Senator Rubio gave an emotional address about his grandfather supposedly fleeing Castro to come to the United States. There's just a problem: the story doesn't stand up to scrutiny. As has been reported in the past, his family came to the United States long before Castro even came to power.

7. Stating That North Korea Can Hit Us With a Nuclear Weapon: Rubio also claimed that North Korea could hit us with a nuclear weapon. Unless they plan to send a team on a boat carrying one, it's not going to happen – there isvery little evidence that they have a functional intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States.

8. Saying, With A Straight Face, That Bush Kept Us Safe: “My brother kept us safe,” said Jeb Bush. This is a pretty ironic thing to say five days after the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which his brother obviously did not keep us safe from.

9. Going Back to the Tired “Sanctuary” Arguments About Terrorists:Rubio made the argument that we needed to stay in Iraq, invade Afghanistan, and have our military all over the world to prevent terrorists from having “sanctuary” – but as the Boston Bombing, Charleston, and many other attacks prove, terrorists don't need to have a physical space to plot attacks, and a giant military presence in a foreign country doesn't necessarily prevent them so much as give them recruits.

10. Telling People Marijuana Is More Harmful Than Beer: Carly Fiorina, disupting Rand Paul's more libertarian view on drugs, said that smoking marijuana isn't like having a beer. Actually marijuana is much safer than alcohol – marijuana kills next to no one while the Centers for Disease Controlis linked to “one in 10 deaths among working-age adults can be attributed to excessive alcohol use.”

11. Lying About Vaccines: Trump boosted theories that vaccinations are linked to autism; despite Ben Carson's intervention that this wasn't true, Rand Paul still went on to tout the “voluntary” nature of smallpox vaccinations – actually they were not voluntary, they were mandated and financed by a global government effort through the World Health Organization.

The alternate universe the GOP candidates live in was on full display last night at the library of a Republican president Ronald Reagan who, if he was alive today, would be considered to be on the far left of his party.

Zaid Jilani is an AlterNet staff writer. Follow @zaidjilani on Twitter.

The Imprudent Serpents: The Fable of Donald and Ronald

The Imprudent Serpent

A Short Fable on the Amnesic Hypocrisy of the Republican Party

by Mateo Pimentel / September 7th, 2015

Once upon a time, there was a boorish rattlesnake named Donald. He was notorious for flashing his fangs at the other desert creatures. But some were slightly demented; in fact, they were charmed by the toxicity of Donald’s hypodermic fangs. Others slowly gravitated toward Donald with the passage of time. The lore surrounding his dangerous potential drew them ever near—even to the point of mental constriction, or paralysis.

Donald hadn’t any compunction. He was highly inegalitarian by nature, and he frequently hissed about the “vermin” he viewed as lesser amongst the desert fauna. Donald was especially mercurial about lashing out at the critters he considered powerless. And the frequency of his obnoxious rattling only grew as droves of critters congregated to witness the spectacle he had so meteorically become.

His slithery narcissism abounded as his worshippers lent credence to his inborn, anti-vermin animosity. However, like most rattlesnakes, Donald wasn’t particularly intelligent. And much like the species to which he belonged, Donald said whatever came to mind, punctuating his sibilance with a specious air of authority. His forked tongue was awfully mesmerizing.

In time, Donald learned what his audience liked to hear; he was at least clever enough to use this information to manipulate the other animals. For the most part, these were creatures of his ilk: irascible scorpions; poisonous desert toads; dreadful gila monsters; and so on. But one night – rattlesnakes prefer to scheme in the dark – when Donald was in the middle of his usual anti-vermin tirade, a toxic toad was heard squeaking no more than a decibel above all the hissing.

“What can we do to stop them?” frenzied the squat little toad.

Donald was dumbfounded. These creatures wanted more than simply to hear him hiss? They wanted him to act? Yes, he thought. They wanted him to dictate! But what could he do? He couldn’t possible kill and eat all the vermin by himself, though the thought had crossed his pea-sized brain once or twice before…

Then, off in the distance, an industrious little desert mouse struggled to surmount a pile of rocks at the mouth of the arroyo not far from where Donald lay coiled and brooding.

“I know!” exclaimed Donald viperously, “Let’s build a wall so the vermin can’t bother us anymore!”

The crowd could only cheer, each one hurrahing in its own animalistic way.

So, they struggled to build a wall in accordance with Donald’s wisdom. Admittedly, it was quite a feat. But although they celebrated their attempt to exclude what they thought were undesirable creatures, it would end up costing them dearly.

Donald’s followers had failed to realize just how valuable some of the walled-off creatures had been. The so-called vermin, of course, performed many functions that were vital to the general well-being of the local habitat. They did things other creatures were no good at, and they even sustained some of the larger, more consumptive predators. They did all this despite the persecution that had assailed them well before Donald shed his skin about it.

But neither Donald nor his emotionally charged disciples understood the importance, nay, the necessity, of diversity in biological capital. Ultimately, Donald and his followers were too busy feeding on their pedestrian emotions and uneducated fears to realize that they were doing nothing more than positioning themselves to starve. And when some of the formerly uninterested creatures – like the hawks, jackrabbits and coyotes – happened upon the little walled-off arroyo, they didn’t feel much remorse for Donald or his filigree.

Only one coyote howled about it. He reminded some of the animals surrounding the unfortunate scene that there was once an appealing leader much like Donald, but who called himself Ronald. Coyote recounted how Ronald was a bit of a contentious figure, just as many old forest elephants are wont to be. How interesting, mused coyote, that one bald little snake could vex so many toxic critters and command them with the silly prospect of walling-off an arroyo while, on the other hand, a lumbering and clumsy elephant had garnered so much acclaim for wanting to tear a wall in the forest down.

Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border, writing for many alternative political newsletters and Web sites. He can be reached at:mateo.pimentel@gmail.com. Read other articles by Mateo.

This article was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2015 at 11:56pm and is filed under Satire.

ELECTION 2016

The Racial Justice Failures That Hillary Clinton Can't Ignore

Clinton's record is far from stellar.

By Guy Saperstein, Gaius Publius / AlterNet

August 31, 2015

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally for Maryland gubernatorial candidate Anthony Gregory Brown and running mate for Lt. Governor Ken Ulman on October 30, 2014 in College Park, Maryland

While the Black Lives Matter movement has focused attention on Bernie Sanders for his perceived racial justice deficiencies, no one seems to be giving much scrutiny to the civil rights record of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the impact their political work has had on the black community.

History has not been kind to the Clintons' record and it is possible that Bill Clinton while president, with no public objections and often with enthusiastic support from Hillary, did more damage to the black community than any modern American president.

Let's take a look at the Clintons' record, in particular the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, the 1994 Violent Crime Act, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the support and passage of NAFTA and NAFTA-style trade agreements.

1996 Welfare Reform Act: Any consideration of Bill Clinton's impact on the black community must include the 1996 Welfare Reform Act that had been put forward by Republicans Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole as a cornerstone of the Republican Contract for America and signed into law by Clinton, fulfilling his 1992 campaign pledge to "end welfare as we know it."  

The bill ended the federal guarantee of cash assistance to the poor, limited welfare payments and turned welfare programs over to the states. Civil rights and women's groups strongly opposed this legislation, which has proved to be a disaster for poor people. Three of Clinton's assistant secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services resigned to protest the law. According to one of them, Peter Edelman, the 1996 welfare reform law destroyed the safety net for poor people, increased poverty, lowered income for single mothers, put people into homeless shelters and left states free to eliminate welfare entirely.

Clinton's welfare reform did "not offer benefits sufficient to lift recipients out of poverty, and despite a strong economy, the majority of families who have moved off the [welfare] rolls have remained in poverty," according to the bookSuccess Stories, by Joe Soss. Jason DeParle of the New York Times, after interviews with single mothers, said that they have been left without means to survive, and have turned to desperate and sometimes illegal ways to survive, including shoplifting, selling blood, scavenging trash bins, moving in with friends, and returning to violent domestic partners.

Feminist critics such as Barbara Ehrenreich said Clinton's welfare reform was motivated by racism and misogyny, using stereotypes of "endlessly fecund" African-American welfare recipients.

On the face of it, devolving welfare programs to the states was racially neutral, but it didn't work out that way. Joe Soss, who co-wrote the book, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, explains how race became the defining characteristic of Clinton's welfare reform:

[P]eople had become so focused on racial issues that race really drove the patterning....[A]ll of the states with more African-Americans on the welfare rolls chose tougher rules.  And when you add those different rules up, what we found was that even though the Civil Act prevents the government from creating different programs for black and white recipients, when states choose according to this pattern, it ends up that large numbers of African Americans get concentrated in the states with the toughest rules, and large numbers of white recipients get concentrated in the states with the more lenient rules.

So state freedom to make these different choices became the mechanism for recreating a racially biased system across the states, where the toughness of the rules you confronted really on your racial characteristics.

Despite the human costs of welfare reform, Bill Clinton is still bragging about knocking people off welfare and Hillary has neither repudiated nor disavowed the 1996 Clinton welfare legislation, which has been a catastrophe for the black community. Hillary Clinton not only supported the 1996 legislation, but as recently as her 2008 presidential campaign, publicly supported it, expressing no regret about how it turned out and telling the New York Times she thought the act was necessary and enormously successful.

1994 Violent Crime Control Act: Another Bill Clinton legacy that has had catastrophic impacts on the black community is the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, which, among other things, expanded the death penalty, provided funds to hire 100,000 more police, imposed tougher prison sentences, eliminated funds for inmate education and provided money to build extra prisons. Clinton, who had a history of pandering to racist, anti-crime sentiments (witness his 1992 flight back to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of a mentally retarded African-American murderer which helped his poll numbers in the New Hampshire primary), pandered to tough-on-crime voters and described the Violent Crime Control Act in stark terms: "Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools," he said. "Every day we read about somebody else who has literally gotten away with murder."

Bill Clinton wasn't the only one using tough language to sell this tough crime bill; Hillary, in selling this punitive bill to the public, added her own red-meat rhetoric, calling kids in gangs "super-predators" without conscience or empathy:

"[W]e also have to have an organized effort against gangs, just as in the previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to drug cartels. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called 'super-predators.' No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about how they got that way but first we have to bring them to heel...."

As a result of this legislation, 28 states and the District of Columbia followed the federal money and enacted stricter sentencing laws and built more prisons. Jeremy Travis, a former member of the Clinton Justice Department and now president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says there was a basic problem with the Clinton crime legislation: There is only a small relationship between high levels of imprisonment and lower crime rates. "We know with the fullness of time that we made some terrible mistakes," Travis has said. "And those mistakes were to ramp up the use of prison. And that big mistake is the one that we now, 20 years later, come to grips with. We have to look in the mirror and say, 'look what we have done.'"

What we have done is incarcerate a lot of minorities. There are more than 2.3 million people in U.S. state and federal prisons and nearly one million are black men. "If you're a black baby born today, you have a 1 in 3 chance of spending some time in prison or jail," says Nick Turner of the Vera Institute. "If you're Latino, it's a 1 in 6 chance. And if you're white, it's 1 in 17....[C]oming to terms with these disparities and reversing them...is a matter of fairness and justice."  

When we speak about justice and fairness, we need to consider not just the prisoners, but the families who are devastated by the imprisonment of a parent and the stigma and loss of job opportunities that endure forever. And when people are in prison, they are not earning pensions or building Social Security accounts, so their futures are permanently diminished.

Recently, the New York Times published an article about the disappearance of 1.5 million black men from daily American life. The reasons were premature death, foreign military deployments and prison.

The 1994 Clinton Crime bill has been a huge failure, at great cost to the black community, as well as many state budgets, and there has been a big public policy debate shift away from excessive incarceration policies. Even the arch-conservative Koch brothers and some Senate Republicans like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio are promoting a re-evaluation of incarceration policies.

To Bill and Hillary's credit, they have acknowledged some of the damage their policies caused. In her meeting with three members of the Black Lives Matter movement, Hillary Clinton tried to explain her policy reversals as the result of different times demanding different policies. Yet the over-reliance on incarceration, particularly for non-violent crimes, made no sense in 1994, and it is equally bad policy today.

The 1994 Act spawned the "era of mass incarceration" that Hillary now questions. The Act supported "truth in sentencing" laws that dramatically increased the amount of time criminals served and over the course of the Clinton presidency, the number of Americans in prison rose an astounding 60 percent. This might have been justified if it led to large reductions of crime, but very little crime reduction is caused by mass incarceration. The Brennan Center for Justice, after spending two years studying 14 different causes of the reduction of crime, concluded that "incarceration was responsible for approximately five percent of the drop in crime in the 1990s" and an even lower percentage since then.

Hillary deserves credit for rethinking the damage the Clinton crime bill caused, but how much credit should that be, since she is now moving on this issue with a herd that includes right-wing Republicans and arch-conservatives like the Koch brothers? Her change of position does not help the millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of African Americans, whose lives were devastated by the hysteria for mass incarceration.

Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act: After the 1920-'21 Depression, the United States began the decade known as the Roaring Twenties, characterized by new forms of consumer credit and bank expansion. Banks sold securities side-by-side with traditional bank services like loans and deposits. The stock market boomed and reached bubble territory and along with the bubble came market manipulation in which banks and other financial entities would hype the value of stocks, then dump them on less-informed buyers right before the stocks collapsed. Banks offered holding company stocks, many of which were little more than heavily leveraged pyramid schemes backed by dubious assets as prudent investments.

In October 1929, the bubble burst, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president and in 1933, a Democratic Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act in response to bank abuses. Because of Glass-Steagall, banks were prohibited from engaging in engaging in banking and investing activities simultaneously. Banks could take deposits and make loans. Brokers could underwrite and sell securities, but no firm could do both due to conflicts of interest and risks to insured deposits. From 1933 to 1999, the system worked well. There were very few large bank failures and no large financial collapses.

In 1999, Democrats led by President Bill Clinton and his Wall Street supporters and joined by Republican Senator Phil Gramm, succeeded in repealing Glass-Steagall at the urging of the big Wall Street banks. As they did in the Roaring Twenties, banks began to originate fraudulent loans and sold securities backed by toxic, worthless assets, to their customers, often while simultaneously "shorting" or betting against the same securities themselves. The bubble peaked in 2007 and collapsed in 2008, causing Wall Street to run to Presidents Bush and Obama and Congress for a financial bail-out, which ultimately cost the federal government $1 trillion in cash and $11 trillion in guarantees. Millions of people lost their homes in foreclosure, unemployment spiked, the average American family lost 40 percent of its net worth and 52 percent of black families and 47 percent of Latino families were left with zero net worth. 

Joseph Stiglitz, a Noble Prize-winning American economist has written: 

Commercial banks are not supposed to be high-risk ventures; they are supposed to manage other people’s money very conservatively…Investment banks, on the other hand, have traditionally managed rich people’s money — people who can take bigger risks in order to get bigger returns.

When repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top. There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risk-taking.

Although American taxpayers bailed out the banks, Wall Street, with the support of President Obama, vigorously and successfully fought the re-institution of Glass-Steagall and the United States today remains just as vulnerable today to bank speculation and financial melt-down as it was in 2007.  

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have called for the re-legislation of Glass-Steagall; by contrast, a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton recently said she did not support legislation reinstating Glass-Steagall rules. The banks remain free to run wild, while the U.S. economy continues to limp along, apparently with Clinton's approval. 

NAFTA: In 1993, President Clinton strongly lobbied for and passed NAFTA, which he and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce promised would create an export boom with Mexico that would create 200,000 high-paying jobs in America within two years and millions of jobs within five years. Instead, trade deficits with Mexico eliminated 682,000 good-paying jobs in the United States, 61 percent of which were manufacturing jobs, many held by African Americans.  

When China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, according to Robert Scott, director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, black workers lost 281,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs from 2001-'11 and tens of billions in wages. The U.S. trade deficit with China is $318 billion per year and Celeste Drake, globalization policy specialist for the AFL-CIO, has written that, "The displacement of manufacturing jobs by growing U.S. trade deficits with China has been particularly hard on minority workers: 958,800 were displaced, with wage-related losses in 2011 of $10,485 per worker and $10.1 billion overall."  

The NAFTA-style trade agreement with Korea (KORUS) has resulted in the net loss of 75,000 jobs for African Americans and other workers, U.S. imports from Korea surged to more than $12 billion, while U.S. imports to Korea increased by less than $1 billion, said Robert Scott.

Once African Americans and other non-white workers lose their jobs, they have a difficult time finding new ones, wrote author Lori Keltzer in the book Job Loss from Imports: Measuring the Costs. "Minority workers face reemployment rates almost 11 percentage points lower than white workers," Keltzer wrote. "For less skilled manufacturing workers, the male minority's employment rate is 20 percent lower than the average. Female minority's reemployment rate is 24 percent lower."

NAFTA  and NAFTA-style trade agreements have been described as a "little discussed triple whammy in the black community that has hit black Americans financially hard over the past two decades," wrote Frederick H. Lowe in, "Will the proposed trade agreement be another bad deal for black workers?"

You can thank Bill Clinton for NAFTA. But the story of bad trade deals is not over. In fact, the worst may be yet-to-come — the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has been described by the AFL-CIO as "NAFTA on steroids."

The TPP, which has been negotiated in secret, involves the U.S., Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Vietnam and Brunei — almost 40 percent of the world economy. If passed, it would reduce tariffs and allow capital to move more freely among these nations. NAFTA and other NAFTA-style agreements have encouraged capital to flee to the lowest-wage countries, a "race to the bottom," wrote William Greider in his seminal work on globalization, One World, Ready or Not.  

If the TPP passes, the race not only will accelerate to the great profit of U.S. corporations, which already are sitting on $2+ trillion of retained earnings they have not repatriated to the U.S. or paid U.S. taxes on, but it will further gut the already-weak U.S. manufacturing base and further damage jobs for the black community. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have publicly opposed the TPP, while Hillary Clinton has refused to take an identifiable position on it. 

The Clinton administration, with policies Hillary Clinton supported at the time and in most respects still supports, pushed millions of African Americans off welfare; over-incarcerated hundreds of thousands of African Americans while devastating hundreds of thousands of black families and careers; supported Wall Street-friendly legislation that helped to melt down the economy, leaving millions homeless and 52 percent of black families with zero net worth; and promoted trade policies like NAFTA which cost African Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs and tens of billions in salaries and income. Is this the track record and set of policies African Americans and racial justice advocates really want to endorse for 2016?  

Guy T. Saperstein is a former civil rights attorney and past president of the Sierra Club Foundation. He is a board member of Brave New Films, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Northern Sierra Partnership.