A View From The Left-“SUPER TUESDAY” March 1. . . On Presidents and Lesser Evils

“SUPER TUESDAY” March 1. . . On Presidents and Lesser Evils

Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia will hold primaries for both parties next Tuesday; Alaska will hold its Republican caucus while American Samoa will caucus for Democrats. Colorado will caucus for both parties though only the Democrats are choosing a candidate. Republicans in Colorado have opted to select delegates only and then let those delegates choose which candidate to support at the national convention… In all, 595 Republican delegates- about 25 percent of the total number – are available on Super Tuesday. Republicans need 1,237 delegates to win the party's nomination; Democrats need 2,383. There are 1,004 Democrat delegates available on March 1. The states involved in Super Tuesday also represent about 130 so-called Super Delegates, Democrats who are not pledged to support the winner from their states. The vast majority of Super Delegates have already pledged support for Clinton.

 

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Paul Krugman (a Clinton supporter) makes the point that Republican Party economic orthodoxy does not (and never did) represent a majority of voter support; he could have said the same thing about the modern Democratic Party, whose pro-bank and pro-Wall Street politics are out of step with the party base.  That’s why wonkish arguments against the Sanders proposals to tax the rich,  extend health care and make public colleges free are having so little impact on Sanders supporters.  People want radical change, not centrist “competence” to continue and maybe lightly tweak the status quo.

 

KRUGMAN: Twilight of the Apparatchiks

Seriously, Republican political strategy has been exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class whites to despise government because it dares to help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished by the success of a candidate who is just saying outright what they have consistently tried to convey with dog whistles… Yet the Republican establishment still seems unable to understand that hardly any of its own voters, let alone the voters it would need to win in the general election, are committed to free-market, small-government ideology. Indeed, although Marco Rubio — the establishment’s last hope — has finally started to go after the front-runner, so far his attack seems to rest almost entirely on questioning the coiffed one’s ideological purity. Why does he imagine that voters care?   More

 

What the Mainstream Media Won't Tell You About Bernie Sanders' Economic Plan

If you depend for your news on the New York Times you have been subjected to a drumbeat of articles attacking Bernie Sanders – and the conclusion of everyone “serious” that his economics are daft… In the 90’s the “establishment” may have gotten away with this and established a “truthiness” to the claim that Sanders’ numbers don’t add up (even though they are actually Friedman’s numbers). Spending on fixing our infrastructure actually would “create jobs” and raise wages. Shifting health care costs off of people’s and business’ backs though a Medicare-for-All plan actually would help the economy. Increasing Social Security benefits and the minimum wage actually would enable people to spend more at local stores, boosting the economy.  We don’t have to accept slow growth, resulting from austerity policies, as the “new normal.”   More

 

THE POST-HOPE DEMOCRATS

Expectations, having been systematically beaten down for thirty-five years, must be beaten down further, whether it’s Clinton saying that to go to college one needs some “skin in the game,” or Representative John Lewis reminding us that nothing is free in America. A challenge from the left has forced centrist Democrats to reveal themselves as proud capitalist tools… It would not be hard at all to make higher education completely free in the USA. It accounts for not quite 2 percent of GDP. The personal share, about 1 percent of GDP, is a third of the income of the richest ten  thousand households in the US, or three months of Pentagon spending. It’s less than four months of what we waste on administrative costs by not having a single-payer health care finance system. But introduce such a proposal into an election campaign and you would be regarded as suicidally insane…  The only obstacles are political — elites, which include Hillary and Starr, don’t want it… Establishment Democrats haven’t merely gone post-hope — they’ve declared war on it.   More

 

Top GOP Pollster: Young Americans Are Terrifyingly Liberal

President Obama is not their favorite political figure — Bernie Sanders is…   They aren’t nationalistic: 58 percent of respondents said they agreed more with the statement “America isn’t better or worse than most other countries” than with “America is exceptional. It’s better than every other country in the world.” In fact, 35 percent of 18 to 26-year-olds, including 42 percent of 18 to 21-year-olds, said they considered themselves more a citizen of the world than of the U.S.  In response to the question, “Which type of political system do you think is the most compassionate?”, 58 percent said socialism and 9 percent said communism. Just 33 percent chose capitalism. 66 percent of the poll’s respondents said corporate America “embodies everything that is wrong about America.”  … Finally, more young Americans declared that the “most pressing issue facing America today” is income inequality than anything else.   More

 

Clintons and Wall Street: 24 Years of Enriching Each Other

For twenty four years the Clintons have orchestrated a conjugal relationship with Wall Street, to the immense financial benefit of both parties.   They have accepted from the New York banks $68.72 million in campaign contributions for their six political races, and $8.85 million more in speaking fees.  The banks have earned hundreds of billions of dollars in practices that were once prohibited—until the Clinton Administration legalized them… A 2014 story in Time magazine said this:  “Few in American history have collected and benefited from so much money in so many ways over such a long period of time…the Clintons have attracted at least $1.4 billion in contributions…”

Time failed to dig deeply enough.  A more thoroughly researched expose’ in the Washington Post a year later doubles the amount to $3 billion… That performance pales, however, compared to the Clintons’ self-serving transformation of the Democratic Party, from the champion of working people to the lapdog of Wall Street—and of corporate America in general.  Cleverly the Clintons still pander to the traditional constituency, but in serving its new clientele the transformed party abandoned the less fortunate strata of American society, especially the communities of color.   More

 

 

A Sanders Foreign-Policy Doctrine? How About ‘No Wars for the Billionaire Class’?

Lots of people—supporters and opponents alike—are asking what a Bernie Sanders foreign policy doctrine would look like. Beyond a few specific references and the important reminder that he, unlike Hillary Clinton, opposed the Iraq War, he’s tended to redirect questions about international issues to his strong suit—his powerful talking points about economic inequality at home…  Coming out against wars that benefit the US and global 1 percent provides a whole new 21st-century way of understanding both President Eisenhower’s warning about the power of the military-industrial complex and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning about the deadly triplets of militarism, racism, and extreme materialism.  No Wars for the Billionaire Class means standing up to the overarching influence of the arms-producing companies, especially their overpaid CEOs.   More

 

More U.S. troops killed by Halliburton than by Iraqis

The geniuses running the U.S. military set up U.S. bases at the sites of old chemical weapons piles, dug giant burn pits into the ground, and began burning the military's trash -- monumental quantities of trash, something like The Story of Stuff on steroids. They burned hundreds of tons of trash every day, including everything you can think of: oil, rubber, tires, treated wood, medicines, pesticides, asbestos, plastic, explosives, paint, human body parts, and . . . (wait for it) . . . nuclear, biological, and chemical decontamination materials.  The burn pits poisoned Iraq, together with depleted uranium weapons, napalm, white phosphorous, and various other horrors, creating unprecedented epidemics of birth defects, and killing untold masses of Iraqis. The burn pits also poisoned tens of thousands of U.S. troops, many of whom have died as a result, including very likely the son of the current U.S. vice president. The burn pits profited Halliburton, the company of the previous U.S. vice president.   More

 

Hillary Clinton And The Syrian Bloodbath

In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence – Clinton’s intransigence – that led to the failure of Annan’s peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton’s insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead… When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change… Clinton has been much more than a bit player in the Syrian crisis. Her diplomat Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi was killed as he was running a CIA operation to ship Libyan heavy weapons to Syria. Clinton herself took the lead role in organizing the so-called “Friends of Syria” to back the CIA-led insurgency.   More

 

With Trump Looming, Should Dems Take a Huge Electability Gamble by Nominating Hillary Clinton?

With a consensus now emerging that the real estate mogul is the likely GOP nominee, it would stand to reason that the most important factor for many Democrats in choosing their own nominee is electability: meaning, who has the best chance of defeating the GOP Satan in the general election? In light of that, can Democrats really afford to take such a risky gamble by nominating Hillary Clinton? In virtually every poll, her rival, Bernie Sanders, does better, often much better, in head-to-head match-ups against every possible GOP candidate… why would anyone assume that a candidate who is the very embodiment of Globalist Establishment Power (see her new, shiny endorsement from Tony Blair), who is virtually drowning both personally and politically in Wall Street cash, has “electability” in her favor? Maybe one can find reasons to support a candidate like that. But in this environment, “electability” is most certainly not one of them. Has anyone made a convincing case why someone with those attributes would be a strong candidate in 2016? Despite this mountain of data, the pundit consensus – which has been wrong about essentially everything – is that Hillary Clinton is electable and Bernie Sanders is not. There’s virtually no data to support this assertion.    More

 

Donald Trump and the Central Park Five: the racially charged rise of a demagogue

Nearly three decades before the rambunctious billionaire began his run for president – before he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, for the expulsion of all undocumented migrants, before he branded Mexicans as “rapists” and was accused of mocking the disabled – Trump called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York following a horrific rape case in which five teenagers were wrongly convicted.  The miscarriage of justice is widely remembered as a definitive moment in New York’s fractured race relations. But Trump’s intervention – he signed full-page newspaper advertisements implicitly calling for the boys to die – has been gradually overlooked as the businessman’s chances of winning the Republican nomination have rapidly increased. Now those involved in the case of the so-called Central Park Five and its aftermath say Trump’s rhetoric served as an unlikely precursor to a unique brand of divisive populism that has powered his rise to political prominence in 2016.   More

 

Evangelical voters like Donald Trump because he hates the same people they do

Pundits are going all a-flutter trying to explain why Republican evangelical voters, who are filled with peace and love and Jesus, seem to be flocking to candidate Donald Trump, who is a human piñata stuffed with wealth and spite and old divorce papers… Evangelicals that are flocking to Trump are doing so for the same reasons other Republicans are. They don't like immigrants, they're mortified that the sitting president is a black man and they are absolutely beside themselves with panic at the thought there are Muslims among us, and Donald Trump is the shouty, red-faced man who promises flat-out that he'll be getting rid of people like that. No muttering about checks and balances or working within the confines of the Constitution, like wimpy Marco Rubio. No nonsense about how immigrants aren't all rapists and drug dealers, like the doomed Jeb Bush piped up quietly with from time to time. Nope. Just good ol' fashioned, white-hot racism with its own private jet.    More

 

Black thinkers like Bernie Sanders. They've studied the Clintons' true cost

If anyone is smart enough to effectively make Sanders’ case to black America, it would be the intellectual leaders who have endorsed him thus far. Take Spike Lee. He is one of the contemporary black geniuses who have helped the nation (and me personally) reconsider race in transformative ways – and the latest to be feeling the Bern. Or Cornel West, who has been stumping for “Brother Bernie” for months… Similarly, much of the country first got woke about the scale and racism of mass incarceration when they read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Alexander has not endorsed Sanders or any candidate – “I endorse the revolution” she wrote – but she has offered the most skewering critique on why “Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve the black vote” in the Nation. She has also reminded black voters that “we are not checkmated” – that we can approach politics with a sense of possibility.   More

 

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

 

Tell Congress a Message: Vote for the People's Budget in March!

Each year, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) offers an alternative budget resolution to the “austerity” budgets supported by the House Majority and Speaker Ryan. The People's Budget offers a solid blueprint to:

• Invest more than $1 trillion in housing, education, transportation, clean energy and safe water to create millions of jobs
• Prevent cuts, restore social spending and reduce poverty by half in 10 years
• Increase educational opportunities, provide Pre-K and debt-free college for all
• Increase, not cut, Social Security and health care
• Close corporate tax loopholes, tax Wall Street speculation and raise taxes on the top 2%
• Redirect wasteful Pentagon spending and direct to peoples needs, ending Pentagon pork and the overseas contingency "slush fund" 

The People's Budget is backed by hard numbers and research by the Economic Policy Institute.

Send your message to Congress here.

 

Ted Cruz wants to give the Pentagon an extra $155 billion when what's needed are significant cuts

In his quest for the GOP presidential nomination, Cruz—who has been climbing in the polls—has been pushing the 67-year-old “Democrats are weak on defense” theme. At the January 28 Republican debate, for instance, where he reiterated his support for World War II-style carpet-bombing of ISIS/Daesh, the senator also bellowed that "Barack Obama right now, No. 1, over seven years, has dramatically degraded our military… As Gordon Adams points out in Foreign Policy magazine, “the campaign whiners have missed the reality: the Pentagon is now rolling in dough.” In fact, average Pentagon spending in the Obama years has been about $100 billion a year above Cold War levels…  54 percent of federal discretionary spending now flows to the military. But that’s only so when a narrow view is taken regarding what comprises military spending. The overall Veterans Affairs budget including benefits and health care adds another 7 percent in discretionary spending. There is also national security spending for international FBI activities, Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile, and other miscellaneous defense-related activities that add another 4 percent. An additional 5 percent goes to Homeland Security functions that are not part of the Department of Defense or Department of Energy. So federal discretionary spending that actually goes for national security purposes is 70 percent.    More

 

GOP backers of defense budget hike got millions in donations

House Republicans urging a steep increase in the Pentagon's budget have received $10 million in campaign contributions over the course of their congressional careers from defense contractors that would benefit from higher levels of military spending.  The 34 GOP lawmakers, all members of the House Armed Services Committee, are pressing for an $18 billion increase in the 2017 budget year, which begins Oct. 1. The push is rooted in their position that the U.S. military has atrophied severely on President Barack Obama's watch, leading America's allies as well as adversaries to question the country's will.  The bid also reflects the message GOP presidential candidates have hammered relentlessly on the campaign trail, where Obama has been cast as a feckless commander in chief. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, last week unveiled his blueprint for a "Reagan-style military buildup" to reverse the damage he said has been done during Obama's two terms. Cruz didn't say exactly what his plan would cost.   More

 

Turning American Communities Into War Zones, Death By Death

In the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, many white people woke up to a reality that was hardly news in most communities of color where death-by-police is all too common. What’s new is that the rest of us are suddenly hearing about the Eric Garners, Freddie Grays, and Sandra Blands who die literally every day in this country.  The rest of the U.S. is beginning to understand what the police already represent to so many communities from Ferguson to Baltimore to Waller County, Texas, to -- yes -- San Francisco. Far from seeing the police as a source of help and protection, many Americans feel the same way about them as people living under corrupt authoritarian regimes feel about their police or armies. They see them as an occupying force, not there to protect and serve but to frighten and extort.   More