All posts tagged: Bernie Sanders

How America’s Dictatorship Works

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This is how America’s dictatorship works. This is not America’s exceptionalism: it is America’s ordinariness. America’s Founders had wanted to produce something not just exceptional but unique in its time: a democratic republic. But what now exists here is instead a dictatorial global empire, and it constitutes the biggest threat to the very existence of the United Nations ever since that body’s founding in 1945. If that body accepts as constituting the leader of Venezuela the person that America’s President declares to be Venezuela’s leader, then the U.N. is effectively dead.

The Real Left, Phony Left and What’s Left

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Philip Farruggio Cutting to the chase, if you consider yourself to be ‘On the Left’ then you have to be a Socialist. Period! Now, there are many different levels under the banner of Socialism. Some may be Marxist, Trotskyite, Syndicalism etc. Yet, the unifying denominator is that all believe in the common ownership of the means of production and services. Many socialists do honor the existence of Mom and Pop private ownership of small business. Under a truly socialist system banking, energy, health & dental care, housing and all necessary services would be owned and operated by the community, whether it be local, state or federal. Imagine if you would if we had real community owned and run mortgage banks, where the only interest charges would be for overhead. Translated: Even in these so-called ‘low rates’ times, where a mortgage rate is around 4 or 5%, with non-profit community banks the rate would be perhaps 1%. Plus, the mortgage paper would remain with that bank. Today’s renters would be tomorrow’s owners of their own abode. …

See what the two main American political parties have become

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David Lindsay See what the two main American political parties have become. On any one or more of torture, Guantánamo Bay, mass surveillance, workers’ rights, consumer protection, environmental responsibility, treaties with Native Americans, healthcare for people with pre-existing conditions (that is, people like me), the President’s supposed immunity from indictment, and the President’s supposed power to pardon himself, Brett Kavanaugh could easily have been blocked by enough Republicans and all Democrats, plus Bernie Sanders. But instead, the useless Democratic Party made it about a #MeToo and #IBelieveHer story that it was impossible to prove. The party of Glass and Steagall repealed Glass-Steagall. The party that put a man on the Moon has become the party that puts a man in the ladies’ room. The eventual party of Civil Rights has regressed to being the party of the lynch mob. I am not going to do the line about the Democratic Party’s having gone “from a chicken in every pot, to a chicken on pot,” because the truth is even worse. Those who had cut their …

Those Permanent War “Progressives”

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Joe Giambrone Get out of here, you lowlife scum!” Sen. John McCain to anti-war protesters, January 29, 2015 One unexpected revelation, that John McCain’s death has shown us, is that we completely misjudged some notable players on the national stage. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even Audrey Denney in Northern California have praised the serial warmonger as some kind of national treasure. Real progressives, on the ground, expect those people to fight against John McCain’s imperial agenda of mass murder for mass profits. What do these representatives stand for in reality? When did imperial wars of aggression become the norm and beyond criticism? What alternatives do we now have in America to this Nazi-styled, industrial-scale barbarism and an ongoing domestic propaganda victory, which Goebbels would have been proud of concocting? Belligerence is now heroism. The right-wing knew for years that McCain was on his way out, and they planned their massive PR offensive, which still unfolds all around us. It’s a sickening nationalism with a fake martyr who isn’t supposed to be criticized. For fifty …

Book Review – “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”

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David William Pear How can I write a review of Andre Vltchek’s new book Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism? I am damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. Andre himself says that: There is nothing to add to the writing of maverick revolutionary philosophers. Hands off their work! Let them speak! Editions without prefaces and introductions, please; no footnotes! The greatest works of philosophy were written with heart, blood and passion! No interpretation is needed. If allowed to read them, even a child can understand.” He is speaking about the works of other great revolutionary writers, not himself. I think Andre is a great revolutionary writer, too. But, who am I to speak for Andre or greatness? Read his great works for yourself, and you will understand them without my introduction. You will find that Andre has the guts to put himself out there, let it all hang out, and expose his vulnerabilities as well as his wisdom… But I am damned if I don’t write a book review for Andre’s book, because I …

Open Thread: Trump-Putin Summit and Mounting Hysteria

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Yesterday, Trump and Putin met for a summit in Helsinki. The resulting hysteria, all throughout the mainstream media and in the minds of neocon and (self-described) “liberals” alike.

Just to be clear – it is not unusual for heads of state to meet. It is not unusual for leaders with different values or interests to discuss international politics. It’s the entire point of diplomacy.

The media at large appear to have forgotten this – giving thousands of column inches to insane ramblings employing words such as “traitor”, “treason”, “puppet” and “surrender”. Words which are rapidly losing their meaning.

Protests Planned Nationwide as Vote on FCC’s ‘Catastrophic’ Plan to Kill Net Neutrality Looms

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by Jake Johnson, from CommonDreams.org With the FCC set to vote on chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to kill neutrality in just over a week, a diverse coalition — ranging from consumer protection organizations to progressive lawmakers to Harvard professors — is denouncing the FCC’s proposals and scheduling nationwide protests to combat the agency’s move to let massive telecom companies “cash in on the internet” at the expense of consumers. Ajit Pai may be owned by Verizon, but he has to answer to Congress, and lawmakers have to answer to us, their constituents.”Evan Greer, Fight for the Future This is the free speech fight of our generation and internet users are pissed off and paying attention,” Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement. “Ajit Pai may be owned by Verizon, but he has to answer to Congress, and lawmakers have to answer to us, their constituents.” Since Pai revealed his plan to gut net neutrality rules just before Thanksgiving, public outrage has continued to grow—even as corporate media outlets have …

Why no-one talks about how “nice” Hillary Clinton is…

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Over 11 months after her (catastrophically bad) loss in the Presidential election, the Guardian is still gamely waving Hillary Clinton’s battle standard. Apparently Clinton is currently doing the press circuit in the UK to promote her book “What Happened”, culminating in a hard-hitting political interview….on the Graham Norton Show. Zoe Williams, Guardian-columnist and leading candidate for shallowest person in the world, watched this interview and decided to ask the hard question: Why does nobody mention that Hillary Clinton is perfectly nice? The comments on said article went into great detail about how nice Clinton is. That’s why they were moderated to oblivion and closed after just a few hours. So, since The Guardian doesn’t want answers to Ms Williams’ question BTL, we’ll post them here, above the line. That’s what we’re for, after all. In brief, no one talks about how nice Hillary Clinton is…because she isn’t. She’s a liar and a war criminal. That’s not a debate or an opinion, those are proven facts. But, while this answer is complete, it’s hardly a fair …

A View From Afar: Trumped! It was the economy, stupid

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by Dennis Broe Everyone, meaning mostly the neoliberal elite, is searching for answers at the moment for why the billionaire Trump beat the corporate candidate Clinton. Was it his xenophobic rhetoric which drew angry white Americans, his macho humiliation of women in the face of which his supporters had to hold their noses to vote for him, or was it the (Trumped-up) charges of “Crooked Hilary” aided and abetted by the FBI “October Surprise” of a new treasure trove of (probably mostly irrelevant) emails that are now being “investigated.” A revealing article here in Paris in Le Monde on the eve of the election seems instead to contain the answer for why solidly union and industrial states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would abandon the Democratic party and vote for Trump, who after all was not the choice of the Republican elite. For decades now, politicians have looked to the October economic, labor and jobs report, released last week, to boost their status just prior to the elections. And indeed, the report showed the creation …

34 Reasons This Bernie Voter Will Vote Trump

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by Eric Zuesse Here are the 34 reasons I will vote for Trump: “Hillary Clinton’s Six Foreign-Policy Catastrophes” “Hillary Clinton the hawk, and the Honduran coup” “I’m a Bernie Sanders Voter: Here’s Why I’ll Vote Trump” “Hillary Clinton: A Threat to All Humanity.” “Red-Light Warning On Now About Hillary Clinton” “Here’s Why Hillary Won’t Allow Her Corporate Speeches to Be Published” “Hillary Clinton’s Global-Burning Record” “We’re out of time on climate change. And Hillary Clinton helped get us here” “Hillary Clinton Is Backed by Major Republican Donors” “Wall Street gives Hillary Clinton $27M” “Tim Kaine Calls To Deregulate Banks As He Campaigns To Be Clinton’s VP” “Hillary Clinton Exposed Part 1 – How She Aggressively Lobbied for Mega Corporations” “Hillary v. Bernie: Their Two Opposite Views of the Presidency” “Hillary Clinton Backs Fast-Track on Obama’s Trade Deals” “Hillary’s Record: Pretending to Oppose Trade Agreements” “Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors” “Neocon Kagan Endorses Hillary Clinton” “Neoconservatives Declare War on Trump” “U.S. Foreign Policy ‘Elites’ Eagerly Await Expansion Of Overseas Wars Under Hillary …

Why Both Clinton & Trump Are Corrupt

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by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org In order to overcome the partisanship on both sides of this U.S. Presidential contest, the corruption of both of the candidates needs to be acknowledged, and a quick way to do that is to consider the cases of their respective charities (we’ll go beyond that to a broader view afterward): On September 10th, David A. Farenthold headlined in the Washington Post, “How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people’s money”, and he documented that Trump has lied in his many statements asserting that he donates lots to charities, and that he has even used his (actually meager) Foundation as a device to collect donations from others and then simply donate that money from others, to other charities as being “charitable donations by the Trump Foundation”; he even has sometimes used donations others had made to his ‘Charity’ in order to purchase things for some of his own businesses. So: not only is his ‘charity’ meager, but it consists largely of the charity of others — and …

The Dangers Behind “Electability”

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by Natasha Scott They say Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable. The same was said about Bernie Sanders. Sanders launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination with minimum name recognition. In the early weeks, he was polling at just two per cent against Hillary Clinton. By April this year he was neck and neck with her and talk about Bernie being unelectable became silenced as Sanders was ahead of her by about 10% in the polls when compared directly to Trump. As time went by the party machinery proved to be quite successful in disenfranchising the Sanders voters in ways not too dissimilar from what the NEC has used to disenfranchise Corbyn supporters. The corporate (establishment) media largely failed to cover it and when they did it was mostly skewed to work in Clinton’s favour. However, they did often talk about his campaign in regard to misogyny, they tried anti-Semitism but with Sanders being Jewish it was very difficult despite the fact that he highlighted the plight of Palestinians. Where Tens of thousands would turn up to …

Poisoning the Challenger so the Queen can Reign

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by Dennis Broe Games of Thrones, Season 7, Episode 1: The Acclamation I was not able to attend the coronation of Queen Hillary the First of the Royal House of Clinton at King’s Landing this week, nor the usurpation in the midlands of the Bush Line by the bastard Trump the previous week, but I was able to read some of the reports sent by the ravens and here are my comments on 2016’s Game of Thrones. Above ground the Republicans pledged allegiance to god, country and morality but the unconscious of a repressed party was on display as even while they praised righteousness from the podium, in their psychoanalytic basement right wing demagogue Roger Ailes was canned from the party network Fox for multiple complaints of sexual harassment.  Also on display were Trump’s blatant corruption; it’s flashy, gaudy and on the surface (he’s so scared of being found out he will not show his tax returns) and contrasts with Clinton’s slightly more subtle concealed corruption.  Trump’s incompetence was also front and center in his …

America’s Recent Achievements in the Middle East

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by Eric Zuesse Here are before-and-after pictures of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East: What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came into the White House, the operations — Libya, Yemen, and Syria — have been, to a large extent, joint operations with the Sauds. ‘We’ are now working more closely with ‘our’ ‘friends’, even than ‘we’ were under George W. Bush. As President Obama instructed his military, on 28 May 2014: When issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States, when such issues are at stake — when crises arise that stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction but do not directly threaten us — then the threshold for military action must be higher. In such circumstances, we should not go it alone. Instead, we must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action. …

The Guardian’s master of cognitive dissonance

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by Jonathan Cook, July 30, 2016 Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian proves himself once again the master of cognitive dissonance. He berates the progressive left for its failure to match the emotional power of the political right’s slogans. The left lacks an answer, he says, to the rise of a Donald Trump. It is hard (for once) not to agree with Freedland when he writes that the left must have: …a response to the globalisation and automisation [sic] that has left so many millions feeling as if they, and the once flush towns they live in, have been consigned to the scrap heap. It means taming globalisation so that both its costs and benefits are shared more evenly. Right now, those at the top get the rewards while those at the bottom pay the price. There are policy answers, starting with putting people back to work in jobs that pay decent wages. Spending billions to repair the fabric of the country – whether that be the bridges, tunnels and roads that are falling apart in the US or giving …

Independents And Jill Stein Won The Democratic National Convention

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by Rob Cotton, via Twist the Knife The Democratic National Convention, being little more than a dismal, choreographed vision into the bleak abyss of our Neoliberal future, will be remembered as a footnote to the real convention that took place on the streets, on the Internet, and in the homes, apartments, restaurants, bars, and other various meeting places in our nation: the convention to defy to the conventional ‘wisdom’ of the Democratic Party elite and forge a new and better path for ourselves. When Bernie Sanders delegates started chanting “no more wars” at the Democratic National Convention, party loyalists drowned them out with a counter-chant of “U-S-A” and the organizers of the convention apparently filtered in white noise to muffle their voices.  The implications could not be more obvious: the Democratic Party is officially all about war.  Of course, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama’s war record already tells us that.  The war criminal in chief has bombed almost double the number of countries that George W Bush bombed. Democrats care (about power and wealth). …

How Clinton Lost the Nomination

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by Charlie Musgrove | 7/28/2016 Yes, as we are all too aware, Hillary Clinton was officially anointed this week as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee for the upcoming election. She was chosen by the party to be its nominee long before the race ever began, and it used every means at its disposal, both in plain sight and behind closed doors, to ensure that nothing – least of all the will of the people – would prevent that from happening. Yet even though she may have won the title, she lost any moral legitimacy to the position that the title represents. It is a shameful, hollow victory; one that has stained the democratic process in its callous and brazen willingness to subvert that very process by whatever means necessary in order to triumph. Her campaign’s collusion with the DNC (not to mention her corporate media allies, lobbyists and tech industry cohorts) to undermine Senator Sanders’ bid for the nomination – to any rational, thinking person who’d paid even the slightest bit of attention to the …

VIDEO: Protesters blocked access to seats at DNC

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This video, posted to Facebook and YouTube last night, apparently shows Sanders supporters from California returning to their section at the DNC, only to find seats with “Reserved” signs being put up, and a white noise machine installed to drown out their boos and protests. If accurate, this is yet more evidence of corruption and anti-democratic tactics from the DNC.

The 1 Percent’s Useful Idiots

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by Chris Hedges, for Truthdig The parade of useful idiots, the bankrupt liberal class that long ago sold its soul to corporate power, is now led by Sen. Bernie Sanders. His final capitulation, symbolized by his pathetic motion to suspend the roll call, giving Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination by acclamation, is an abject betrayal of millions of his supporters and his call for a political revolution. No doubt the Democrats will continue to let Sanders be a member of the Democratic Caucus. No doubt the Democrats will continue to agree not to run a serious candidate against him in Vermont. No doubt Sanders will be given an ample platform and media opportunities to shill for Clinton and the corporate machine. No doubt he will remain a member of the political establishment. Sanders squandered his most important historical moment. He had a chance, one chance, to take the energy, anger and momentum, walk out the doors of the Wells Fargo Center and into the streets to help build a third-party movement. His call to his …

DNC Hack: Ignore the diversions – the content is what counts

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by Kit The hacked and leaked e-mails of the Democratic National Committee prove what many people already knew – the primaries were unfair. This is not a surprise, anybody paying attention to the race for the past months has witness massive “voting irregularities”, then there’s the totally undemocratic system of “super delegates”, and the ridiculously unfair provisional ballots. The DNC e-mails, where party officials discuss ways to discredit and sabotage Sanders’ campaign, merely serve to turn a glut of evidence into an all-out orgy. That the chairwoman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, should be forced to resign in disgrace…only to be immediately hired by Clinton’s campaign, is just the icing on the cake. The elections were rigged. Sanders never had a chance. That is clearer now than it has ever been. You would think that evidence of massive corruption at the heart of the American political establishment would be newsworthy, but you would be wrong. Hillary, in this case as in many others, seems to be above criticism. Unfortunately for the establishment, simply ignoring …