Yesterday, Bernie endorsed Hillary. Body language experts across the Web came to the same conclusion: They don’t like each other. They saw Hillary as uncomfortable, even vulnerable. They observed Bernie as resentful, doing something he didn’t want to do. Hillary and the DNC had to cough up a lot of concessions to get Bernie’s endorsement. And it was equally painful for Bernie to agree to it. While endorsing, he recited his campaign proposals and then declared Hillary was now supporting them. A brilliant move on Bernie’s part. What used to be a meaningless piece of paper—the Democratic Party Platform—is now publicly tied to Hillary. It’s hers to betray and everyone will know when she does.

Tonight, Bernie delegate Jen Ranes reported on a conference call he held with his delegates. She said:

• He has NOT suspended his campaign.
• He is taking this to the convention.
• He needs his delegates there.
• He will call for a role call vote.

Even though Bernie endorsed Hillary, this is not yet a done deal. Chances are quite high she will be the nominee, but Bernie will keep his options open all the way to the convention.

This has not gone down as Hillary had planned. What should have been an easy and short glide to the nomination turned into a long, humiliating trek. While she struggled to fill high school gymnasiums, Bernie filled football stadiums. She was forced to take time off to beg billionaires for money, while Bernie took two minutes to ask for donations at campaign events. Ever loyal to power, the corporate media maintained its blackout on Bernie’s campaign. They refused to cover the massive crowds and the extraordinary, historic nature of his run. They ignored that he had turned modern politics on its head.

Bernie exposes the establishment

What the media didn’t see coming was Bernie outing the Party leadership as not giving a rat’s ass about the rest of us. He was relentless in calling out the “Democratic establishment” and the “media establishment,” as servants of the 1%. Distracted by the incestuous, never-ending DC money game, and used to pretending to be progressive for the rubes back home, party elites were blindsided by Bernie’s spectacular success. People didn’t know they were hungry for Bernie’s message until they heard it, and found themselves overwhelmed and moved by his honesty, his integrity, and his humane proposals. Especially for younger people struggling to get an education and find a job, Bernie’s Democratic socialism seemed sane and sensible. The Party freaked out. It had lost control. A rumpled 74-year-old socialist was the Democratic rock star of 2016, not Hillary Clinton, their handpicked heir to the throne. They regrouped and pulled it off with the help of local party hacks, vote rigging, scheduling as few debates as possible, and a loyal corporate media relentlessly ignoring and/or undermining Bernie. And Yay! It worked! A damaged Clinton limped across the finish line and prematurely claimed victory.

Clinton baggage

Because Wall Street and the Deep State trust her to do their bidding, the DNC put Hillary forward as the Democratic Party candidate. Claiming to be neutral they blatantly tipped the scales in her favor. They ignored her high negatives—knowing both Democrats and Republicans view her as dishonest and unlikable. They ignored Bill’s smarmy past, and his/their terrible economic policies that led to the 2008 meltdown. They ignored their racism—the gutting of welfare programs, the buildup of the for-profit prison system, and, in 2008, Hillary’s 3 AM ads against Obama. They ignored the ravages of NAFTA. The Clinton’s personal and political baggage would fill a semi. The Party picked a familiar but terrible candidate.

If she is nominated at the convention, Hillary will go up against Trump in November and the polling doesn’t look good. Bernie has endorsed her and agreed to campaign for her. Thanks to his integrity and tenacity, she has inherited the most progressive Democratic platform in the history of the Party. It’s not everything he or we wanted, but it’s dramatically better than anything she and the Party would have typed up only to forget as soon as the convention ended. By using his considerable leverage, and forcing his progressive platform on the Party, Bernie may have rescued her from defeat. If she is the nominee and genuinely runs on that platform, she may squeak out a win against Trump.

A Democratic Party split?

Bernie could have deliberately blown up the Democratic Party, split it in two. But, even though the Party doesn’t deserve it, he graciously offered to save it from itself. That isn’t to say that the Party won’t split anyway. The installation of Hillary Clinton as the nominee may cause the party to implode—progressives taking off in one direction and corporate shills in the other.

Unlike other “loser” candidates, and it’s not clear that he has officially lost, Bernie will refuse to go quietly into the night. He plans to help elect progressive down ticket candidates, many at odds with the current Democratic establishment. He has announced that, if she is elected, he will organize his supporters to hold her feet to the fire, and to hold all Democrats feet to the fire. She knows that and he knows that. No matter what happens, the future is going to be contentious, because the revolution Bernie started is just beginning. And we should be forever grateful to him for that.

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This list of Bernie Sanders’ accomplishments is for those who think Bernie Sanders has achieved “nothing” in his time in office, or think he’s an uncompromising leftist ideologue who doesn’t know how to “get things done,” or who think he couldn’t possibly achieve anything as president. These ideas are floating around Facebook, so I think it’s time to have a look at Bernie’s actual record.

Over the past 50 years, Bernie has had a distinguished career as a social justice activist and an elected official. He’s been a mayor, a congressman and a senator. But I want to add a few accomplishments that don’t appear on his website. I want to acknowledge that he has had the courage to:

• run for president without taking Wall Street or corporate money,
• run for president against the formidable Clinton machine
• run as a Democrat without backing or support from the Democratic Party,
• run in the context of blatant corporate media bias for Hillary and against him

That’s a lot of courage, and I think he needs to be commended for it. Indeed, Bernie is a rare bird. His life has been honed by decades of hard work as a  public servant on behalf of poor and middle class Americans. He has had the integrity to live his life according to his progressive values. Is Bernie perfect? No. But he has never shilled for banks and corporations, and that’s a big accomplishment in Washington DC.

You will never hear Bernie spouting focus-group talking points, or shifting his message daily to see what sticks to the wall, or reading prepared speeches off a teleprompter. Bernie doesn’t have to use a teleprompter. He’s been talking about income inequality and social justice for fifty years, and his message hasn’t wavered. He understands, on a deep level, the struggles of the poor and the middle class and the origins of injustice and inequality. His wisdom and authenticity is resonating among voters who have lost confidence in the political process.

Some of Bernie’s accomplishments listed below are his votes against war. Why are votes an accomplishment? He was correct in his predictions that they would lead to disaster. These votes underscore his wisdom and judgment, qualities I want in a president. Through deal making and compromise with Democrats and Republicans, Bernie has amassed a solid record on behalf of the Black, Latino, women, LGBT and elderly communities, on behalf of veterans, and on behalf of lower and middle income individuals and families. He has consistently given voice to those with less power. He will continue to do that as president.

Bernie’s North Star has always been the poor and middle classes. No surprise, he has the highest approval rating of any U.S. senator—an astonishing 83% of Vermonters trust Bernie to represent their interests. Instead of lowering expectations of what’s possible, Bernie continues to offer a bold and humane vision of what this country can be.

Bernie’s accomplishments

• Elected by the state of Vermont 8 times to serve in the House of Representatives.
• The longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history.
• He was dubbed the “amendment king” in the House of Representatives for passing more amendments than any other member of Congress.
• Ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee.
• Former student organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
• Led the first ever civil rights sit-in in Chicago history to protest segregated housing.
• In 1963, Bernie Sanders participated in MLK’s Civil Rights March. One of only 2 sitting US Senators to have heard MLK’s “I have a Dream Speech” in person in the march on Washington, DC.
• Former professor of political science at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and at Hamilton College.
• Former mayor of Burlington, VT. In a stunning upset in 1981, Sanders won the mayoral race in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. He shocked the city’s political establishment by defeating a six-term, local machine mayor. Burlington is now reported to be one of the most livable cities in the nation.
• Co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus and chaired the group for its first 8 years.
• Both the NAACP and the NHLA (National Hispanic Leadership Agenda) have given Sanders 100% voting scores during his tenure in the Senate. Earns a D- from the NRA.
• 1984: Mayor Sanders established the Burlington Community Land Trust, the first municipal housing land-trust in the country for affordable housing. The project becomes a model emulated throughout the world. It later wins an award from Jack Kemp-led HUD.
• 1991: one of a handful in Congress to vote against authorizing US military force in Iraq. “I have a real fear that the region is not going to be more peaceful or more stable after the war,” he said at the time.
• 1992: Congress passes Sanders’ first signed piece of legislation to create the National Program of Cancer Registries. A Reader’s Digest article calls the law “the cancer weapon America needs most.” All 50 states now run registries to help cancer researchers gain important insights.
• November 1993: Sanders votes against the Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement. Returning from a tour of factories in Mexico, Sanders says: “If NAFTA passes, corporate profits will soar because it will be even easier than now for American companies to flee to Mexico and hire workers there for starvation wages.”
• July 1996: Sanders is one of only 67 (out of 435, 15%) votes against the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex couples legally married. Sanders urged the Supreme Court to throw out the law, which it did in a landmark 2013 ruling – some 17 years later.
• July 1999: Standing up against the major pharmaceutical companies, Sanders becomes the first member of Congress to personally take seniors across the border to Canada to buy lower-cost prescription drugs. The congressman continues his bus trips to Canada with a group of breast cancer patients the following April. These brave women are able to purchase their medications in Canada for almost one-tenth the price charged in the States.
• August 1999: An overflow crowd of Vermonters packs a St. Michael’s College town hall meeting hosted by Sanders to protest an IBM plan to cut older workers’ pensions by as much as 50 percent. CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and The New York Times cover the event. After IBM enacts the plan, Sanders works to reverse the cuts, passing a pair of amendments to prohibit the federal government from acting to overturn a federal district court decision that ruled that IBM’s plan violated pension age discrimination laws. Thanks to Sanders’ efforts, IBM agreed to a $320 million legal settlement with some 130,000 IBM workers and retirees.
• November 1999: About 10 years before the 2008 Wall Street crash spins the world economy into a massive recession, Sanders votes “no” on a bill to undo decades of financial regulations enacted after the Great Depression. “This legislation,” he predicts at the time, “will lead to fewer banks and financial service providers, increased charges and fees for individual consumers and small businesses, diminished credit for rural America and taxpayer exposure to potential losses should a financial conglomerate fail. It will lead to more mega-mergers, a small number of corporations dominating the financial service industry and further concentration of power in our country.” The House passed the bill 362-57 over Sanders’ objection.
• October 2001: Sanders votes against the USA Patriot Act. “All of us want to protect the American people from terrorist attacks, but in a way that does not undermine basic freedoms,” Sanders says at the time. He subsequently votes against reauthorizing the law in 2006 and 2011.
• October 2002: Sanders votes against the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq. He warns at the time that an invasion could “result in anti-Americanism, instability and more terrorism.” Hillary Clinton votes in favor of it.
• November 2006: Sanders defeats Vermont’s richest man, Rich Tarrant, to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Sanders, running as an Independent, is endorsed by the Vermont Democratic Party and supported by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
• December 2007: Sanders’ authored energy efficiency and conservation grant program passes into law. He later secures $3.2 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for the grant program.
• September 2008: Thanks to Sanders’ efforts, funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program funding doubles, helping millions of low-income Americans heat their homes in winter.
• February 2009: Sanders works with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley to pass an amendment to an economic recovery bill preventing Wall Street banks that take taxpayer bailouts from replacing laid-off U.S. workers with exploited and poorly-paid foreign workers.
• December 2009: Sanders passes language in the Affordable Care Act to allow states to apply for waivers to implement pilot health care systems by 2017. The legislation allows states to adopt more comprehensive systems to cover more people at lower costs.
• March 2010: President Barack Obama signs into law the Affordable Care Act with a major Sanders provision to expand federally qualified community health centers. Sanders secures $12.5 billion in funding for the program which now serves more than 25 million Americans. Another $1.5 billion from a Sanders provision went to the National Health Service Corps for scholarships and loan repayment for doctors and nurses who practice in under-served communities.
• July 2010: Sanders works with Republican Congressman Ron Paul in the House to pass a measure as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill to audit the Federal Reserve, revealing how the independent agency gave $16 trillion in near zero-interest loans to big banks and businesses after the 2008 economic collapse.
• March 2013: Sanders, now chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and backed by seniors, women, veterans, labor unions and disabled Americans, leads a successful effort to stop a “chained-CPI” proposal supported by Congressional Republicans and the Administration to cut Social Security and disabled veterans’ benefits.
• April 2013: Sanders introduces legislation to break up major Wall Street banks so large that the collapse of one could send the overall economy into a downward spiral.
• August 2014: A bipartisan $16.5 billion veterans bill written by Sen. Sanders, Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jeff Miller is signed into law by President Barack Obama. The measure includes $5 billion for the VA to hire more doctors and health professionals to meet growing demand for care.
• January 2015: Sanders takes over as ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, using the platform to fight for his economic agenda for the American middle class.
• January 2015: Sanders votes against the Keystone XL pipeline, which would allow multinational corporation TransCanada to transport dirty tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
• March 2015: Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced legislation to expand benefits and strengthen the retirement program for generations to come. The Social Security Expansion Act was filed on the same day Sanders and other senators received the petitions signed by 2 million Americans, gathered by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
• September 2015: Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) today introduced bills to ban private prisons, reinstate the federal parole system and eliminate quotas for the number of immigrants held in detention.
• January 2016: Sanders Places Hold on FDA Nominee Dr. Robert Califf because of his close ties to the pharmaceutical industry and lack of commitment to lowering drug prices. There is no reason to believe that he would make the FDA work for ordinary Americans, rather than just the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies.

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As you may have noticed by now, the Democratic primaries are maddening. First, it’s hard to keep track of which primary is when. Then you have closed primaries, open primaries, and caucuses, each with their own arcane rules. And what are “swing states” anyway? Poll results are issued daily, and often wildly contradict each other. And, sadly, only a tiny fraction of Democrats (and some Republicans and Independents) vote in the Democratic primaries. The outcome of this insane process, especially the caucuses, is not always trustworthy. But, in the end, candidates are apportioned delegates according to the percentage of votes they have received, however weirdly (or fraudulently) they are counted—or it’s “winner take all.” Depends on the state.

It gets worse. An additional 715 “superdelegates” will select the Party’s nominee at the Convention. Superdelegates are elected officials, party big wigs and lobbyists (yes lobbyists.) ABC news reports:

In fact, when you remove elected officials from the superdelegate pool, at least one in seven of the rest are former or current lobbyists registered on the federal and state level, according to lobbying disclosure records.

That’s at least 67 lobbyists who will attend the convention as superdelegates. A majority of them have already committed to supporting Hillary Clinton for the nomination.

But to be clear, it was never the job of Superdelegates to represent the wishes of the people. Their job is to represent the interests of the Democratic Party. This may seem highly undemocratic, because it is. It was designed to make sure the Party has a viable candidate in the general election. But, the good news is, unlike “elected” delegates, superdelegates are free to vote as they wish, and change their vote as often as they want. Superdelegates currently pledged to Hillary Clinton, are free to change to Bernie Sanders if he seems the best choice to win in November.

It’s all about November

Superdelegates are focused like a laser beam on the general election and how best to get a Democrat in the White House. Based on past elections, some primaries are meaningless in determining electability in the general election. For example, Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina Democratic primary by a whopping 76% to 24% margin over Bernie Sanders, but South Carolina will most certainly go Republican in November and its Electoral College votes will go to the Republican nominee. So, while exhilarating for Clinton supporters, it’s not a win that holds much meaning for the Party and the superdelegates.

On the other hand, Bernie Sanders won 60% of the votes in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, and Clinton won 38%. Because New Hampshire will be in play this year in the general election, its primary does have weight. Hillary’s weak showing in New Hampshire is concerning to the superdelegates and the Party. And, in two other important swing-states, Clinton won, but not convincingly. She won Iowa by a hair and just barely won Nevada. In both states there were voting irregularities that suggest Sanders may have actually won. Again, something the Party and the superdelegates will be looking at when they decide whom to nominate.

Although they have personal preferences, most, if not all, of the 715 superdelegates will put aside their preference to elect a Democrat in November. A large number of superdelegates hold public office, and a Democratic Administration will empower them, no matter who sits in the Oval Office. The Electoral College tally in November will dominate their thinking.

The Swing States

The swing states are Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida.

Both Bernie and Hillary will concentrate on winning primaries in the states that could go either Republican or Democratic in the November. Those states will determine which Party wins in the Electoral College. But this is no ordinary election. If Trump is the nominee, then it’s not clear if states that traditionally vote Republican in the general will do so this year.

But, superdelegates only have past experience to go by. So, whoever performs well in the swing-states will earn the Democratic Party’s nomination. The Party Establishment, and many of its superdelegates have already chosen Hillary Clinton. If Bernie decidedly wins the toss-up states, he can make a good case for the superdelegates to switch their votes to him. If he loses, he won’t be able to convince them, and his bid for the nomination and the presidency will end. If there’s no clear winner, then we are on to a brokered convention, and I think that’s where we’re going.

Meanwhile, make your own scorecard, keep track, and refer to this Wikipedia page for the dates of the upcoming primaries.

The post Bernie vs Hillary: It’s all about the swing states appeared first on Occasional Planet.

First off, let me be clear. I’m voting for Bernie Sanders in the primary and I hope he wins the nomination. If he doesn’t I will vote for Hillary Clinton. I’m choosing Bernie not just because my political views are closer to his, they are, but because I think he has the best chance of winning in November.

That said, I have some problems with Bernie Sanders.  My greatest criticism is that he’s a faux Democratic Socialist. No real Democratic Socialist would vote, as he has time and again, to continue the U.S. imperialist wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine. His foreign policy views are slightly better than Clinton’s, and he is less of an outright warmonger, but he is a huge disappointment to me on that front. Bernie can’t call for a “revolution” and ignore the link between our vast imperialist military/intelligence state and the problems we are facing at home. They are profoundly connected. Even though this is a big issue for me, I’m still voting for him, and I will explain the many reasons why. Before I get to them, there are other things about Bernie that I’m not thrilled about.

Bernie’s deals with the Devil

As an Independent from Vermont, Bernie’s deals with the Democratic Party have somewhat muzzled his progressive voice. I’ll give you an example. Although to his credit, he did, rather brilliantly, force Republicans to add funding for community health centers to the Affordable Care Act, he did not push hard enough for the “public option.” Bernie had a lot of influence because he sat on the committee that wrote the bill.

He’s been terrible on guns, primarily to garner votes from gun-owning Democrats, Independents and Republicans in his home state of Vermont.

Because of his deal with the Democratic Party to not run candidates against him in exchange for his caucusing with Democrats, he has diminished his ability to be critical of the Party.

Countering Bernie criticism from the Left

There’s no shortage of criticism of Bernie by writers on the Left. People I admire, like Paul Street and Chris Hedges, consider Bernie a socialist sellout. They support Green Party candidate Jill Stein. I too would prefer to vote for her, but the stakes are too high. I don’t want a Republican in the White House.

For better or worse, Bernie’s imperfect deals with Democrats, which the Left despises and considers a deep character flaw, have allowed him to “get shit done” as Hillary supporters like to claim. In fact, Bernie has way more legislative success to his credit than Hillary, precisely because he’s a very skilled dealmaker. When he was in the House, he was called the “Amendment King,” because he improved not-so-great bills by introducing progressive amendments. Bernie is not as ideologically or politically “pure” as the Left or I would like, but he has been consistently effective, nonetheless, in passing bills that help ordinary Americans.

It’s the money, stupid

Bernie is remarkably clean when it comes to special interest money. He takes campaign donations from unions, but not banks and big corporations. And he has not benefited personally from holding elected office. After being in public office for 34 years (including time as mayor of Burlington, VT), his net worth is around $400,000. The Clintons left the White House broke, but managed to make $230 million over the next 14 years from speaking engagements, book deals, and consulting gigs.

If Hillary is nominated and elected president, her indebtedness to powerful special interests will leave her hamstrung when it comes to “getting shit done” for the American people. Hillary is very “experienced” at simultaneously dog-whistling to her donors as she tells voters she is “fighting for them.” She did that very artfully during the last debate when talking about the TPP trade agreement.

My point is that the influence of Big Money is devastating. This is the main reason Bernie keeps harping on it. Big Money produces watered down bills like the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank that are touted as the best thing since sliced bread—or the Depression—take your pick. Worse, Big Money siphons off trillions for wars that benefit its interests. For good reason, people feel shafted. No wonder they are looking for a non-establishment candidate—someone who is not drowning in campaign donations and speaking fees from banks and corporations. Those who are looking for a scapegoat choose fascist candidate Donald Trump, Those who want a government more responsive to their needs choose Bernie Sanders.

If elected president, Bernie will not be afraid to mobilize the electorate behind initiatives that challenge big money, because he has no skin in the game. He has no one to appease on Wall Street. He doesn’t have to suck up to Lloyd Blankfein to get reelected. That’s precisely why Blankfein called him “dangerous.”

Bernie can flip the House and Senate, Hillary can’t

If Bernie keeps winning the primaries, he will continue to energize and turn out a previously disaffected voter base—a broad spectrum of young Democrats, Independents and some Republicans. Unlike Hillary, he will insure a huge voter turnout in November, giving him the possibility of flipping the House and Senate.

As Bernie’s campaign manager confirmed in a recent interview, the plan is to bring progressive candidates on board to challenge Republicans down ticket. If Elizabeth Warren is his running mate, he will not only win, he could shut down Republicans for a decade. If she isn’t on the ticket, he still has a very good chance of winning the presidency and achieving a Democratic victory in the House and Senate—an advantage he will not squander. The road will be steep to take back the House and Senate, but only Bernie has a chance to achieve this.

Clinton campaign dated and out-of-touch

Bernie Sander’s record-breaking victory in New Hampshire exposed how out-of-sync the Clinton machine is with the times. Hillary lost because she based her campaign on the playbook of a fading, and out-of-touch Democratic establishment—one that has fought to deny Democratic voters a choice, and make her nomination a coronation.

Hillary figured women would vote for her simply because she was a woman. She figured college grads and wealthier Democrats would vote for her because her more “pragmatic” policies wouldn’t seriously challenge the status quo. She figured Bernie Sanders was not a real threat, and that she was the inevitable candidate—all fatal assumptions by an out-of-touch campaign.

Not surprising, in New Hampshire she won those 65 or older with incomes over $200,000, but she lost everyone else—women, men, people under 30, college grads, blue-collar workers. She lost both liberals and moderates. Hillary and the Democratic establishment backing her were so focused on big money and power players they missed the seismic shift happening under their feet. They ignored, for example, the public’s enthusiasm for populist icon Elizabeth Warren, the only woman senator yet to endorse Hillary Clinton.

In a speech from the senate floor on the sixth anniversary of Citizens United, Warren said:

A new presidential election is upon us. The first votes will be cast in Iowa in just eleven days. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club.

Wonder who she was talking about?

If Hillary wins the nomination, she won’t bring the party together

If Hillary wins the nomination, even with Bernie’s promised endorsement, she doesn’t have the skills to reunite the party. That said, because of a GOP in disarray, Hillary could still win in November, but not by much, because voter turnout could be diminished. Therein lies the danger. Throw in that her unfavorable rating is quite high, and Democrats could lose. And, because turnout will be lackluster, she will not be able to change the Republican grip on the House and Senate.

Bernie has the wisdom and judgment to be president

A good way to judge a president is by the people he or she chooses as advisors and cabinet members. If Hillary gets elected, she will bring into her administration the same old corporate/Wall Street cronies that were there under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In contrast, Bernie has suggested people like Robert Reich, Elizabeth Warren and progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz. He has said on CNN’s State of the Union that his administration would include “great public servants who, for years, have been standing up for the middle class and the working families of this country.”

Hillary may have more “experience” in holding powerful positions, but her judgment in her various roles has been deeply flawed and compromised, and at times, atrocious. I don’t expect her judgment to be any better as president. I also cringe at the idea of Bill and Hillary being back in the White House. Something about this feels terribly wrong. A democracy should not have ruling dynasties, backed by massive amounts of corporate/oligarch money, moving in and out of the White House.

You may imagine the president as a solitary figure, making big decisions on his or her own, but in reality the president is a leader of a team. The president we need now is someone who can put together and lead an extraordinary team of public servants who will craft and enact policies that will benefit the majority of the American people. We need someone who is willing to confront and break the grip of money in politics. That person is not Hillary Clinton. It’s Bernie Sanders.

Matt Taibbi on “The Case for Bernie Sanders”

Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks upon his “grumpy demeanor.” But Bernie is grumpy because he’s thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who’ve had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time.

I first met Bernie Sanders ten years ago, and I don’t believe there’s anything else he really thinks about. There’s no other endgame for him. He’s not looking for a book deal or a membership in a Martha’s Vineyard golf club or a cameo in a Guy Ritchie movie. This election isn’t a game to him; it’s not the awesomely repulsive dark joke it is to me and many others.

And the only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair.

Not all of us can say that. But that doesn’t make us right, and him “unrealistic.” More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It’s the rest of us who are lost.

The post Why I’m voting for Bernie Sanders appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’m not going to get support of the governors and the senators, with a few exceptions, or many of the major organizations. But the reason we are doing so well . . . is not from the establishment. It’s from the grass roots of America.
—Bernie Sanders

The current political leaders of the Democratic Establishment are Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and DNC head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Add to them, influential, center-right Democratic congressmen and senators. Then you have your high-powered donors, Wall Street executives, corporate CEOs, entertainment moguls and hedge fund managers, along with Wall Street funded think tanks like Citibank/Robert Rubin’s Hamilton Project. Next, there are various progressive organizations, whose leadership cultivates Democratic Establishment money and approval, often at the expense of its membership.

Case in point, the leadership of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has been fighting for a $15 minimum wage, endorsed Hillary Clinton, who is calling for a $12 minimum wage, This enraged many of the union’s 2 million members who feel Bernie Sanders best represents their interests. Many local chapters are breaking with leadership to support Bernie Sanders.

Being creatures of the Democratic Establishment, the Clinton and Obama administrations have faithfully served the needs and agendas of big money in its various forms. If it were not for a stain on a blue dress, Bill Clinton would have pursued his “bipartisan” plan, in partnership with Newt Gingrich, to partially privatize Social Security.

If it were not for Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives mobilizing organizations and individuals outside the beltway, Barack Obama would have cut Social Security in a “bipartisan” deal to enact the “chained CPI.” Thanks to an overwhelming grass roots backlash, he backed down.

Although her role is to be neutral, DNC head Wasserman-Schultz is openly supporting Democratic Establishment candidate Hillary Clinton. Toward that end, she has limited Democratic debates and scheduled them when they would have the least viewership, on weekends and opposite NFL football games. Her intention has been to limit the public’s exposure to Bernie Sanders’ truly progressive ideas. Here we have the head of the Democratic National Committee actively undermining the democratic process by stifling debate. Clearly, the Democratic Establishment’s interests are no longer aligned with the peoples interests, and haven’t been for a long time.

Working in tandem with the Democratic Establishment, corporate media has severely limited and/or distorted coverage of Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

Robert Reich on the Democratic Establishment

In his January 22 Facebook post, Robert Reich explained why the insular, elitist, Democratic Establishment is incapable of addressing the pressing needs of the majority of Americans.

Last night on Chris Hayes MSNBC show, Chris asked me if there’s a “Democratic establishment.” Of course there is. It’s comprised of current and former Wall Street executives who make massive campaign donations to Democrats (some of whom have served in the Clinton and Obama administrations and then returned to the Street); hedge-fund partners who make even larger contributions; moguls from large high-tech corporations and entertainment companies who both contribute directly and also “bundle” contributions from their friends; and major Washington lobbyists and lawyers who focus their bundling and their political activities on Democrats (half of all retired Democratic members of Congress in recent years have become Washington lobbyists).

The Democratic establishment is slightly more liberal than the Republican establishment, but their world-views are not wildly dissimilar. After all, they have similar large homes in Westchester or Bethesda; they frequent the same vacation spots in the Hamptons or the Vineyard; attend many of the same charitable balls and dinners; serve on many of the same corporate and nonprofit boards; go to the same conclaves, such as Davos; travel in similar private jets; and are invited by presidents (Republican or Democratic, depending on who they’ve supported) to attend similar White House parties and receptions, and to serve on similar presidential commissions and advisory boards.

So the Democratic establishment sees the world much as the Republican establishment sees it: a system of privilege and power, to which they’re entitled because of their superior intelligence and ambition. And they view the vast and widening inequities of income, wealth, and power in America as natural and inevitable and, ultimately, just

On January 25, Reich followed up with a blog post: “The Volcanic Core Fueling the 2016 Election.”  He writes that on a recent book tour, he was shocked to encounter people who were trying to decide between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Although not true, he realized the general public considers both to be “anti-establishment.” Clearly, there’s anger building against the out-of-touch elite in both parties. Reich is correct—there’s is a volcanic core fueling the 2016 election.

The other day Bill Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health plan as unfeasible and a “recipe for gridlock.”

Yet these days, nothing of any significance is feasible and every bold idea is a recipe for gridlock.

This election is about changing the parameters of what’s feasible and ending the chokehold of big money on our political system.

I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have.

But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.

The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power—whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well.

The post People’s candidate Bernie Sanders challenges Democratic establishment appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1865, the 13^th amendment abolished slavery, but there was a loophole. Prisoners were exempt. Since the passage of the amendment, prisons and businesses have been forcing inmates to work for slave wages, or sometimes no wages.

Capital thrives on squeezing as much profit and productivity as possible out of workers. In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy for maximizing profit.

In an article at U.S. Uncut, Kelly Davidson reports that corporations, in partnership with the United States government, are forcing prisoners to work for wages as low as .25 and $1.15 per hour. It’s called “insourcing.” If you are a CEO or a stockholder in one of these companies it’s great! You get your products made by prison slaves for practically nothing, or you get your products made in third world countries for practically nothing—either way, you reap the profits.

Which companies make use of prison labor?

I’ve annotated Davidson’s list:

Lets start with Whole Foods. This high-end grocery chain purchases artisan cheese and fish prepared by prison inmates who work for private companies. The inmates are paid .74 cents a day to raise tilapia that Whole Paycheck sells for $11.99 a pound.

Then we have McDonald’s. It buys tons of prison-manufactured items including plastic cutlery, food containers, and uniforms. As Davidson notes, the inmates who sew the uniforms make even less money per hour than the people who wear them.

And, of course, there’s Wal-Mart. The official company policy is: “no forced or prison labor will be tolerated.” But Wal-Mart gets around this by buying from independent prison labor factories. Same thing Whole Foods is doing. According to Davidson: “Wal-Mart purchases its produce from prison farms where laborers are often subjected to long, arduous hours in the blazing heat without adequate sunscreen, water, or food.”

If you like sexy lingerie, you may enjoy buying from Victoria’s Secret. Know that female inmates in South Carolina, forced to work for slave wages, make a lot of the company’s garments, as well as J.C. Penny’s women’s underwear.

In 1993, AT&T laid off thousands of union telephone operators in a move to smash unions and increase profits. It has a prison labor policy similar to Wal-Mart’s. Yet, since 1993, AT&T has used inmates, managed by third party companies, to work their call centers, paying them $2 a day.

It turns out BP used African-American inmates to clean up the 4.2 million barrels of oil it spilled into the Gulf coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. The right thing was for BP to hire Coastal residents whose livelihoods it had just destroyed, but the company opted for cheap prison labor. Then its PR department put out ads touting the company’s dedication to the Gulf and the people who live there.

Davidson sums up:

From dentures to shower curtains to pill bottles, almost everything you can imagine is being made in American prisons. Also implicit in the past and present use of prison labor are Microsoft, Nike, Nintendo, Honda, Pfizer, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Starbucks, and more.

The “more” includes, among others, Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, Motorola, Compaq, IBM, Boeing, Texas Instrument, Revlon, Macy’s, Target Stores, Nortel, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Honeywell, Pierre Cardin, 3com, and Lucent Technologies.

The Prison-Industrial-Complex and UNICOR

Davidson fingers the U.S. government as the guilty party in this modern day reincarnation of slavery. UNICOR, a corporation created in 1934 and owned by the federal government, oversees penal labor, and sets the condition and wage standards for working inmates.  UNICOR’s official line is that in exchange for their slave labor, prisoners are given “vocational training.” Yet the workplace conditions are often appalling, and the transfer of skills to the private sector is dubious.

For example, at one UNICOR operation at a California prison, inmates “de-manufactured” computer cathode-type monitors. According to industry safety practices, a mechanical crushing machine is supposed to be used to minimize danger from flying glass, with an isolated air system to avoid releasing lead, and other toxic substances into the workplace atmosphere. At the UNICOR facility, prisoners were required to smash CRTs with hammers without any protection.

The United States of Incarceration

We have a huge per capita prison population—the second highest in the world. Although we have only 5 percent of the world’s population, we incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Racism, drug laws, mandatory sentencing, and of course, privatization of prisons all play a part. The partnership of the U.S. government with big business allows prisoners to be used as slave labor, another great incentive for filling prisons. Prison overcrowding is common. Instead of helping and rehabilitating people, we use them for profit—another grotesque feature of a capitalist system fixated on making money over everything else.

I’m afraid the answer is not prison reform, because that simply won’t happen in our current political and economic environment. Also, the use of prisoners for profit has been going on for 150 years. Instead, we have to examine and question the overriding system that created prison slave labor in the first place. We have to break the taboo on talking about capitalism. We have to question capitalism’s ruthless, limited way of thinking, and its distorted, often inhumane values. We have to step back and ask ourselves: Is this how we want to treat people? Is this really how we want to live? Is capitalism a system that works for most Americans, or most inhabitants of the Earth, or just a lucky few? How can we transition to a better, more humane system, a new democratic socialism for the 21^st century?

Michael Liebowitz writes about the nature of capitalism in his book The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development:

. . .no one could say that capitalism is a good society. Capitalism is certainly not oriented toward solidarity, respect, social responsibility, or caring: it is not about creating the conditions for protagonism in the workplace and society—that necessary way by which people can achieve “their complete development, both individual and collective.” On the contrary, capitalism is not about human development at all.

The logic of capital generates a society in which all human values are subordinated to the search for profits. . . .Rather than building a cohesive and caring society, capital tears society apart. It divides workers and pits them against one another as competitors to reduce any challenge to its rule and its bottom line. Precisely because human beings and nature are mere means to capital’s goal, it destroys what Marx called the original sources of wealth—human beings and nature.

The post U.S. companies make a killing off prison labor appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The most popular post, over the years, on Occasional Planet is: “Military Mystery: how many bases does the US have, anyway?”  American University anthropology professor, David Vine, spent six years trying to answer that question and to investigate the effect of U.S. military presence on foreign soil. In researching his subject, he traveled to U.S. military installations around the world, interviewing both the military and local residents. His findings are published in his new book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. (Henry Holt, 2015).

Some of David Vine’s main points:

The military admits we have an excess base capacity worldwide. It doesn’t have a clear idea, and/or doesn’t want to confirm how many bases we have. The official count is 686 but it excludes known bases in Kosovo, Kuwait, and Qatar, “secret” bases in Israel and Saudi Arabia, and who knows how many in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vine settles on 800 as a good estimate.

The sites vary from massive bases in Germany and Japan to smaller facilities in Peru and Puerto Rico, to off-the-record “black sites” run by the CIA and military intelligence. By comparison, Russia has bases in 10 countries, mostly in former Soviet states. India and China have none.

Maintaining installations and troops overseas cost at least $85 billion in 2014. Our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq brings the total to $156 billion—money, Vine says, that could be better spent on education, infrastructure, housing and health care.

Our presence in other countries provokes hatred toward Americans. Our bases and troops in the Middle East have been major catalysts for anti-Americanism and radicalization.

Foreign bases heighten military tensions and discourage diplomatic solutions, while, at the same time, encourage excess military spending.

Imprisonment, torture, and abuse at bases from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib have generated worldwide disgust and damaged our reputation. Drone bases enable missile strikes that have killed hundreds of civilians, producing further outrage.

The official line is that these military bases are defensive and make us, and the host countries, safer. Yet they have functioned more as launching pads for interventionist wars that have resulted in repeated disasters costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.

David Vine: On the presence of U.S. foreign military bases as a catalyst for war:

Placing U.S. bases near the borders of countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, for example, increases threats to their security and encourages them to respond by boosting their own military spending. Again, imagine how U.S. leaders would respond if Iran were to build even a single small base in Mexico, Canada, or the Caribbean.

Notably, the most dangerous moment during the Cold War—the Cuban missile crisis—revolved around the creation of Soviet nuclear missile facilities roughly ninety miles from the U.S. border. Similarly, one of the most dangerous episodes in the post-Cold War era—Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its involvement in the war in Ukraine—has come after the United States encouraged the enlargement of NATO and built a growing number of bases closer and closer to Russian borders.

Indeed, a major motivation behind Russia’s actions has likely been its interest in maintaining perhaps the most important of its small collection of foreign bases, the naval base in the Crimean port Sevastopol. West-leaning Ukrainian leaders’ desire to join NATO posed a direct threat to the base, and thus to the power of the Russian navy.

Perhaps most troubling of all, the creation of new U.S. bases to protect against an alleged future Chinese or Russian threat runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. By provoking a Chinese and Russian military response, these bases may help create the very threat against which they are supposedly designed to protect. In other words, far from making the world a safer place, U.S. bases overseas can actually make war more likely and America less secure.

Questioning American military empire

At no time in history has a nation had such a vast international military presence as the United States does today. Our foreign bases serve US “interests” meaning the geopolitical/economic/financial interests of banks and corporations. The military and its war industries account for a large share of the budget while most Americans are experiencing declining incomes and quality of life.

The hubristic attitude, shared by Republicans, Democrats, and progressives alike, is that the United States is “exceptional,” and therefore has some sort of self-appointed moral right to militarily and economically dominate the world. We decide when a national leader “has to go” and initiate a covert or overt “regime change.” We assassinate identified “enemies” with drones along with innocent bystanders referred to not as “human beings” but as “collateral damage.” We ignore international law and the United Nations if they get in the way of our pursuing our “interests” in a country or region. We prefer destroyed, failed states that we can control to independent, functioning states that refuse to be US vassals (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Syria). Sadly, the American people are generally comfortable with all this, or indifferent.

Absent in the media, among elected officials, or in the general public, is a debate about whether we should continue this hubristic and destructive hegemonic agenda. The only voices raised against a US-dominated, unipolar world come from the Left, and a few on the Libertarian Right. Those voices are routinely slapped down and ridiculed as being overly critical, negative, ideological, unrealistic, disloyal, utopian, hyperbolic, naïve, conspiratorial, weak, unpatriotic, and, when critical of the role of Israel in the middle east, anti-Semitic. Rarely do Americans engage with the challenging issues raised by the Left.

The US public, perhaps the most uninformed in the developed world, may never question, or worse yet, even be aware of, the vast number of US military bases and operations around the globe. Our jingoistic media supports our corporate-backed military agenda by demonizing any country that refuses to align itself with our interests. Fear-based war mongering is routinely served up as “news” on CNN, FOX, and in the pages of the New York Times. Mainstream media-driven, official narratives abound, dissenting voices occasionally, but rarely appear, while everywhere serious analysis or dialog is discouraged.

The US debt is now at 101% of GDP, much of that from unpaid for wars and an unsustainable and bloated military/intelligence budget. By comparison, China’s debt is 64.37% of GDP, and Russia’s is 11.66% of GDP. (http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org) The powerful British Empire, once controlled 25% of the world. Eventually, it fell under the weight of its overextended global presence. Given the stagnation of our economy and the deterioration of our infrastructure, we are clearly headed down that road.

In 2004, the late Chalmers Johnson, “cold-warrior,” Korean War veteran, CIA consultant, and university professor, wrote the following prescient analysis:

Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can’t begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations, or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip; each thrives off the other. Already highly advanced in our country, they are both on the verge of a quantum leap that will almost surely stretch our military beyond its capabilities, bringing about fiscal insolvency and very possibly doing mortal damage to our republican institutions.

The post The case for closing our overseas military bases appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In a recent interview in Jacobin, linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky gave an interesting answer to a question about the American capitalist system. He basically said we don’t have one. We have something else, more akin to “state capitalism.”

And by not being engaged and involved in the political process, we’ve allowed corporations and banks to “run things,” to take over government. We’ve felt powerless to effect change, and we’ve allowed them to suck up resources that should be going to fund projects and policies that directly help us and the communities where we live.

Chomsky’s comment on our so called “capitalist system:”

What’s called “the capitalist system” is very far from any model of capitalism or market. Take the fossil fuels industries: there was a recent study by the IMF, which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

I think Chomsky is saying that our form of capitalism is not one Adam Smith would recognize. In our version, fossil fuel companies fund politicians, who then vote for industry subsidies. Even though the industry is a big contributor to climate change, the government continues to promote fossil fuels. Bought senators and congressmen continue to give away money to a highly profitable industry that doesn’t need it. Money in politics has a life of its own, and it’s not benign. If a senator or congressperson stops voting for subsidies, there’s hell to pay when he or she is up for reelection. Not only will they no longer get campaign donations, they will have money being spent against them. We live under the illusion that  we have a “free-market” economy, when its more akin to a mafia-run protection racket.

Chomsky turns the conversation to banks:

And the same is true of other components of the so-called capitalist system. By now, in the US and other Western countries, there’s been, during the neoliberal period, a sharp increase in the financialization of the economy. Financial institutions in the US had about 40 percent of corporate profits on the eve of the 2008 collapse, for which they had a large share of responsibility.

There’s another IMF study that investigated the profits of American banks, and it found that they were almost entirely dependent on implicit public subsidies. There’s a kind of a guarantee—it’s not on paper, but it’s an implicit guarantee—that if they get into trouble they will be bailed out. That’s called too-big-to-fail.

And the credit rating agencies of course know that, they take that into account, and with high credit ratings, financial institutions get privileged access to cheaper credit, they get subsidies if things go wrong and many other incentives, which effectively amounts to perhaps their total profit. The business press tried to make an estimate of this number and guessed about $80 billion a year. That’s got nothing to do with capitalism.

It’s clear that without massive subsidies and bailouts, the banks would be insolvent. In a real capitalist system they would have been failed businesses. Chomsky is not the first to point this out. For nearly imploding the world economy, banks were rewarded with access to free money, which they use, not for repairing the damage they did to main street, but for speculation. Thanks to Bill Clinton removing the wall between traditional and investment banking, big banks continue to operate like gambling casinos.

Corporations, too, have been borrowing money at very low, or no interest for stock buy-backs, which raises stock prices and CEO pay. Profits are off-shored and tax-sheltered. Nothing big banks and big corporations are doing right now is helping middle class and working people. Chomsky continues:

It’s the same in many other sectors of the economy. So the real question is, will this system of state capitalism, which is what it is, survive the continued use of fossil fuels? And the answer to that is, of course, no.

By now, there’s a pretty strong consensus among scientists who say that a large majority of the remaining fossil fuels, maybe 80 percent, have to be left in the ground if we hope to avoid a temperature rise which would be pretty lethal. And, unfortunately, that’s not happening. Humans may be destroying their chances for a decent survival. It won’t kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically.

This is Chomsky’s conclusion if the current situation were to continue. But there’s a rebellion brewing against the status quo. Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Alex Tsipris in Greece, and Pablo Iglesias in Spain are openly challenging the corporate/bank/billionaire grip on their respective governments. And in Canada, the Liberal Party just won back control of Parliament after nine years of the conservative Harper government. So, there’s reason for hope.

Getting a person or party elected is not enough

We can’t pin all our hopes on another Wall Street-funded candidate. Chomsky thinks it will take pressure from a large popular movement to effectively challenge the grip of money and power on government. The job of activists and organizers, he says, is to help people understand they have power, and even though they feel powerless, they’re not powerless. “People feel impotent, but that has to be overcome.”

About Bernie Sanders, Chomsky feels it’s pretty unlikely in a system of bought elections that he could win. And even if he won, he would be abandoned by both corporate parties, In other words, he couldn’t get much done. But, even if he loses he will have made a positive contribution. Chiomsky says:

In fact, the Sanders campaign I think is valuable—it’s opening up issues, it’s maybe pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit in a progressive direction, and it is mobilizing a lot of popular forces, and the most positive outcome would be if they remain after the election.

It’s a serious mistake to just to be geared to the quadrennial electoral extravaganza and then go home. That’s not the way changes take place. The mobilization could lead to a continuing popular organization, which could maybe have an effect in the long run.

A little history

In 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama could have nurtured and expanded his extremely effective Obama for America organization to be exactly the kind of popular organization Chomsky calls for—one standing behind him and supporting him in demanding real change—but he funneled everyone into the newly formed “Organizing for America.” Organizing for America served to neutralize and eventually shut down the enthusiasm and populist energy stirred up by his campaign, thwarting any threat to the big money interests that bankrolled his election. As Gloria Bilchik wrote in 2010, OFA became a propaganda machine for the President and a subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

The best outcome of the coming election will be if Bernie’s followers form a truly progressive organization independent of the Democratic Party. It’s purpose would be to keep pressure on politicians to do the right thing for the American people.

The post Noam Chomsky: On capitalism and why electing Bernie isn’t enough appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We’re republishing this post from 2012, because it continues to have relevance to our ongoing debate about gun violence in America. After the recent mass shooting at a community college in Oregon, the media diverted attention from the problem of gun proliferation to ” how do we keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill?” Instead, we should be asking: Why do we allow gun manufacturers and importers to flood the country with tens of millions of guns every year? Why do we allow the NRA to posture as a gun enthusiast’s organization when its main purpose is to, a) sell weapons for the gun industry, and b) undermine any laws that might stem the flow of guns into our communities?

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is the lobbying arm of the firearms industry. It uses fear, racism, and focus-group tested catchwords like “freedom,” and “self-defence” to pimp sales for the over 300 firearms manufacturers in the United States. While the NRA represents itself as an association of gun enthusiasts, its real purpose is to serve the interests of gun manufacturers. To that end, it bullies elected officials into passing laws that will make it easier for the gun industry sell more rifles and handguns. It promotes gun sales among the public by stoking fear and racism. It conflates patriotism with gun ownership, suggesting individuals have a patriotic duty to own a firearm.

Playing off fear and racism, the NRA says “good,” people should carry a gun to protect themselves from “bad” people whom they perceive as threatening them or their loved ones. In its latest strategy to boost gun sales, the NRA has, with the help of ALEC, passed “Stand Your Ground” or “Kill at Will” laws in dozens of states across the country. By encouraging a vigilante mindset, these new laws have resulted in a large increase in “justifiable homicides.” Unfortunately, the recent shooting in Florida of “bad” hoodie-wearing, unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin by “good” gun-toting, neighborhood watch citizen George Zimmerman may add to that statistic.

It’s no surprise that gun sales and concealed weapons applications have boomed since Barack Obama was elected. That’s because NRA president Wayne LaPierre has been spreading the rumor that President Obama “has a secret plan to take away your guns.” The NRA has cynically used the election (and racist feelings against President Obama) to gin up gun sales—because the NRA is not about what is good for the country, it’s about promoting gun industry profits.

Politicians pander for NRA campaign contributions

At the 2012 NRA convention in St Louis, MO, Newt Gingrich—while simultaneously reaching for new heights of absurdity and new lows in pandering—called for “universal gun ownership.” In delivering the ultimate gun industry wet dream, he promised if elected president to submit a UN resolution calling for the arming of everyone on the planet. Yes, really. As quoted from Digby:

The right to bear arms comes from our creator, not our government,” Gingrich said. The NRA “has been too timid” in promoting its agenda beyond American borders. The Bill of Rights was not written only for Americans, he said. “It is a universal document.”

“A Gingrich presidency will submit to the UN a treaty that extends the right to bear arms as a human right to every person on the planet.” Every world citizen, he said, “deserves the right to defend themselves from those who exploit, imprison, or kill them.” For his latest big idea, Gingrich earned a standing ovation from the crowd of roughly 5,000.

The jaw-dropping irresponsibility of Gingrich’s craven statement, aimed squarely at the primitive reptilian brain—the one in all of us that responds to fear with fight or flight—boggles the mind. But then again, the GOP specializes in pandering to the lower aspects of our human nature in order to win elections for their corporate overlords.

The social and economic toll of gun proliferation in the United States

The Medical school of the University of Utah has collected some powerful statistics that throw a stark light on the devastating effects of gun proliferation. In the end, gun ownership has huge economic and social consequences for the United States. Here are a few highlights:

In the U.S. for 2010, there were 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308; Homicide 11,015; Accident 600. Firearm injuries are among the top ten causes of death in the U.S., right up there with cancer, stroke and heart disease.

There are over 200,000 non-fatal gun injuries per year in the U.S. Many of these injuries require hospitalization and very expensive trauma care. An older study from 1994 revealed the cost per gun injury requiring admission to a trauma center was over $14,000. The cumulative lifetime cost in 1985 for gunshot wounds was estimated to be $911 million, with $13.4 billion in lost work productivity.

A 2003 study of firearm deaths in high-income countries used data from the World Health Organization (WHO). To put these statistics in perspective, the total population in the United States for 2003 was 290.8 million while the combined population for the other 22 countries was 563.5 million. There were 29,771 firearm deaths in the US and 7,653 firearm deaths in the 22 other countries combined. In other words, of all the firearm deaths in these 23 high-income countries in 2003, 80% occurred in the US.

Accidental shooting deaths are most commonly associated with one or more children playing with a gun they found in the home. The person pulling the trigger is a friend, family member, or the victim. In the period from 1979 to 2000, accidental firearms deaths involving children declined in the U.S., aided by child access prevention laws and felony prosecution of offenders. A study of non-natural deaths in a large American city revealed that half of such deaths in persons from 10 to 19 years of age were due to homicide, and firearms were involved in 88% of them.

In a 2004 study, regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and suicide in the home. Persons who own a gun and who engage in abuse of intimate partners such as a spouse are more likely to use a gun to threaten their intimate partner.

In a 2009 study, individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault are 4.46 times more likely to be shot in the assault than persons not in possession. So much for the “self-protection” argument for gun ownership.

Forget public safety, there’s money to be made in selling lethal weapons

According to Hoovers, a Dun and Brandstreet company: “The US gun and ammunition manufacturing industry includes about 300 companies with combined annual revenue of about $6 billion. Major gun and ammunition manufacturers include Browning Arms; Freedom Group (which includes Remington Arms, Marlin Firearms, and Bushmaster Firearms); Olin; Alliant Techsystems; Sturm, Ruger & Company; and Smith & Wesson. The industry is highly concentrated.

To underscore the lucrative nature of this business, large private equity firms like Cerberus and The Freedom group have been buying up gun manufacturing companies, like Remington and Bushmaster, because they have decided there is an opportunity to grow the industry beyond what it is and make even more money.

Changing the conversation about guns in America

Do we want a country where everyone is paranoid and armed to the teeth? Or do we want a country like Denmark, that has the lowest rate of deaths involving firearms of the 23 largest industrial countries? The reason Denmark has the lowest rate is because guns are illegal in Denmark and the laws against them are stringent, putting anyone who carries a gun and is not legally allowed to do so in jail. Only police officers and soldiers are allowed to carry guns. Other weapons, such as knives or lead pipes are now considered deadly weapons in Denmark, and in recent years stricter laws have been passed for assault with those deadly weapons.

The current conversation about gun ownership in the United States is based on a misguided interpretation of the Second Amendment. Widespread ownership of guns is considered a given in American culture and discussion about guns is myopic, limited to “responsible” gun ownership vs. irresponsible gun ownership, legal gun ownership vs. illegal gun ownership, or open carry vs. concealed carry. Elected officials are afraid of the NRA and rarely take it to task . To avoid hundreds of thousands of gun injuries and deaths per year, and to create a more peaceful and safe society, we need to call out the NRA as the official pimp of the gun industry—and begin the discussion about disarming America.

The post NRA: Still the official pimp for the multi-billion dollar gun industry appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’m one of those “cord-cutters.” I’ve also given up all mainstream media news. Even though I can still watch and read it online, I mostly choose not to. The lies and distortions are reaching full on lunacy, and if I do catch a headline, or watch a clip, or read a few paragraphs of what the “voices of empire” have to say about Syria or Ukraine, it just ruins my day. I get depressed knowing that most Americans believe the false narratives spun by the White House and State Department, narratives that go unquestioned by the “journalists” who report them. These stories are designed to get the country on board with the administration’s expensive, illegitimate wars that drain resources away from the many to enrich the few.. Unfortunately, most Americans feel that If CNN or the New York Times says it’s true, it must be true.

In case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. government uses the media to demonize the legitimate heads of state in countries it wants to overthrow—most recently Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin. When the demonization starts, you know that country is in the crosshairs of the United States. We pursue “regime change” if a country refuses to bow to U.S. hegemony, is making economic alliances with other countries that threaten U.S. economic interests, or if it has resources we want, such as oil. We also destroy countries that bypass the dollar on trade settlement, as Libya was intending to do. Gaddafi was in the process of starting a gold backed pan-African bank that would serve, rather than exploit, the countries on the African continent. That was unacceptable to Wall Street and international banking cartels. Gaddafi was assassinated, and Libya, once the most prosperous country on the continent, is now a completely destroyed, failed state.

How do we invade without deploying troops? We have NATO do our dirty work, we impose economic and financial sanctions, we impose “no fly zones,” we use mercenaries, we use NGOs to stir up internal unrest and opposition, we send in  CIA-backed fighters like al-Nusra in Syria, we recruit and train jihadists to destabilize our target countries in the Middle East, and we get in bed with corrupt oligarchs and neo-Nazi’s in countries like Ukraine. We steal resources, destroy economic competition, and preserve, or restore, the primacy of the dollar as reserve currency. Most Americans have a misguided view of the United States as some sort of benign force keeping the peace and taking out “bad guys.”  Actually, we are the bad guys. 

Have a look at this moronic Newsweek cover. This is what propaganda looks like. There are deranged Neocons infesting the Obama administration, like Victoria Nuland at State, and Ashton Carter at the Pentagon. And in the DC media, you have people like Richard Cohen at the Washington Post.  They drool over the idea of assassinating Putin, installing another U.S. puppet, like the late, drunk, Boris Yeltsin, and making Russia, with its vast landmass and resources, into a vassal state. This image of Putin as a crazed power hungry “pariah” is the false narrative they want you to buy. Neocons are elitists who don’t believe in democracy. They have no problem manipulating and lying to the American people, as they did going into the Iraq War. They feel the destiny of the United States is nothing less than full-spectrum world dominance.

Humor to the rescue, or, “if I wasn’t laughing I’d be crying”

I love humor, especially when it’s used to expose a devastating truth about current events. So, in the spirit of John Stewart, John Oliver and the venerable Onion, I bring you Gary Leupp, professor of History at Tufts University. By mocking current news coverage on Syria, Leupp points to what’s not true in what we’re hearing and reading. Here’s an edited excerpt of his post “A Useful Prep-sheet on Syria for Media Propagandists”, (emphasis mine). You can read the rest of his wickedly insightful commentary at Counterpunch.

State Department talking points on Syria for cable news anchors:

• Keep mentioning the barrel bombs. Do not mention how the Israeli Air Force pioneered their use in 1948, and how they were used by the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam in Operation Inferno in 1968. Keep repeating, “barrel bombs, barrel bombs” and stating with a straight face that the Syrian regime is using them “against its own people.” Against its own people. Against its own people. Against its own people.
• Keep mentioning “200,000.” (The UN estimates that 220,000 have been killed in the conflict since 2011.) Declare, like you really believe it, that this is the number of civilians the Syrian government of Bashar Assad has killed during the war. (Do not be concerned about any need to back the figure up. No one is ever going to call you on it publicly.) Do NOT mention that around half of the war dead (estimates range from 84,000 to 133,000) are Syrian government forces waging war against an overwhelmingly Islamist opposition, and an additional 73,000 to 114,000 are anti-government combatants. Do not discuss these figures because they would call into question the claim that the Syrian government is targeting and killing tens of thousands of civilians willy-nilly.
• Keep expressing consternation if not outrage that Russia is “interfering” in Syria. Scrunch up your face and act like you think it’s puzzling. Do NOT mention that Syria is much closer to Russia than to the U.S. and that Russia faces a much greater threat of Islamist terror than the U.S. (in places like Chechnya and Dagestan that your viewers can’t locate on a map). Downplay the fact that Russia has had a military relationship with Syria since the 1950s, no more nor less legitimate that the U.S. military relationship with Saudi Arabia. (And avoid any objective comparisons of the human rights records of Saudi Arabia and Syria since the former’s is manifestly so much worse than the latter’s!) Do NOT imply any moral equivalence between Russia’s desire to prevent U.S.-backed regime change in Syria and the U.S.’s desire to inflict another Iraq or Libya-type regime change on that tragically war-torn country.
• Keep treating the Assad regime as an obvious pariah, whose leader has “lost legitimacy.” Say that with an air of authority, like you really believe that U.S. presidents—like Chinese emperors of the past or medieval popes— enjoy so much “legitimacy” that they can confer this on, or remove it from, anybody else. Study CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s facial expressions and body language when he announces—so matter-of-factly, as a self-evident fact, as a done deal—that (come on, everybody!) “Assad has lost legitimacy.” (Chris is your model. He’s the State Department’s pleasantly vapid headed scion-of-privilege poster boy, whose occasional dark flashes of indignation—especially those directed towards anyone questioning the official talking points on Russia—embody the attitude Foggy Bottom seeks to encourage in the corporate press.) Do NOT remind viewers that the Syrian government is internationally recognized, holds a UN seat, retains cordial relations with most nations and is engaged in a life-and-death struggle against people who enslave, crucify, behead, bury alive and burn alive people, and want to replace Syria’s modern secular government with a medieval religious one intolerant of any diversity.
• Keep treating Russian President Vladimir Putin as America’s Enemy Number One, an ally of a Syrian government that U.S. has said must go, deploying force in Syria to bolster Assad rather than (as Moscow claims) to target ISIL. Do NOT lend any credence to the Russian assertion that the Syrian Army is the force best placed to defeat ISIL. Do NOT point out the incongruity of the U.S. invading and attacking countries from Pakistan to Libya since 2001 while expressing alarm that Moscow is (after much hesitation) taking action against Islamist terrorists at Damascus’s invitation.
• Please keep everything simple, following the examples set by MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough and CNN’s Cuomo, and inculcate in the mind of the viewer that Assad is the main problem and most horrible actor in the Syrian situation. Tell them that Putin, while striving to revive the tsarist empire, is backing Assad as a loyal ally and using his military to prolong his rule that Washington condemns rather than (as he states) taking action against ISIL.
• If you do all this, you will demonstrate your loyalty to the State Department, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the military-industrial complex, the One Percent, your advertisers, your producers and editors, and the unsung heroes behind the scenes who arrange your teleprompter scripts.

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