The Corporate Democrats’ “electability” Argument — a historical fallacy

The primary argument against Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is, that even though they’re right about the most important issues (healthcare, climate change, decent treatment of immigrants), they’re “unelectable.” This is pure b.s. as the the following list of “electable” Democratic nominees shows. All of these candidates were “electable” centrists, except Obama, who ran as a progressive, but then screwed the people who elected him, leading in large part to the red wave election in 2010 and today’s political catastrophe.

Here are the list of centrist “electable” Democratic nominees over the last four decades. Please think about how well this all turned out, before hitting the panic button and voting for “electable” Joe Biden. The Democratic Party has done nothing but nominate centrist corporate Democrats since Reagan took office. Here they are:

• 1980, Jimmy Carter
• 1984, Walter Mondale
• 1988, Mike Dukakis
• 1992, Bill Clinton
• 1996, Bill Clinton
• 2000, Al Gore
• 2004, John Kerry
• 2008, Barack Obama
• 2012, Barack Obama
• 2016, Hillary Clinton

Despite his progressive rhetoric, in 1992 and 1996 it was quite apparent that Bill Clinton was just another Republican-lite corporate tool. He won anyway, while the economy was good. In 2008 and 2016, Obama won while running as a populist. He was a phony, but he won anyway. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton, running against the most grotesque, personally disgusting authoritarian the Republicans have ever nominated (Nixon included), managed to lose an election that was hers for the taking.

Why? 1) She had exceptionally high unfavorability ratings, but the establishment powers-that-be thought they could cram her down our throats because the Republican nominee was even more unpalatable; 2) She offered nothing positive, no real change, didn’t give people a single reason to vote for her other than that she wasn’t Trump — and Bernie was too far left and “unelectable” (despite him beating her in the primaries in almost all of the potential swing states).

Her campaign slogan, “I’m with her,” pretty much says it all: “I want it, I’m entitled to it, I’m going to do nothing for you, and what are you gonna do about it, vote for Trump?”

Well, that wasn’t good enough. Hillary, the “electable” candidate, lost. And only 59% of eligible voters bothered to vote. She got 28% of the popular vote (of eligible voters), Trump got 26% (but won the electoral college by about 70,000 voters in swing states), roughly 5% voted for third-party candidates. And a full 41% of those eligible didn’t even bother to vote. If only 10% of those 41% (overwhelmingly black, latino, and poor) voters felt inspired to vote, it would have been a landslide. But why didn’t they vote?

In all probability, it was because they saw no reason to, no reason to choose between a mad-dog, obvious phony Republican, who promised to shake things up, and a Republican-lite candidate who offered more of the same old same old, without even attempting to disguise it.

Over the last four decades, the Democrats have nominated eight “electable” centrist corporate Democrats. Six of them lost, and the last one who won, Obama, ran as a progressive. He didn’t win because he was a centrist, corporatist tool and was honest about it, he won because he lied to his supporters. If he’d run on what he actually was going to deliver, the only reason he’d have been elected was because of the 2008 economic meltdown, pure voter desperation, and the desire for anything different. In other words, if he’d been honest about delivering more of the same old same old (which is what he did), he might not have won.

Today, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg all offer a “return to normalcy” — a return to business as usual as the top 1% rape the rest of us, without all that nasty culture-war b.s. of the Trumpies.

The “lesser of two evils” strategy failed in seven of the last ten presidential elections. (The 2008 election was an anomaly, as Obama ran as something better, and then didn’t deliver.)

Why on earth would you think it would work any better now? Why on earth would you vote for a loser such as Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or Klobuchar?

For once, vote for a candidate who gives you a positive reason to vote for them. Odds are that a lot of previous nonvoters will join you.

Lest we forget how vile CNN is

The Democratic debate last night was a good reality check: given how openly authoritarian Trump-TV (Fox “News”) is — a combination of butt kissing (e.g., Jeanine Pirro calling Trump “almost superhuman”), goose-stepping “patriotism” that trashes almost everything America is supposed to stand for, and punching down (encouraging knuckle-draggers to blame immigrants — people even poorer and more powerless than they are — for their misfortunes), it’s easy to give CNN a pass, as CNN is at least openly hostile to Trump.

Last night provided a timely reminder that CNN, though not as awful as Fox, is still pretty damn bad. The moderators spent most of their time trying to provoke fights between the candidates, the low point being moderator Abby Phillip — after Bernie Sanders, in a he-said-she-said denied saying that a woman could never win the presidency, and offering corroborating evidence going back decades — immediately asking Warren, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?” As if that was a fact, not a dispute about what was said in a conversation between two people, with no witnesses.

To call Philip’s question/accusation grossly unprofessional is an understatement. CNN should have fired her on the spot.

Beyond that, the moderators appeared entirely unconcerned with military spending taking up 53% of discretionary spending, and with the U.S. spending as much on “defense” (largely on weapons and overseas bases, not even counting military-incurred debt servicing) than the next eight countries combined. Nope. They were concerned with the cost of “Medicare for all” — universal healthcare coverage.

The moderators’ questions all concerned the cost of such coverage. Never mind that the U.S. is supposedly the richest country on the face of the Earth, that every other industrialized country already has universal, free healthcare, that 87 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, that the U.S. has worse healthcare outcomes (e.g., infant mortality) than all of those other industrialized countries, and that U.S. per-capita spending on healthcare is at minimum twice what the other industrialized countries spend, sometimes considerably more.

No. The moderators’ concern was with the “cost” — never mind the potential savings to average Americans nor what the astronomical cost is now.

They didn’t ask a single question about how much average Americans would save under Medicare for all. Not one.

Nor did they ask what possible advantage there is in having a parasitic middle man (the insurance industry) that drains off $100 billion a year in profits, and that incurs vast administrative expenses for providers in dealing with the nightmarish tangle of private insurance coverage. (Tellingly, one of the questions was about what would happen to the “workers” in the “insurance town” of Des Moines if a single-payer plan eliminated their entirely parasitic jobs.)

As for CNN, the disgraceful performance of its moderators points toward this great advice: “Follow the money.” CNN is a corporate entity designed to maximize corporate profits. While there are some good reporters and editors at CNN, it’s utterly unrealistic to expect the network to act as anything other than a corporate tool designed to preserve the economic status quo and corporate profits.

Joe Biden’s Insane Electability Argument

Some Trump 2016 supporters voted for him out of frustration. They were totally fed up with stagnant wages and both job and home losses during the Great Recession; Obama had betrayed their hopes — he saved the big banks but not them; and the Democrats in 2016 presented them with a Hobson’s choice: an almost equally loathsome candidate who promised more of the same, or Trump, who at least promised to shake things up.

The Democrats thought they could blackmail people into voting for their widely despised candidate, who won via a rigged primary, who openly ridiculed proposals for fundamental economic change and greater fairness, and who was the most disliked Democratic candidate since polls started tracking the matter half a century ago. Trump was even more disliked, so they thought they had the electorate in a hammer lock. It was essentially, “Vote for me suckers, or it’s Trump! What are you gonna do, punks?” Clinton and her accomplices didn’t even attempt to present  a positive agenda. Her message was pure and simple, “It’s me or Trump.”

And, surprise surprise, that message failed to inspire.

The corporate Democrats had argued that Clinton was more electable than Bernie Sanders, who had a far higher popularity rating and who was calling for fundamental (if reformist) change. (Bernie’s calling his proposals a “revolution” is ridiculous — they’re a call for mild reforms within a fundamentally corrupt system. Still, they’re the best thing going on the electoral front).

Today, another longtime Washington insider, corporate Democrat and Obama accomplice, Joe Biden, has taken up the “electability” argument. He has the same do-nothing mantra as Clinton, “It’s me or Trump,” the same lack of proposals for real change, and the same stench of insider politics. (Why has his son Hunter been receiving $50K per month for being on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, a position for which his only qualification is his name? If anything, Biden has behaved honorably there. But the fact remains that his son is trading on the Biden name.)

As well, Biden has been a faithful servant of big pharma and, especially, the big banks and credit card companies, who have royally screwed average people. He was a lobbyist for credit card giant MBNA through 2005, and worked diligently to make it harder for people to file for medical-caused bankruptcy, and all but impossible for students to discharge through bankruptcy student loan debt, which has approximately quadrupled since 2005.

One thing Biden’s supporters conveniently forget to mention in their “electability” argument is that Trump received the votes of only 26% of those eligible to vote, and Clinton roughly 28%, while 5% voted for minor party candidates (almost certainly out of frustration), and a full 41% of those eligible to vote chose not to vote.

If the Democrats have the sense to nominate a candidate calling for real change (especially in healthcare), they’ll almost certainly win. Of Trump’s 2016 supporters, especially those who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, they could likely pick up one in ten. And of the 41% who didn’t vote in 2016, even if they motivated only one in ten to vote, they’d win in a landslide.

The only way they could really fuck this up is by nominating Joe Biden.

Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Identity Politics

All right. I’m bracing myself for blowback from the identity-politics wing of the Democratic Party — that part that’s more concerned about patting themselves on the back, demonstrating their virtue, and shaming their more pragmatic brethren, than defeating Trump.

Think I’m talking about Joe Biden? Wrong! Biden is a corporate sell-out hack with no discernible virtues. He backed the Clinton “tough on crime” measures in the ’90s that helped increase mass incarceration and racial sentencing disparity; as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the run-up to the disastrous Iraq War, he not only voted in favor of that disaster, but avoided calling expert witnesses who would have called Bush/Cheney’s blatant dishonesty into question. He actively abetted that crime against humanity, helped sell it, because he almost certainly thought it would be to his political benefit to do so. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he totally screwed Anita Hill at the Clarence Thomas hearings — and helped saddle us with extreme-right authoritarian Thomas — by refusing to hear Hill’s corroborating witnesses about Thomas’s gross sexual harassment of Hill.

As VP, he enthusiastically supported Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s war on whistle blowers (thus criminalizing exposure of war crimes, while letting war criminals off the hook).

He also supported Obama’s decision to save the banks while screwing the millions of people who lost their jobs and/or homes who voted for Obama, the master bullshit artist, who betrayed us en masse. (Yes, I voted for Obama in 2008, hoping that his “hope and change” promises weren’t complete bullshit, complete dishonesty — I was wrong.)

Biden also supported Hillary Clinton’s engineered Libya disaster (with no exit strategy in sight), which she thought would make her appear “tough.”

And, of course, he used his VP shoulder to prop up the Obama/Clinton policy of support for “ISIS-with-oil,” the murderous Saudi Islamic regime.

Joe Biden is a complete fraud as a representative of the working class, and a symptom of everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party.

Most recently, however, he was ambushed by Kamala Harris on day 2 of the Democratic debates. He was like a deer in headlights.  Notwithstanding that Harris’s attack was simplistic and borderline dishonest (yes, Biden did repeatedly praise racist ubermensch John Stennis), and completely missed the point, Harris did Trump a major favor.

It’s always the same with conventional identity-politics liberals, such as Harris: they pose a false dichotomy. In this case, that the “choice” was between forcing white kids to be bussed to shitty, predominantly black schools an hour away from their homes, or be “racist.”

This totally misses the point: Why are some schools shitty, with damn near no money, and others aren’t? Unequal funding!

The bussing “solution” to this is to maintain unequal, shitty schools in black areas (and around here Mexican areas), but to subject some white students to them as well to subject most black students to them, and to give a few black/Mexican students access to better “white” schools.

Can you think of a more effective way to set black and white (and Mexican) working people at each other’s throats? Why not equal funding across district lines? Or, better, across state or federal lines.

Why not? Why not equal funding? The status quo is called “artificial scarcity.” It’s how they manipulate us.

It serves the interests of the powers-that-be very well. Divide and conquer.

No one — not a single one — of the Democratic candidates, not even Bernie Sanders, had the guts to point this out. Not a one had the guts to point out that the very obvious solution is to get away from property-tax funding of schools and to turn to equal state (better, federal) funding for every damn school in the country.

No one called Kamala Harris on this. No one called her out on playing the false-dichotomy, racial-division game.

All successful improvement programs (notably Social Security, Medicare), are universal. They benefit everyone. To do less, as Harris (and Biden, and Clinton, and Obama) did is to set us up for division along racial lines — perhaps deliberately. Which plays into the hands of the GOP racists.

And let’s not even start on “reparations.” The fundamental assumption of this is that things are basically okay, but for racial disparities. Really? What reality are you living in? What about the Mexicans who the border crossed? What about the Native Americans? What about the illiterate European immigrants who died working in abusive, exploitative conditions (e.g., one of my grandfathers — an otherwise horrible excuse for a human being — who died from from silicosis after working for decades in awful conditions in a foundry — I remember at five, in the 1950s, watching him hurl his lungs up on my parents’ back porch, and then die, strangling before my eyes.) Yeah, I’m “privileged.”

Please. Stop dividing us. Please stop patting yourselves on the backs for how “woke” you are, and please shut the fuck up — please get over yourselves, stop getting in the way of real change. Real change means betterment for everyone.

Unless Kamala Harris stops playing the identity-politics card, unless she starts talking about and emphasizing measures that will make life better for everyone (regardless of race and gender), she’s playing Trump’s game.

 

Trumps First Year, Best Posts — Bernie Sanders and Trump

Over the next week or so we’ll repost our best posts on Donald Trump during his first year in office. Here’s the one from September 8, 2017:

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While watching Stephen Colbert last night, I witnessed a first: Bernie Sanders left speechless. It happened after Colbert asked Bernie to say something good about Donald Trump. Bernie sat there looking gobsmacked, about as uncomfortable as a trout gasping on the bank of a stream.

I’m sure that Bernie thought of a number of good replies later, and quite possibly slapped himself on the forehead going, “Doh! Why didn’t I say that?”

The French have an expression for this sort of thing: l’esprit d’escalier, which means thinking of a withering reply after the fact. More literally, thinking of a perfect reply while descending the stairs.

It’s an all too common human experience.

When Colbert asked Bernie the question, I couldn’t think of a single good thing about Trump, either. But I did think of one this afternoon:

“He didn’t say that all of the Nazis were ‘fine people.'”

Bernie Sanders and Trump

While watching Stephen Colbert last night, I witnessed a first: Bernie Sanders left speechless. It happened after Colbert asked Bernie to say something good about Donald Trump. Bernie sat there looking about as uncomfortable and perplexed as a trout gasping on the bank of a stream.

I’m sure that Bernie thought of a number of good replies later, and quite possibly slapped himself on the forehead going, “Doh! Why didn’t I say that?”

The French have an expression for this sort of thing: l’esprit d’escalier, which means thinking of a withering reply after the fact. More literally, thinking of a perfect reply while descending the stairs.

It’s an all too common human experience.

When Colbert asked Bernie the question, I couldn’t think of a reply, either.

But I did think of one this afternoon:

“He didn’t say that all of the Nazis were ‘fine people.'”

 

* * *

If you can think of another apt reply to Colbert’s question to Bernie, please leave a comment.

Clinton’s New Book and A Blast from the Past: Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President

Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened, will be released in a few days, so it’s time to remind people of why she would have been a lousy president — not as bad as Trump (a lobotomized Chihuahua could hardly be worse) — but lousy nonetheless.

The excerpts I’ve read have been notable for Clinton’s attempt to blame Bernie Sanders for her loss. Let’s be clear about one thing: Clinton lost because she was a wooden, status-quo, visionless candidate, who openly ridiculed Sanders’ calls for change, and whose only apparent reason for wanting to be president was personal ambition. She was a candidate who inspired no one beyond her identity-politics worshipers. (Her campaign slogan, “I’m with her,” exemplified this. What a call to arms.)

Seth Myers called her out on some of her b.s. tonight, but he didn’t go far enough: 1) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to give three $5,000-a-minute speeches to Goldman Sachs; 2) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to vote for G.W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq; 3) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to oppose single-payer healthcare (favored by about 60% of the American public); 4) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her campaign and Super PAC to rely on big-money and corporate donors rather than small donors; 5) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her to take advantage of her allies’ at the DNC rigging of the primary system; 6) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her (as secretary of state) to engineer the disastrous intervention in Libya; 7) Bernie Sanders didn’t force her, during a debate, to brag about her friendship with war criminal and mass murderer Henry Kissinger. (Yes, a minor point, but one that’s particularly revealing.)

The list goes on; these are just some of the highlights.

To reiterate what I’ve written elsewhere, we’re in some ways fortunate that Trump won. If Clinton had won, we’d have had four years of gridlock, the corporate Democrats would have retained an iron grip on the Democratic Party, the Republicans would have blamed her for everything that went wrong while being held responsible for nothing, and they’d almost certainly have retained control of both houses of Congress in 2018 and won the presidency in 2020. And with a more competent, less overtly loathsome theofascist than Trump, who is stirring up massive popular resistance.

So, here’s a blast from the past from 2013. Enjoy!, if that’s the right word.

Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President

by Chaz Bufe, See Sharp Press publisher

There are plenty of reasons that no one should ever be president, but for now let’s focus on why Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president.

She should never be president because of one single vote, the vote that authorized the illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003. No one in their right mind would accuse  Hillary Clinton of being stupid. It’s beyond dispute that she’s one of the sharpest political operatives in recent decades. So, it’s almost certain that she knew exactly what she was doing when she cast that vote. It’s almost certain that she knew it was wrong, that the “evidence” supporting the invasion had been cooked, and that the invasion would result in disaster–in untold death and misery. But she cast the vote anyway.

This is no small thing.

When the chickenhawks in the Bush Administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.) began ginning up the case for invading Iraq, it was obvious from the start that they were doing exactly that–manufacturing evidence and support for an unnecessary, illegal war. The very concept that former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Qaeda was mind boggling, absurd on the surface. Al Qaeda was and is a virulently fundamentalist religious organization. Saddam Hussein, for all his many and terrible sins, was a secularist. Al Qaeda considered Saddam a very bad Muslim.

Then there was the problem that the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, the head of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was a Saudi, his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was an Egyptian, and that Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan. From all this, Bush and company concluded–more accurately, attempted to sell the idea–that Al Qaeda’s secularist enemy, Saddam Hussein, was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and, to make matters worse, had weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s).

And most Americans bought it. Not all of us, but most of us. How did Bush and company pull off this incredible con job? They grossly manipulated intelligence, ignored evidence that pointed away from their predetermined conclusions, relied on weak and even demonstrably false evidence supporting those conclusions, smeared those who pointed out false evidence (Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame), and even set up their own intelligence operation in the Pentagon to produce the “evidence” they wanted.

Even so, they’d never have gotten away with it if the press had done its job. With very few exceptions (notably some reporters at Knight-Ridder), the press rolled over and served as the propaganda arm of the Bush Administration. It did essentially no investigation of Bush et al.’s claims, let alone expose their falsity. Rather, the press served as Bush’s megaphone. In the run-up to the war, the networks (notably CNN) hired dozens of former high-ranking military officers as “expert” commentators, and fired anti-war reporters and pundits (among them, Phil Donohue, who had the top-rated show on MSNBC). So, not only were the TV news operations not doing their job of investigating and reporting, they were actively supporting the launch of an illegal war. A study of ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS in January and February 2003 by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) found that only 17% of guests on those networks’ news programs were opposed to or skeptical of invasion, while 83% favored it.

As well, a New York Times “reporter,” Judith Miller (now, appropriately, employed by Fox “News”), served as the Bush Administration’s stenographer. She reported as fact what they told her about supposed Iraqi WMD’s, and the Times ran Miller’s reports as front-page “news.” In one particularly egregious example, Miller’s September 13, 2002 article in the Times, “White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons,” repeated White House-supplied disinformation about the “threat” of Iraqi WMD’s — and the next day Dick Cheney cited Miller’s article as “evidence” of the WMD “threat,” using the Times, the national “paper of record,” to lend credibility to his and Bush’s self-manufactured “evidence.” Of course, Miller and the Times didn’t call Cheney on his dishonesty.

Almost all of this (sans some details of the media manipulation) was obvious at the time–at least to those who were paying attention. And rest assured, Hilary Clinton was paying attention. Yet she cast a vote in favor of death and destruction on an industrial scale. Approximately 4,500 American troops died needlessly in that war, with tens of thousands more wounded, many of them maimed for life. Iraqi casualties were far higher. All of the widely cited estimates of the number of deaths caused by the war exceed 100,000, with some being much higher. The Lancet estimate, for instance, is 601,000. Then there are the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi wounded and the estimated 1.5 to 4 million Iraqis who lost their homes and became refugees as a direct result of the war.

Hillary Clinton couldn’t have known how destructive the Iraq War would be. No one could have known that. But she had to have known that it would cause death and destruction, and that it was unjustified, simply wrong. At the time, public opinion was heavily in favor of invading Iraq, with most polls showing support by roughly a 2-to-1 margin. So, Hillary Clinton made a cold political calculation and voted in favor of the war. She certainly wasn’t stupid enough to believe Dick Cheney’s b.s. that U.S. troops would be “greeted as liberators,” but she bet that public opinion would remain in favor of the war and that voting for it would be to her political advantage. Never mind the unnecessary death and destruction.

That alone is enough to forever disqualify her from being president.

Related articles

• Hillary the Hawk
• Hillary Clinton Likes to Bomb People and That Could Be a Problem for Democrats in 2016

• Ten years after Saddam Hussein’s capture, Iraq struggles with violent legacy (metro.co.uk)
• Al-Qaeda Raises Its Black Flag In Iraq (patdollard.com)
• Are Syria’s chemical weapons the Iraqi WMDs that didn’t exist? (bokertov.typepad.com)
• Torture Doesn’t Work. Law Does Work. Why Keep That Secret?! (huffingtonpost.com)
• PressTV: Congress cites 9/11 Bush cover-up, demands Obama act (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
• Iraq: ‘Christians are finished here’ (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
• Down Memory Lane (brainiac-conspiracy.typepad.com)

So, you think the Democrats are your friends?

by Chaz Bufe, publisher See Sharp Press

I’ve been putting off writing this post for some time, but last week a grotesque piece of political performance art jolted me into putting fingers to keyboard: Hillary Clinton declared herself part of the “resistance,” and announced that she was creating a PAC (!) to fund “resistance” groups she approves of (and that, presumably, approve of her).

Why is this grotesque? She’s the one-woman embodiment of the status quo, not “the resistance.”

Hillary Clinton with war criminal Henry Kissinger

She voted in favor of Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq. She was the architect of the disastrous intervention in Libya (with no plan about what would follow Qaddafi’s overthrow). During the presidential debates, she even bragged about being friends with mass murderer Henry Kissinger.

And she takes money — lots of it — from the banks and corporations, including “pay” for three speeches to Goldman Sachs between 2013 and 2015 at $225,000 each, and another eight speeches to banks in the same period garnering her another $1.8 million.

Bill Clinton is no saint in this regard, either. In February 2016 CNN documented Bill and Hillary Clinton’s receiving, to that point, $153,000,000 in speaking fees. (Yes, $153 million.)

And like those of her husband, her campaigns (and PACs and SuperPACs supporting her) have been funded predominantly by the corporations, banks, and those who own them. One strongly suspects that the ultra-rich who fund Clinton aren’t doing so out of the goodness of their hearts.

It would be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to prove that her (and her husband’s) positions are payback for that funding, but consider this: During her career in politics, she, like her husband, never even proposed any measures that would threaten her backers financially.

To cite the most prominent example of that, she has consistently opposed a “Medicare for all” single-payer system (supported by approximately 60% of the public), and instead has opted for plans which leave our healthcare in the hands of the big pharma and insurance industry vampires, whose goal is to deliver the minimum amount of healthcare for the maximum amount of dollars.

Which brings us to her predecessor. Barack Obama ran on a platform of “hope and change.” And then he systematically betrayed those who voted for him. He continued, and in some ways intensified (drone assassinations of U.S. citizens), George W. Bush’s disastrous, interventionist, neo-con foreign policy. He kept the wars going, and kept up American support for authoritarian Islamist (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Turkey) and military (Egypt) regimes.

He also promised the most open administration in history, and then delivered the most secretive, with mass surveillance of all of us, and the persecution of whistle blowers — at the same time that he completely let the banking criminals responsible for the financial crash completely off the hook.

Domestically, he proposed a stimulus big enough to keep the economy from collapsing (thus saving the banks) during the recession, but nowhere near big enough to put the 8.7 million who lost their jobs back to work. Nor did he do anything to help the 7 million who lost their homes.

What did he deliver? A singularly inadequate piece of healthcare legislation that protected big pharma and the insurance industry, and left tens of millions uninsured and tens of millions more underinsured. Obama also delivered, to some extent, on social issues that did not threaten his ultra-rich and corporate backers: gay rights and reproductive rights.

Richard Branson and Barack Obama on Branson’s yacht

Now that he’s left office, he’s been cashing in on his celebrity and connections — including being paid a $400,000 speaking fee by a Wall Street firm — and hanging out with his natural constituency, billionaires (Richard Branson and David Geffen).

Which brings us to the present, the “democratic wing of the Democratic Party” is currently trying to wrest control of it from the corporate lackeys personified by Obama and the Clintons (and Diane Feinstein, John Podesta, Chuck Schumer, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, et al.).

The corporatists recently won the first major battle, electing Obama’s Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee over Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison.

(This on the heels of the DNC’s rigging the presidential primaries against Bernie Sanders and for Hillary Clinton — by among other things drastically restricting the number of debates and by scheduling them at times almost guaranteed to deliver low viewership, thus throwing away tens of millions of dollars of free air time.)

This does not portend well. It portends more of the same: no real attempt to address the gross economic inequality in this country, no attempt to institute universal healthcare, and instead a continued focus on social issues (that are no threat to the rich), all under the stirring battle cry, “We’re not as bad as the Republicans!”

It’s time for people to wake up and realize that the Democrats (at least the Clintons, Obama, and the rest of the corporatists) are not their friends.

Instead, they’re the “good cop” in America’s perennial good-cop / bad-cop political extortion routine.

The “good cop” is not your friend.

* * *

(Chaz Bufe is the author, co-author, or translator of 12 books. His latest work is The American Heretic’s Dictionary, which is the 21st century’s equivalent of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.)

Trump’s “Mandate”

Trump’s alt-right supporters have been celebrating his election — through, among other forms of assholery, attacks on blacks, hispanics, and muslims — and acting as if he won in a landslide. But he has nothing approaching a mandate.

The Democratic corporate elite did their best to hand him one. They managed to foist upon the electorate the most disliked (or detested) Democratic candidate in history, a candidate whose unfavorability polling rate has exceeded 50% for years. They knew how unpopular she was going in; they rigged the primary process to deliver the nomination to her; and they alienated many, many of her opponent’s supporters, especially his young supporters.

They were arrogant enough to think that they could cram an incredibly unpopular candidate down an unwilling public’s throat, because they calculated that Donald Trump was even more unpalatable than she was. They thought that their perennial good-cop-bad-cop routine would once again work. They were almost right.

Donald Trump won the electoral college, but lost the popular vote, receiving about 2.6 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton; he lost the popular vote by approximately 2%, roughly 46% to 48% (with the other 6% going to “protest” candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson).

Looking at the figures more closely, one sees that the voter participation rate was approximately 59%, which means that over 40% of eligible voters were so disgusted or discouraged that they didn’t even bother to vote. They abstained in what the Democratic establishment and its water carriers were trumpeting as “the most important election of our time” (as they’ve trumpeted every presidential election in my time). Subtracting “protest” votes, only about 55% of those eligible voted for either Trump or Clinton.

And Trump didn’t win even half of those votes. Trump won with the votes of 27% of eligible voters.

That’s one hell of a “mandate” there, Bubba.

If Clinton loses, who’s to blame?

As I write, fivethirtyeight gives Hillary Clinton a 64.4% chance of winning the election. This of course means that they assign Donald Trump a better than one-in-three chance of winning.

In the event that happens, prepare yourself for a slew of articles blaming Green Party and Libertarian Party voters for that horrifying outcome.

In its most naked form the argument runs as follows: “If you don’t vote for Clinton you’re voting for Trump.” Neglecting that something akin to transubstantiation would be required for a vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson to magically transform to a vote for Trump, those who make this particular argument ignore the fact that a Trump supporter could make essentially the same assertion: “If you’re not voting for Trump, you’re voting for Hillary.” Thus the achievement of perfect symmetry.

So, neglecting that weak attempt to shift blame, if Clinton loses who really would be responsible? Let’s hit only the high points (more realistically, the low points) here:

Neglecting recent history (we’ll get to it shortly), we need to go all the way back to 1972/1973, the years in which real wages peaked. It’s been downhill from there: wages have declined as productivity has approximately doubled, with almost all of the productivity gains going to the top 1%. Democrats have done exactly nothing about this.

In fact, Democratic policies, particularly trade policies, have made the situation worse. NAFTA is a case in point. Passed under Bill Clinton, with bipartisan support in Congress, NAFTA resulted in heavy losses of manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt and at the same time devastated million of Mexican small farmers by opening up their markets to mass importation of cheap, agri-business-produced corn (which directly led to the “immigration crisis” as landless, income-less farmers streamed north due to NAFTA-induced economic desperation).

(Going back even further, bipartisan tax policies allowed [and still allow] corporations to transfer millions upon millions of American manufacturing jobs overseas, while paying virtually no tax penalties for doing so.)

Then there was Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform,” again passed with bipartisan support, which led to millions upon millions of our poorest citizens being plunged into utter destitution. Combine this with America’s disastrous mass-incarceration policies, and you end up with tens of millions living in utter misery, with little if any hope.

Follow that up with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, once more with bipartisan support, at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, and you find the seeds of the Great Recession.

Getting back to Hillary Clinton, consider her cynical vote authorizing the catastrophic 2003 invasion and subsequent war in Iraq, a war which cost approximately 5,000 American lives, perhaps 1,000,000 Iraqi lives, the squandering, at absolute minimum, of at least one trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars, and the creation of ISIS.

Clinton isn’t dumb. Far from it. She had to know that the rationale for the invasion was phony and would at best lead to the loss of thousands of lives. But she voted for it anyway, almost certainly because she calculated that it was to her political advantage to do so.

Flash forward to the Great Recession of 2008,  in which the de-regulated banks (free of Glass-Steagall restrictions) gambled massively with depositors’ funds on CDOs (based on the issuance and aggregation of bad mortgages) and lost damn near everything when the housing market collapsed — until the federal government stepped in and saved them (but not us).

At that point, Barack Obama, the “hope and change” candidate was elected. He was elected in a near-landslide, and had big majorities in both houses of Congress. What did he deliver? A stimulus package that was large enough to keep the economy going, but not large enough to help the over 6,000,000 people who lost their jobs nor the approximately 7,000,000 who lost their homes.

He also delivered a grossly inadequate healthcare program–he didn’t even try for anything better–that left tens of millions uninsured and left the insurance companies and big pharma with their fangs sunk in the public’s jugular.

Beyond that, and the grossly inadequate stimulus package, he delivered virtually nothing to the people who had elected him.

Perhaps most maddeningly, Obama’s “Justice” Department, at the same time it was zealously persecuting whistle blowers, didn’t prosecute any of the top-level banksters responsible for what has justly been called “the greatest financial fraud in world history.” (One single mid-level trader was jailed, and that’s it.)

To put it simply, Obama betrayed the hopes of those who elected him, leading to the Republican takeover of Congress and many, many state governments in 2010, and in part to the formation of the Tea Party. (Racism alone doesn’t explain the rise of the Tea Party; you need to add in Obama’s economic betrayal of those who elected him.)

Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State during this time, part and parcel of the Obama Administration. During the time she was Secretary, she gave tacit approval to the coup in Honduras in 2009, was a leading cheerleader for/architect of the disastrous intervention in Libya (with no plan as to what would follow Qaddafi’s overthrow), and also went along, with evident enthusiasm, with Obama’s war on whistle blowers. While she was Secretary of State, she displayed terrible judgment.

Which brings up her use of a private e-mail server. The FBI investigation revealed that she did nothing horrible, but it was a prime example of her hubris and poor judgment — if she wasn’t so hubristic, she’d have realized that should word of the server ever become public, the optics would be terrible.

Fast forward to the primary campaign against Bernie Sanders.

Yes, it was rigged. Over 20% of Clinton’s delegates were “super delegates,” unelected party insiders. Donna Brazile, Clinton ally and interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, fed Clinton debate questions prior to her debates with Bernie Sanders. And previous DNC chair and Clinton ally, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, restricted the number of debates between Clinton and Sanders (thus throwing away tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars of free airtime), and scheduled the debates at times that virtually guaranteed minimal viewership. (This allowed Clinton to capitalize on her name-recognition advantage with low-information voters; because of name recognition, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy would have gotten votes simply because low-information voters recognized their names but couldn’t recall what they were famous for.) Add to that the mountains of corporate and big-donor cash that funded the Clinton superpac and campaign, and it’s fair to say that the primary election was rigged.

And all this to nominate a candidate most of the public disliked or despised –going back years — prior to her nomination. All of the empirical evidence, all of the polling, during the primaries showed that Bernie Sanders was running well ahead of all of the potential Republican candidates, while Clinton was neck and neck with them. The polling also showed that over 50% of the public disliked or despised Clinton, and that her unfavorability ratings had been remarkably high for years.

Clinton’s water carriers chose to ignore, and downplay, all of this evidence while making the bizarre assertion, with no evidence to back it, that Sanders would get beat in the general election because the Republicans would red bait him. And this despite Bernie Sanders having loudly proclaimed for decades that he was a socialist, and his proclaiming it at every stop on the campaign trail. All too many Democrats bought the Clintonistas’ line of b.s., and voted to nominate the candidate most likely to lose.

In a time of widespread disgust with the status quote, the corporate Democrats managed to nominate the status quo candidate par excellence. They were betting the bank that the Republicans would nominate someone even more odious than Clinton, and that they could then extort the public into voting for her.

So, if Clinton loses, who’s to blame? Clinton and her fellow corporate, status quo Democrats, or those who refuse to give in to blackmail, who refuse to vote for Clinton simply because her opponent is even more despicable than she is?

 

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Hillary Clinton is all but Unelectable (against any sane opponent)

Two months ago we reported on Hillary Clinton’s favorablity vs. unfavorability ratings. At the time, fully 53% of the public viewed her in an unfavorable light. Since then, her unfavorability rating has risen to 55%, with only 40% of the public viewing her favorably. Further, 49% of the public say they would not even consider voting for her.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’ favorability and unfavorability ratings are a mirror image of Clinton’s. The most recent poll puts his favorability rating at 55% and his unfavorability rating at 40%. The Huffington Post’s average of 10 polls over the last three weeks has Sanders’ favorability rating averaging 47% and his unfavorability rating averaging 42%.

Which candidate is more electable?

It’s all too possible that Clinton could lose the general election if, as now seems quite possible, Sanders continues to pile up victories in the remaining primaries and caucuses, and the superdelegates hand the nomination to Clinton. Fully 25% of Sanders voters say they will not vote for Clinton, should she win (or be handed) the Democratic nomination. If it is in fact handed to her following a stream of losses, that percentage would almost certainly rise.

Clinton seems to be banking on the Republicans nominating a candidate the public loathes even more than it loathes her. It could happen. They could nominate either Donald Trump (69% negative, 26% favorable) or Ted Cruz (59% negative, 26% positive.

In such a case, Clinton would probably win a squeaker, the Republicans would retain control of the House and Senate, and we’d have four more years of the status quo: no serious moves toward reducing economic inequality; no real moves toward addressing the climate crisis; continued kid-glove handling of Wall Street criminals; continuation of the disastrous Bush/Obama interventionist foreign policy; and continued assaults on civil liberties and persecution of whistle blowers.

To make this more palatable to her backers, Clinton would throw them a few sops on social issues — especially gay rights and women’s rights. These are good things, but they’re also things she could deliver without angering her corporate backers, including those who have “paid” her $5,000 a minute to deliver speeches at their events.

This is the best we can hope for if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination.

But if, as now seems certain, the Republicans have a contested convention, and if they end up nominating anyone but an ogre (such as Trump or Cruz), all bets are off. Dislike of Clinton is so high that she could well lose to any Republican who sounds remotely reasonable.

Hillary Clinton’s specious arguments against free higher education

For months now, Hillary Clinton has been attacking Bernie Sanders’ proposal for free higher education on two grounds. One is that the country simply can’t afford it, and the second is that the country shouldn’t be funding free higher education for the rich.

Both of these arguments are, to put it mildly, deliberately misleading.

Let’s consider the “we can’t afford it” argument first.

Even ignoring that the U.S. is responsible for well over 40% of world military spending, and spends more than eight times as much as the next eight countries combined, Sanders has proposed a Wall Street tax, a transaction tax on sales of stocks and commodities that would fund his higher education proposal. It would have the added benefit of reducing speculation and high-volume day trading, thus increasing the stability of the market and reducing the prospects of another crash. Average people have a lot to gain from this proposal. The only losers would be speculators and day traders (many of whom fund Clinton).

Clinton’s second argument against free higher education is truly grotesque: that taxpayers shouldn’t be funding free education for the children of the rich. That sounds reasonable for about five seconds, until you realize that she could use exactly the same argument against Medicare, Social Security, and public schools — in fact, against any program that benefits all members of the public. Clinton — who has promised to be “flexible” on proposals to degrade (“reform”) Social Security benefits — is arguing here against all publicly funded programs to promote social wellbeing.

This transparently phony, deliberately misleading argument reveals as nothing else does Hillary Clinton’s contempt for the people who support her. She thinks they’re too stupid to see through this ridiculous argument and hold her accountable for her cynicism and dishonesty.

One can only hope she’s wrong.

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Hillary Clinton’s “Electability” Assertion

With Bernie Sanders having crushed Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, let’s take a look at Hillary Clinton’s primary argument: that she’s more electable than Bernie Sanders. That’s simply crazy. A majority of the public dislikes Clinton, and a lot of Americans outright hate her. The Huffington Post just ran a compilation of polls on Clinton’s favorability, and Clinton’s favorability rating only averages 42%, while her unfavorability rating averages 53%. (In contrast, Bernie Sanders has a 46% favorable rating and a 38% unfavorable rating.)

Even worse for Clinton, her favorability rating has been steadily falling over the last three years, while her unfavorability rating has been steadily rising. Three years ago she had a net favorable rating of a few points, with some polls giving her a net favorability rating of over 20 points. That favorability rating has vanished in all of the polls, being replaced by an ever-increasing unfavorability rating. In other words, the more exposure the public has to Hillary Clinton, the more the public dislikes her.

Why do people dislike Clinton so much? One reason is that very large numbers of people consider her untrustworthy. A New Hampshire primary exit poll, for example, showed that only 5% of voters considered her trustworthy. This figure includes Republicans and independents, not just Democrats, but it’s devastating nonetheless.

There’s very little Clinton can do about this. She’s been in the public eye for a quarter of a century, went into this campaign with an already high unfavorability rating, and it’s been getting worse. Those who disliked her going in still dislike her, and voters who weren’t paying close attention are finding that the more they learn about Clinton the less they like her.

To make matters even worse, large numbers of Republicans outright hate Hillary Clinton — listen to talk radio if you doubt this — and most independents dislike her; the latest figures are that 55% of independents view Clinton unfavorably and only 39% view her favorably. Even among Democrats, Clinton’s unfavorability rating has doubled since last summer, from 11% to 22%.

What will happen if Clinton somehow obtains the Democratic nomination? Disaster for the Democrats. She’ll energize the Republicans, who loathe her, and demoralize the Democratic Sanders voters who want real change–and who won’t turn out if Clinton is the nominee. Her only argument in the general election will be that she’s not as bad as her Republican opponent, and that’s simply not an inspiring message.

In the general election, Clinton might squeak by if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Then again, she might not.

She’s all but unelectable.

 

Divide-and-conquer political tactics

In a recent interview, Bernie  Sanders explained the divide-and-conquer tactics of the ruling class. He began by talking about the lowest-paid white workers in the country during the Civil Rights era: Mississippians.

 

What did the whole system tell these white workers, who were the lowest-paid white workers in the U.S. — in other words, these workers were being exploited.

What they said is, you can go over to that water fountain and take a drink, and this black guy can’t. You can go to this bathroom, you can go to this restaurant — Man, you got it good!

Meanwhile, we’re paying you nothing.

So you divided blacks from white, in that case, whites from blacks.

It is what they always do.

And then they go, you see that woman over there? An uppity woman wants your job, man.

You’re not gonna let that woman take your job, you’ve got to divide from her. . . .

That has been what the ruling class has done over and over again. Why?

Because they understand that when we come together, if we fight for decent wages, for education for your kids, the right to Social Security, we win. If they divide us, they win.

 

What Sanders didn’t say, but could have, is that politically correct types are actively aiding and abetting the ruling class in their divide-and-conquer strategy. They do this by their focus on race, on guilt-tripping white working class people, telling them that they’re “privileged” and asking them dishonest, condescending questions such as “Are you a racist?” (The answer of course, as they’ll generously explain, is that all white people are racists–it doesn’t matter how you live your life, how you treat other people, you’re automatically a racist because you’re white.)

This is not the way to unite people. It’s a way to keep them divided–while at the same time allowing the condescending PC types who do this  crap to pat themselves on the back for being so enlightened.

Add in awkward, artificial, off-putting language that very, very few working class people ever use, and you end up with a situation where all too many white working class people think that all politically progressive people are upper class or academic PC jerks who use strange, ugly jargon, and who look down on them. And so, white working class folks flock to right-wing political manipulators who at least speak their language, but channel the white working class’s rage onto fellow victims.

Unfortunately, the ruling class’s divide-and-conquer strategy continues to work, driving the white working class into the arms of its exploiters. Aided and abetted by arrogant PC  types who focus on race rather than economics.

One hopes that PC leftists will learn that lesson and start being allies rather than obstacles to those of us trying to make the world a better place.

At minimum, one hopes that they’ll shut up and get out of the way.

Is Trump a Fascist?

 

by Chaz Bufe, co-author The Anarchist Cookbook

 

In recent days, many leftist commentators have suggested that Donald Trump is a fascist. Neglecting that both leftists and rightists routinely and grossly misuse the term — applying it as a pejorative to anything or anyone they dislike — and that most of them have no more understanding of fascism than a dog does of calculus, is there any merit to such accusations?

Before answering that question, we’ll need to look at what fascism actually is. Here, we’ll take the examples of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

• the government’s stock in trade was patriotic and nationalist appeals, sometimes but not always targeting minorities (Hitler did; Mussolini only did so under intense pressure from Germany);
• the head of state was a demagogue, a megalomaniacal, narcissistic, pathological liar who attempted to present a folksy image (more so in the case of Hitler than Mussolini);
• the demagogue frequently cited the nation’s past glories, and promised to restore it to greatness;
• the economic system was capitalist and dominated by big corporations;
• the government operated for the benefit of big business (Mussolini proudly referred to fascist Italy as a “corporate state”);
• civil liberties were systematically suppressed in the name of national security;
• the government routinely used brutal means to maintain itself in power;
• the mass media was subservient to the government and  big business;
• the nation’s wealth was squandered on a huge military machine;
• military worship was practically a state religion;
• the nation had an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy;
• small, helpless countries were the objects of invasion;
• a majority of the people enthusiastically supported those military adventures;
• there were huge disparities in the distribution of wealth and income;
• the rights of working people to organize were severely restricted;
• the unions served to preserve the status quo;
• the government routinely intruded into individuals’ private lives;
• abortion was outlawed;
• the government embarked on a massive prison-building spree, while locking up millions of its own citizens (far more in Germany than in Italy);
• and logic, skepticism, and rationality were ridiculed, while mysticism, “spirituality,” and “patriotism” (blind support of the government) were considered the highest virtues.

(Readers interested in the nature of fascism would do well to consult Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business, William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism.)

Neglecting the many disturbing parallels between fascist Italy and Germany, and the present-day United States, is it fair to label Trump a fascist? He does use patriotic and nationalist appeals; he does target already persecuted minorities; he does routinely cite America’s past glories and promises to make it “great” again; he is a megalomaniacal, narcissistic demagogue; he is the personification of big business and the huge disparity of wealth and income in the U.S.; he’s in favor of an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy; and he’s in favor of exceptionally brutal use of government force (waterboarding those he considers enemies and murdering the families of ISIS members).

But how much does this distinguish him from the other presidential candidates? Almost all of them, Democrats and Republicans alike, use patriotic and nationalist appeals. By definition, they’re almost all narcissistic megalomaniacs–you’d almost have to be to seek the office. Almost all of them–including, very much so, Hillary Clinton–are business-as-usual types backed by the big corporations and by billionaires, who expect–and will receive–something for their money. Almost all of them, with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, are in favor of curtailing civil liberties in the name of security. Virtually all of them worship at the altar of the military. All of them, with the notable exceptions of Rand Paul and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders, are in favor of an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy. All of them are in favor of government intrusion into the private lives of individuals (except for Rand Paul, they at least tepidly support the “war on drugs” and, including Paul, but not Sanders or Clinton, oppose reproductive rights). And virtually all of them, with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and, one suspects (though they don’t dare say so) Rand Paul and Hillary Clinton, are confirmed religious irrationalists.

So, taking away Trump’s bigoted comments about Mexicans and Muslims, what is there to set Donald Trump apart from the other candidates? What is there that marks him singularly as a fascist?

Not much. Trump is simply more open about his views than the other presidential candidates. They’re horrified not because they disagree with Trump, but because he’s let the cat out of the bag.

Back in the ’80s, there was a book called Friendly Fascism. It’s an apt term. If you go by the support for, passive acceptance of, or participation in most of the matters mentioned in the bullet list, it’s fair to describe almost all of the Republican and Democratic candidates as “friendly fascists.”

Trump is different. He’s an unfriendly one.

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