Friday, August 12, 2016

Editorial: Berniecrats’ Choice

The Democratic National Convention went about as well as could be expected for Hillary Clinton. On the first night, former rival Bernie Sanders gave her a strong endorsement. Some of his supporters weren’t willing to let go, and booed every mention of Clinton’s name at the convention, but they have little choice if they want to achieve what Sanders fought for.

In Clinton, the Berniecrats have a candidate who has agreed with Sanders on about 90% of his program, including the need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage; the need to create millions of new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, bridges, water systems and wastewater plants; and the need to act on climate change,.

Sanders and Clinton agreed on a proposal to guarantee tuition-free college education for most students; they want to move toward universal health care, with a public option in their health care exchange and access to primary health care, dental care, mental health counseling and low-cost prescription drugs through a major expansion of community health centers.

Clinton also agreed with the Democratic platform’s calls for breaking up the major financial institutions on Wall Street and the passage of a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. It also calls for strong opposition to job-killing free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Clinton also supports overturning the Citizens United decision which allows the wealthiest people in America to buy elections. Sanders has noted that Clinton’s Supreme Court appointees will defend the rights of workers, women, the LGBT community, minorities and immigrants and the government’s ability to protect our environment.

Bernie-Or-Busters who can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary can opt for Jill Stein, the Green presidential nominee, who might have a more progressive agenda than Sanders, but she has never been elected to an office higher than the Lexington, Mass., town council and she won’t be elected president in November. Greens are on 20 state ballots as of July, according to Ballot-Access.org.

The worst alternative is Trump, a narcissistic sociopath who has gained support from the white working class with his attacks on undocumented immigrants and free trade deals, but in his business career he has taken advantage of those trade pacts to outsource manufacturing of his clothing lines to Mexico, China and other overseas factories and he has been known to employ undocumented workers. He has resisted union organizers at his resorts and he does not support a national minimum wage; instead he thinks states should have the right to lower the minimum wage below the current $7.25 an hour. He has resisted paying small businesses for work they’ve done at his resorts and casinos, forcing many of them to accept lower fees than they had agreed to, or sue him, knowing that his legal team could delay court action and starve the contractors out.

Trump also has voiced support for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act to break up big banks, but when he announced a 13-member economic advisory team Aug. 5, Zach Carter reported at HuffingtonPost.com, the team included bankers, hedge fund managers from Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, a shale oil magnate, a real estate developer and the head of Cerberus Capital Management, a notoriously secretive private equity firm. “These are, in other words, mostly people who have backed traditional Republican policies: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation and free trade,” Carter noted. And in a speech to the Detroit Economics Club on Aug. 8, he proposed a moratorium on new agency regulations along with slashing tax rates, which amounts to a replay of Bush-era economic policy that nearly sent the world into a depression in 2008.

Unfortunately, many Sanders supporters have adopted the Republican talking point that Clinton can’t be trusted. They should know better. Clinton has been slurred over a quarter century by the right-wing echo machine and in the past few years the muck has been piled on by taxpayer-funded political action committees operated by Republicans in the House of Representatives with an eye to increasing her negatives. And they succeeded.

Progressives can and should keep an eye on Hillary to make sure she follows through on her promises, but she started left of center with an interest in public service since her college days. She may have friends on Wall Street but Trump has been looking out for his own bottom line since his daddy bankrolled his first real estate ventures in New York. And Trump won’t release his tax returns because he doesn’t want us to know about some of his more exotic business ties. If you believe in his promises of economic populism, you’re being taken for a sucker and you’re likely to join the legions who have gone broke believing Donald Trump’s promises during his long career of enriching himself.

Nicholas Kristof noted in the New York Times (Aug. 7) that a recent CBS News poll found that only 34% of registered voters said Clinton is honest and trustworthy compared with 36% for Trump. “Yet the idea that they are even in the same league is preposterous,” Kristof wrote. “If deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y.”

As of Aug. 8, PolitiFact noted that 27% of Clinton’s statements it examined were “mostly false” or worse, including 11% that were false and another 2% classified as “Pants on Fire.” In comparison, 70% of Trump’s statements were rated “mostly false” or worse, including 36% “false” and 19% “Pants on Fire.”

PolitiFact judged 22% of Clinton’s statements were true, 28% were “mostly true” and 21% were “half true.” Trump’s statements were 4% true, 11% “mostly true” and 15% “half true.”

Likewise, the Washington Post Fact-Checker has awarded its worst ranking, Four Pinocchios, to 16% of Clinton’s statements that it checked and 64% of Trump’s. “Essentially, Clinton is in the norm for a typical politician,” Glenn Kessler, who runs Fact-Checker, told Kristof, while Trump “is just off the charts. There’s never been anyone like him, at least in the six years I have been doing this.”

Trump voters often argue that Clinton is an inveterate liar and a crook, Kristof wrote. Yet when pressed, they usually draw from the same handful of examples: Clinton’s 2008 claim that she landed in Bosnia “under sniper fire” and “ran with our heads down” from the plane, her statements to the families of the four Americans killed in Benghazi in 2012, her disingenuous explanation of flip-flopping on the TPP and her accounts of her use of private email servers.

But this is junior varsity mendacity when compared with Trump, whom Kristof called “the champ of prevarication.” Politico found more than five dozen Trump statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false out of a week’s worth of public statements in March — an average of one misstatement every five minutes. The Huffington Post on March 30 chronicled 71 inaccuracies in an hourlong town hall session — more than one a minute.

Sanders supporters can be proud of what they have accomplished and we hope they have whetted their appetite toward political activism. Many of the current Democratic establishment got their starts as young supporters of progressive insurgents such as Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Fred Harris and Jesse Jackson (including Hillary Clinton, who cut her political teeth working on the McGovern campaign in Texas in 1972). Many others from those insurgent campaigns remain agitators and rabble rousers. The system depends on both sides staying in the game. A good way to keep the revolution going is the plan of some Sanders campaign staffers and volunteers to recruit and run 400-plus progressive candidates in a Brand New Congress campaign for the 2018 midterm elections.

For the next three months, however, Berniecrats and other progressive populists should work to elect Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats to help Clinton and Sanders pass the progressive agenda the Democratic platform has outlined. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2016

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Copyright © 2016 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the September 1, 2016 issue

COVER/Hal Crowther
Summer of our discontent


EDITORIAL
Berniecrats’ choice


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Was Elie Weisel our last best thinker? 


RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
Know what you eat, at home or on the road


DISPATCHES p. 5
Obamacare still not killing jobs;
US trade deficits up 8.7%;
Pope: capitalism is ‘terrorism against all of humanity’;
Trump’s ‘economic renewal’ starts with doubling down on fossil fuels, less regs;
Trump properties taking a beating;
Trump Taj Mahal to close after Labor Day;
Krugman warns 'no ight turn' for Clinton;
Right-wing provocateur O'Keefe flops in election fraud scam;
Nuclear plants lose money at astonishing rates;
Coal jobs decline with or without fed regs;
Sam Brownback’s loss in Kansas is everyone else’s gain;
Billionaire bonanza as wealth surges among 1%;
Fact checkers rebut Trump's 'pathetic' economic lies in real time ...


JILL RICHARDSON
Is solar energy really too expensive?


JOHN YOUNG
Democrats’ citizenship smackdown


SETH SANDRONSKY
Reducing US workplace violence


ROBERT BOROSAGE
Hillary Clinton and the choice


DAVE JOHNSON
A look at Clinton and Trump’s promises


GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Killing the killer


BOB BURNETT
5 Takeaways from the Democratic Convention


CLAIRE RATER, CAROL SPIEGEL and JIM GOODMAN
Consumers can stop the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms


HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
When facts meet rhetoric: The success of Obamacare


SAM URETSKY
Shared ignorance makes matters worse


MARK ANDERSON
Support your local beer


WAYNE O’LEARY
Is there a Brexit in America’s future?


JOHN BUELL
Liar, liar, pants on fire


JOEL D. JOSEPH
Brexit, sschmexit


WENDELL POTTER
It’s way past time for us to stop deluding ourselves about private health insurers


ROB PATTERSON
Rock gets rolled


MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
The grips of wrath in search of dreck


and more ...

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Just when we thought Trump could sink no lower, he calls for assassination of his opponent as if America were Chile or Iran

By Marc Jampole

To walk something back is a recent expression to the American lexicon which refers to the quibbling and prevaricating political candidates or elected officials do to show that they didn’t really mean to make a controversial remark that has sunk them into deep doo-doo.

Supporters of Donald Trump will need a “Million Man March” effort to walk back his explicit suggestion that some identified group of gun owners attempt to assassinate a President Hillary Clinton as a means to prevent her appointing Supreme Court justices who would support the 90% of all Americans who want to toughen gun control laws.

I know readers have seen and heard his exact words a number of times, but they really do capture everything that is dangerous about the Donald, so here goes: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know…

There can be no doubt what he is taking about—assassinating Hillary Clinton. The explanation he and his factotums are giving for this vile statement is that Trump is referring to the collective activity of voting, but, clearly his statement refers to a time after Clinton has assumed the presidency. Judging from the reaction by the news media and both Democrats and Republicans, this walk back was a complete and utter failure.

Assassinating the winner of an election is an American tradition, but we usually do it in foreign countries. Many of the same hardliners who approved or would have approved of our complicity in disposing of the elected leaders of Iran, Chile, South Viet Nam and elsewhere are now scared out of their minds that a major political candidate in the United States has floated the notion that the assassination of his opponent might be acceptable.

Trump’s intemperate comments mark the second time since the end of the major party conventions that he has tried to throw into question the legitimacy of the American political process.  Days earlier he started suggesting that the fall elections could be rigged. He didn’t explain how or why, but in his distorted world in which he is the Sun King, the only way he could possible lose anything would be through nefarious means. Just as after his assassination call, after Trump cast shadows on the honesty of the electoral process, a large number of prominent people distanced themselves from his remarks. Many wrote or said rigging a national election wasn’t possible, since the fifty states control the ballots.

There have been at least three rigged elections in my lifetime, all engineered by Republicans: 1) Nixon got the South Vietnamese to agree not to start peace negotiations until after the 1968 elections, depriving Humphrey of the foreign affairs victory he needed to win the election; 2) Reagan got the Iranians to postpone releasing the American hostages until after the election in return for Reagan supplying Iran with advanced weaponry; 3) Illegal purging of voter rolls in Florida gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush.  The first two are examples of rigging by influence, as opposed to our more common understanding of rigging as involving the actual manipulation of votes.

While accusing others of rigging, Trump tried to do it himself. When Trump called on Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee offices and reveal any unsavory emails, he was really asking that a foreign power intervene and help him rig an election.

Historically, however, most rigging has come before an election through denial of the ballot or making it harder for certain groups to vote. The dozens of new voter law to pass in Republican-dominated states over the past six years collectively have one purpose: to prevent minorities, the poor and the young from voting and thereby swing the election to Republicans. Thus, the assault on our democratic process and the desire to delegitimize it does not begin with Donald Trump, but is a long-time strategy of the Republican Party.

In fact, most of the really obnoxious statements the Donald has made over the past year are firmly rooted in the standard post-Reagan Republican playbook. As many have pointed out, he merely speaks with greater crudeness and explicitness than other Republicans.  He was not the first or only politician to express admiration for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin as a means to denigrate our own President.  Every Republican candidate called for building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and all of them like to conflate terrorism with Islam. Every Republican wants to lower taxes on the wealthy.

Even when he goes too far for his fellow Republicans—as when he went after Ghazala Khan, referred to a television news personality’s menstruation or suggested that women who broke anti-abortion laws should go to jail—he is reflecting the underlying sentiment of the GOP and its core voters.

The reference to assassination is different in that it probably does not reflect the thoughts of any but a handful of deranged people. But in another very important way, Trump’s suggestion that someone assassinate Hillary Clinton is very typical, because when Trump says something really sick and icky, it almost always involves women. A woman should quit a job when facing sexual discrimination or harassment. A woman is too ugly to serve as President. Ivanka is so hot I would sleep with her if she weren’t my daughter. The real reason Ghazala Khan said nothing is that she is oppressed by Islam. Let’s assassinate the first woman president of the United States.


When Donald goes so far over the line that even his supporters distance themselves from his comments, his victim is almost always a woman, which is without a doubt part and parcel of both of his underlying mental illness and his undiminished appeal to uneducated white males.