The Political Revolution Continues

By Bernie Sanders, Bernie 2016

17 June 16

 

lection days come and go. But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end. They continue every day, every week and every month in the fight to create a nation of social and economic justice. That’s what the trade union movement is about. That’s what the civil rights movement is about. That’s what the women’s movement is about. That’s what the gay rights movement is about. That’s what the environmental movement is about.

And that’s what this campaign has been about over the past year. That’s what the political revolution is about and that’s why the political revolution must continue into the future.

Real change never takes place from the top down, or in the living rooms of wealthy campaign contributors. It always occurs from the bottom on up – when tens of millions of people say “enough is enough” and become engaged in the fight for justice. That’s what the political revolution we helped start is all about. That’s why the political revolution must continue.

When we began this campaign a little over a year ago, we had no political organization, no money and very little name recognition. The media determined that we were a fringe campaign. Nobody thought we were going anywhere.

Well, a lot has changed over a year.

During this campaign, we won more than 12 million votes. We won 22 state primaries and caucuses. We came very close – within 2 points or less – in five more states.

In other words, our vision for the future of this country is not some kind of fringe idea. It is not a radical idea. It is mainstream. It is what millions of Americans believe in and want to see happen.

And something else extraordinarily important happened in this campaign that makes me very optimistic about the future of our country – something that, frankly, I had not anticipated. In virtually every state that we contested we won the overwhelming majority of the votes of people 45 years of age or younger, sometimes, may I say, by huge numbers. These are the people who are determined to shape the future of this country. These are the people who ARE the future of this country.

Together, in this campaign, 1.5 million people came out to our rallies and town meetings in almost every state in the country.

Together, hundreds of thousands of volunteers made 75 million phone calls urging their fellow citizens into action.

Together, our canvassers knocked on more than 5 million doors.

Together, we hosted 74,000 meetings in every state and territory in this country.

Together, 2.7 million people made over 8 million individual contributions to our campaign – more contributions at this point than any campaign in American history. Amazingly, the bulk of those contributions came from low-income and working people whose donations averaged $27 apiece. In an unprecedented way, we showed the world that we could run a strong national campaign without being dependent on the big-money interests whose greed has done so much to damage our country.

And let me give a special thanks to the financial support we received from students struggling to repay their college loans, from seniors and disabled vets on Social Security, from workers earning starvation wages and even from people who were unemployed.

In every single state that we contested we took on virtually the entire political establishment – U.S. senators, members of Congress, governors, mayors, state legislators and local party leaders. To those relatively few elected officials who had the courage to stand with us, I say thank you. We must continue working together into the future.

This campaign has never been about any single candidate. It is always about transforming America.

It is about ending a campaign finance system which is corrupt and allows billionaires to buy elections.

It is about ending the grotesque level of wealth and income inequality that we are experiencing where almost all new wealth and income goes to the people on top, where the 20 wealthiest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million.

It is about creating an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.

It is about ending the disgrace of native Americans who live on the Pine Ridge, South Dakota, reservation having a life expectancy lower than many third-world countries.

It is about ending the incredible despair that exists in many parts of this country where – as a result of unemployment and low wages, suicide, drugs and alcohol – millions of Americans are now dying, in an ahistorical way, at a younger age than their parents.

It is about ending the disgrace of having the highest level of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth and having public school systems in inner cities that are totally failing our children – where kids now stand a greater chance of ending up in jail than ending up with a college degree.

It is about ending the disgrace that millions of undocumented people in this country continue to live in fear and are exploited every day on their jobs because they have no legal rights.

It is about ending the disgrace of tens of thousands of Americans dying every year from preventable deaths because they either lack health insurance, have high deductibles or cannot afford the outrageously high cost of the prescription drugs they need.

It is about ending the disgrace of hundreds of thousands of bright young people unable to go to college because their families are poor or working class, while millions more struggle with suffocating levels of student debt.

It is about ending the pain of a young single mother in Nevada, in tears, telling me that she doesn’t know how she and her daughter can make it on $10.45 an hour. And the reality that today millions of our fellow Americans are working at starvation wages.

It is about ending the disgrace of a mother in Flint, Michigan, telling me what has happened to the intellectual development of her child as a result of lead in the water in that city, of many thousands of homes in California and other communities unable to drink the polluted water that comes out of their faucets.

In America. In the year 2016. In a nation whose infrastructure is crumbling before our eyes.

It is about ending the disgrace that too many veterans still sleep out on the streets, that homelessness is increasing and that tens of millions of Americans, because of a lack of affordable housing, are paying 40, 50 percent or more of their limited incomes to put a roof over their heads.

It is about ending the disgrace that, in a given year, corporations making billions in profit avoid paying a nickel in taxes because they stash their money in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

This campaign is about defeating Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president. After centuries of racism, sexism and discrimination of all forms in our country we do not need a major party candidate who makes bigotry the cornerstone of his campaign. We cannot have a president who insults Mexicans and Latinos, Muslims, women and African-Americans. We cannot have a president who, in the midst of so much income and wealth inequality, wants to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very rich. We cannot have a president who, despite all of the scientific evidence, believes that climate change is a hoax.

The major political task that we face in the next five months is to make certain that Donald Trump is defeated and defeated badly. And I personally intend to begin my role in that process in a very short period of time.

But defeating Donald Trump cannot be our only goal. We must continue our grassroots efforts to create the America that we know we can become. And we must take that energy into the Democratic National Convention on July 25 in Philadelphia where we will have more than 1,900 delegates.

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Secretary Clinton and discuss some of the very important issues facing our country and the Democratic Party. It is no secret that Secretary Clinton and I have strong disagreements on some very important issues. It is also true that our views are quite close on others. I look forward, in the coming weeks, to continued discussions between the two campaigns to make certain that your voices are heard and that the Democratic Party passes the most progressive platform in its history and that Democrats actually fight for that agenda. I also look forward to working with Secretary Clinton to transform the Democratic Party so that it becomes a party of working people and young people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors: a party that has the courage to take on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel industry and the other powerful special interests that dominate our political and economic life.

As I have said throughout this campaign, the Democratic Party must support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.

We must ensure that women will no longer make 79-cents on the dollar compared to men and that we fight for pay equity.

We must fight to make certain that women throughout the country have the right to control their own bodies.

We must protect the right of our gay brothers and sisters to marriage equality in every state America.

As the recent tragedy in Orlando has made crystal clear, we must ban the sale and distribution of assault weapons, end the gun show loophole and expand instant background checks.

We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership and make certain that that bad trade deal does not get a vote in a lame-duck session of Congress.

We must resist all efforts to cut Social Security and, in fact, expand benefits for our seniors and disabled veterans.

We must understand that the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street has to end, that we need to pass modern-day Glass-Steagall legislation and that we need to break up the biggest financial institutions in this country who not only remain too big to fail but who prevent the kind of vigorous competition that a healthy financial system requires.

We must aggressively combat climate change and transform our energy system, move to energy efficiency and sustainable energy and impose a tax on carbon. It means that, in order to protect our water supply, we ban fracking.

We must compete effectively in a global economy by making public colleges and universities tuition free and substantially reduce student debt.

We must join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all people as a right and not a privilege.

We must end the disgrace of having more people in jail than any other country on earth and move toward real criminal justice reform at the federal, state and local levels.

We must pass comprehensive immigration reform and provide a path toward citizenship for 11 million undocumented people.

We must take a hard look at the waste, cost overruns and inefficiencies in every branch of government –including the Department of Defense. And we must make certain our brave young men and women in the military are not thrown into perpetual warfare in the Middle East or other wars we should not be fighting.

But the political revolution means much more than fighting for our ideals at the Democratic National Convention and defeating Donald Trump.

It means that, at every level, we continue the fight to make our society a nation of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.

It means that we can no longer ignore the fact that, sadly, the current Democratic Party leadership has turned its back on dozens of states in this country and has allowed right-wing politicians to win elections in some states with virtually no opposition – including some of the poorest states in America. The Democratic Party needs a 50-state strategy. We may not win in every state tomorrow but we will never win unless we recruit good candidates and develop organizations that can compete effectively in the future. We must provide resources to those states which have so long been ignored.

Most importantly, the Democratic Party needs leadership which is prepared to open its doors and welcome into its ranks working people and young people. That is the energy that we need to transform the Democratic Party, take on the special interests and transform our country.

Here is a cold, hard fact that must be addressed. Since 2009, some 900 legislative seats have been lost to Republicans in state after state throughout this country. In fact, the Republican Party now controls 31 state legislatures and controls both the governors’ mansions and statehouses in 23 states. That is unacceptable.

We need to start engaging at the local and state level in an unprecedented way. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers helped us make political history during the last year. These are people deeply concerned about the future of our country and their own communities. Now we need many of them to start running for school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures and governorships. State and local governments make enormously important decisions and we cannot allow right-wing Republicans to increasingly control them.

I hope very much that many of you listening tonight are prepared to engage at that level. Please go to my website at berniesanders.com/win to learn more about how you can effectively run for office or get involved in politics at the local or state level. I have no doubt that with the energy and enthusiasm our campaign has shown that we can win significant numbers of local and state elections if people are prepared to become involved. I also hope people will give serious thought to running for statewide offices and the U.S. Congress.

And when we talk about transforming America, it is not just about elections. Many of my Republican colleagues believe that government is the enemy, that we need to eviscerate and privatize virtually all aspects of government – whether it is Social Security, Medicare, the VA, EPA, the Postal Service or public education. I strongly disagree. In a democratic civilized society, government must play an enormously important role in protecting all of us and our planet. But in order for government to work efficiently and effectively, we need to attract great and dedicated people from all walks of life. We need people who are dedicated to public service and can provide the services we need in a high quality and efficient way.

When we talk about a Medicare-for-all health care program and the need to make sure all of our people have quality health care, it means that we need tens of thousands of new doctors, nurses, dentists, psychologists and other medical personnel who are prepared to practice in areas where people today lack access to that care.

It means that we need hundreds of thousands of people to become childcare workers and teachers so that our young people will get the best education available in the world.

It means that as we combat climate change and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels, we need scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs who will help us make energy efficiency, solar energy, wind energy, geothermal and other developing technologies as efficient and cost effective as possible.

It means that as we rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, we need millions of skilled construction workers of all kinds.

It means that when we talk about growing our economy and creating jobs, we need great business people who can produce and distribute the products and services we need in a way that respects their employees and the environment.

In other words, we need a new generation of people actively involved in public service who are prepared to provide the quality of life the American people deserve.

Let me conclude by once again thanking everyone who has helped in this campaign in one way or another. We have begun the long and arduous process of transforming America, a fight that will continue tomorrow, next week, next year and into the future.

My hope is that when future historians look back and describe how our country moved forward into reversing the drift toward oligarchy, and created a government which represents all the people and not just the few, they will note that, to a significant degree, that effort began with the political revolution of 2016.

Thank you very much. Good night.

Orlando: Obama Cried "Terror" Before He Knew Diddly

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

16 June 16

 

But the President was one of the saner, more decent public voices

rlando touched off the usual backflow of moral and political oral garbage that pollutes American public life, and sadly that’s no surprise. And it’s no surprise, although it always should be, that our public voices range from helpless to shrill, from limp impotence to hate-filled bigotry. It would be nice if, in the wake of the horror of the next Orlando, we could hear someone in authority somewhere say something sometime that made us proud, something that motivated us to act compassionately and rationally. But that is not where we are as a country now, and haven’t been for a long, long time, so very long that it sounds almost antique to talk today about compassion and reason, or even simple precision.

In his first comments on Orlando, President Obama promptly characterized the shooting with the demagogic red herring of “terrorism,” even though he didn’t know that, and it may not have been that in any rational sense. He certainly didn’t have to play the “terrorism” card, surely he knew others would, and he could have chosen to stand apart in thoughtful restraint. In any event, his tone was modulated and low key, even as he uttered the heedless red-flag words:

Today, as Americans, we grieve the brutal murder – a horrific massacre – of dozens of innocent people. We pray for their families, who are grasping for answers with broken hearts. We stand with the people of Orlando, who have endured a terrible attack on their city. Although it’s still early in the investigation, we know enough to say that this was an act of terror and an act of hate. And as Americans, we are united in grief, in outrage, and in resolve to defend our people….

We are still learning all the facts. This is an open investigation. We’ve reached no definitive judgment on the precise motivations of the killer. The FBI is appropriately investigating this as an act of terrorism…. [Emphasis added.]

Actually, at that point and even now most likely, we do not know “that this was an act of terror” in anything like the 9/11-al Qaeda-ISIS sense of the phrase. “Terror” and “terrorism” are slippery words that ultimately carry no useful meaning, certainly not these days in the fevered dialogue of the American public sphere. In fear-drenched America, the deployment of terror-words is itself an act of verbal terrorism that, purposefully or not, makes it harder to think clearly about what is actually happening.

“Terrorism” is Orwellian language, used to make thought impossible

Orlando was an “act of terror” only in the generic sense, in the sense that it terrified people, and that is a meaningless truism. In the political context of today, the phrase is loaded with explosive subtext, and to use the phrase is to set it off in the minds of listeners. To what purpose does the President deploy this word-weapon from the White House? Are there not adequate equivalents in English, such as “act of hate,” that the President uses almost as an afterthought? Could he not have let it go at “brutal murder – a horrific massacre”? Could he not have used unthinkable, harrowing, unconscionable, barbaric, bloodthirsty, or any other extreme equivalent instead of the politically loaded – and essentially inaccurate – “act of terror”?

In our present context, it is fundamentally inaccurate, dishonest, demagogic to speak of an “act of terror” without specifying the actual terrorist who perpetrated it. Without some ideological context, an “act of terror” like Orlando is just mass murder, which should be bad enough to warrant our attention. (Consider: were the slaughters of native peoples at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, or elsewhere just mass murder or deliberate acts of US terrorism?) Terrorism is a tactic, often a tactic of the weaker side, though not always. Terrorism is intended to weaken and demoralize the other side, to the benefit of the terrorists. It is not known to be a reliably effective tactic. The massive terror-bombing of World War II seems mostly to have stiffened British, German, and Japanese resolve to resist – until the ultimate terror-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Terrorism in our time has rarely reached anything like the scale of carpet-bombing. Today’s terrorism is typically the drone strike, the bomb in the baby carriage, the suicide bomber – attacks that wreak carnage, to be sure, but rarely on the scale of 241 dead Marines in Beirut in 1983, or even 168 dead in Oklahoma City in 2001.

To be a meaningful “act of terrorism,” the crime must be part of some plan to achieve a larger end. In this sense serial killer Ted Bundy was terrifying, but not a terrorist, while Charles Manson’s delusional apocalypticism qualifies him as at best a borderline terrorist; unfortunately, real terrorists can be both sane and rational in at least some of their behavior, as illustrated by Menachem Begin, Ho Chi Minh, Houari Boumediene, Osama bin Laden, and others. In the full context of history, however, terrorism has been less useful to oppressed people than to ruthless governments (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Andrew Jackson, and their ilk). And it’s often useful for government to fearmonger its citizens with the threat of “terror” from the likes of Omar Mateen, thereby distracting from the government’s own, greater terror campaigns (years of drone war, years of night raids in Afghanistan, over a year of genocidal war in Yemen, for a few examples).

Omar Mateen’s profile: American, Democrat, divorced, father …

If Omar Mateen is a terrorist at all, the evidence so far puts him at the Charles Manson end of the terrorist spectrum. Mateen was a 29-year-old New Yorker, a registered Democrat, an American citizen born to naturalized Americans of Afghan birth. He lived in Fort Pierce, about an hour away from Orlando. He worked as a security guard for G4S, the world’s largest global security firm, headquartered in Britain, with more than 610,000 employees in 110 countries worldwide. G4S screened Mateen when it hired him in 2007. G4S screened Mateen again in 2013, after learning that the FBI had investigated (and cleared) him. Mateen had claimed to have ties both to the Shiite Hezbollah and the Sunni al Qaeda. G4S says now that it did not know of the 2014 FBI investigation that also cleared Mateen. In 2011 and 2012 he made pilgrimages to Mecca.

He met his first wife, Sitora Ali YuSufi, on Myspace in 2008. They married in early 2009. She had left her native Uzbekistan when she was 11, as she wrote in a blog post: “Thanks to my father I spent a lot of my childhood traveling, attending private schools and fluently speaking 5 languages by the age of 8.” With help from her parents, she fled his company in August 2009, after three months of marriage (they divorced in 2011). She has an active online presence, saying now that he beat her then. She also says now that she believed then that he was gay, an opinion now being reinforced by several Mateen acquaintances in the LGBT community going back to 2006.

His current wife, Noor Zahi Salman, 30, is of Palestinian descent and grew up in a Muslim family that would not allow her to drive. She may have married Mateen in 2013, and they have a three-year-old son. She is reportedly cooperating with the FBI, whose anonymous leaks suggest she helped Mateen buy ammunition, that she drove him to the Pulse nightclub on occasion, and that she tried to talk him out of attacking it. Salman’s online presence has been largely scrubbed. Reportedly, Salman had separated from Mateen and moved in with her parents in Rodeo, California, in December 2015, but subsequently returned to Florida. The FBI maintains pressure on her in part by anonymously briefing reporters that she could be arrested for knowing about a crime in advance and not reporting it – not that they’re accusing her, they’re just sayin’.

The only apparently credible, albeit remote tie between Mateen and ISIS is an alleged 911 call he made the night of the shooting, during which he supposedly pledged some sort of allegiance to ISIS. No 911 tape has been made public. Mateen’s father observed that Mateen showed no signs of being radicalized, by the way he talked, by the way he dressed, or by growing a beard. The President and the FBI continue to search for that needle in the haystack of Mateen’s life.

Only one of Mateen’s former co-workers, Daniel Gilroy, has come forward in public. Gilroy, 44, a retired policeman, worked with Mateen at G4S, which assigned them to gate duty at a low security PGA Village. Gilroy calls Mateen “very racist, very sexist.” Gilroy says he complained multiple times about Mateen being dangerous, but nothing came of his complaints. Gilroy says he quit his job when Mateen “became obsessed” and started harassing him with more than 20 text messages and a dozen phone calls daily. These have not been made public.

Almost no credible evidence that Omar Mateen was an Islamic radical

Whatever his complexities, Omar Mateen was together enough to hold a security guard job with an international company for almost a decade. He was together enough to pass that company’s screenings as well as two FBI investigations. He was together enough to entice two attractive women to marry him. He was together enough to make two pilgrimages to Mecca and to practice his Muslim faith at least minimally. He was together enough that the FBI didn’t even try to entrap him (so far as we know).

Compared to scant evidence that he was a terrorist, the evidence that Omar Mateen was a closeted homosexual is compelling, albeit circumstantial. Numerous people have come forward to say that Mateen frequently attended Pulse, that he drank heavily and alone, that he used gay dating apps, that he frequented other gay clubs, that he flirted with other gay men, that he had gay friends, and so on. His ex-wife said he might be gay, his father insisted he was not gay. If this is true, if Omar Mateen was a closeted gay man, his apparently mixed persona makes sense – if that was who he really was, it was an offense to his religion and his Afghan culture. He had no easy way out. So he committed a hate crime. And it may also have been a self-hate crime.

The Orlando massacre was so obviously, so primally a hate crime against the LGBT community that the President and others seem almost willfully stupid in their efforts to make it somehow more about something else. Islamic terrorism is nowhere near as big a threat as good old American bigotry. Being gay or black or Latino or any number of ethnic/cultural minorities in America today is to be widely despised in America. Being poor or old or young in America today is to be widely despised in America. Americans increasingly despise each other and rally around the figureheads who bless their particular bigotries and sanctify their own murderous impulses (abortion clinic bombers and doctor assassins are real American terrorists, almost never called by their rightful name).

Even though the President misled the country with his reflexive terrorist baiting, he also spoke eloquently and sympathetically about the gay community. And he again called for controlling automatic assault weapons for the general public, albeit with comments that sounded more like resignation than a call to serious action. Twenty years ago, Australia had a mass shooting problem. Australia banned assault weapons. It worked, and Australia has had no mass shootings since 1996. What makes Americans so much more stupid than Australians?

Some of us don’t see mass shootings of LGBT people as a problem. Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California, told his congregation on the night after the shootings that Christians “shouldn’t be mourning the death of 50 sodomites…. The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is – I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job!”

Florida governor Rick Scott was quick to join the “terror” demagoguery, but his only response to the massacre was that everybody go pray. This has long been a popular political evasion, especially given its demonstrable ineffectiveness, but it helps people, especially Republicans, feel sanctimonious while actually taking no responsibility for solving the problem. Demonstrating his level of empathy and compassion, Scott also refused to acknowledge that the LGBT community had been targeted. Asked what to do to help the victims, Scott told CNN: "Just pray. Pray for the victims, pray for their families, pray that this never happens again."

In mid-May, Rush Limbaugh was talking up a new tactic for Christian bigotry for small business owners: “Instead of telling the gay couple that you refuse to bake the cake for their wedding because you disapprove of homosexuality, you should now say you are not going to bake a cake for the gay wedding because you fear Muslim backlash. Or, due to your respect of Islam, you cannot bake a cake for a gay wedding. See how that flies.”

And then there’s Donald Trump, calling for banning Muslims coming into the US – only Mateen was born here, so that wouldn’t work unless it were somehow made retroactive and people had to be removed because of where they came from and what was done there. For example, using Trumpery logic, both of Trump’s parents came from Germany, so we need to deport Trump now to protect ourselves from the threat of an American Holocaust. That should work.

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.