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Bernie Enters the 2020 Race With Defiant Anti-Trump Rhetoric |
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Wednesday, 20 February 2019 09:27 |
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Taibbi writes: "It's official. The Bern is in."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Bernie Sanders Raises $4 Million in 12 Hours
After Announcing 2020 Campaign
Bernie Enters the 2020 Race With Defiant Anti-Trump Rhetoric
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
20 February 19
The Vermont senator has announced his 2020 candidacy, aiming to take on both President Trump and the Democratic establishment
 t’s official. The Bern is in.
Ending a lengthy period of deliberation, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who won over 1,800 delegates and captured 43 percent of the Democratic Party vote in 2016, announced his candidacy in an email to supporters this morning.
“Brothers and Sisters,” Sanders writes. “I have decided to run for president of the United States.”
Sanders goes on to promise “an unprecedented and historic grassroots campaign” that will “begin with at least a million people from across the country.”
The email contains a lengthy list of policy positions the senator is expected to elaborate upon in the coming weeks. Sanders pledges to create a “government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice,” then adds a coda to his familiar theme of taking on special interests, including those that have traditionally held sway as donors within his own party.
“I’m talking,” he writes, “about Wall Street, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex, the private-prison industry and the large multi-national corporations that exert such an enormous influence over our lives.”
In announcing his campaign four years ago on the shore of Lake Champlain in Vermont, Sanders laid out a message-based campaign that he said was not about him, “not about Hillary Clinton,” and “not about Jeb Bush or anyone else.”
This time around, his opening email seems crafted to leave the impression that winning, and beating Donald Trump in particular, is central to his thinking.
He writes about “running against a president who is a pathological liar, a fraud, a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe and someone who is undermining American democracy,” adding that Trump is leading us “in an authoritarian direction.”
The Senator is expected to have a busy schedule of events in the next weeks to help introduce key themes of this campaign, which are expected to differ somewhat from the last race.
A second Sanders presidential campaign is bound to suffuse the Democratic primary with intense drama, as he represents one side of a profound argument tearing across the globe about populism.
From the “yellow vest” protests in France, to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in Britain, to the anti-austerity movements seen in Greece, the Netherlands to Germany, voters are increasingly rejecting the neoliberal, corporate-backed economic policies that have dominated Western democracies for a generation.
The opening email by Sanders, as expected, argues the only way to unseat Trump is with a grand, sweeping message that’s in tune with this transformational moment in history. Sanders believes he will have to build an independent movement big enough to overcome deficits in corporate money and press attention.
“They may have the money and power,” he writes. “We have the people.”
He is running less against specific opponents like Sens. Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren than against decades of pro-corporate policies endorsed by both parties, dating back to NAFTA and the deregulation of Wall Street.
This system-wide criticism has not endeared him to party leaders. To say Sanders is a controversial figure in Democratic circles is a great understatement.
Campaign post-mortems from 2016 like Shattered and Chasing Hillary, as well as the WikiLeaks dump of DNC and John Podesta emails, made clear what everyone in Washington already knew: the apparatchiks who run the Party and sit in Democrat-aligned think-tanks dislike Sanders with the heat of a thousand suns. In some quarters, he may be resented more than Trump, among other things because he represents a brand of politics that takes aim at many Beltway sinecures.
Sanders can expect diffident treatment at best by the bulk of the commentators on TV and at papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times. In those outlets, he’s regularly derided as a line-jumping socialist peddling simplistic thinking, a “geriatric Che,” as Chasing Hillary chronicler Amy Chozick put it.
A Yahoo! report from earlier this year suggesting Sanders would “imminently” announce his 2020 run inspired outrage on social media. On Twitter, a seemingly bot-driven #NeverBernie hashtag coalesced almost immediately.
Sanders took the press by surprise in 2016, when pundits condescended to a “fringe” eccentric who “rarely kisses babies” and was over-focused on “high-minded politics.”
In 2016, reporters suffering from what even the Washington Post calls “Pundititis” refused all the way up until Election Day to detect fundamental changes in national voter attitudes that elevated the Sanders campaign.
The Times earlier this year ran a piece asking:
Will candidates sprint to the left on issues and risk hurting themselves with intraparty policy fights and in the general election?
This point of view is based upon the idea that the party’s mainstream of voters does not want reduced military spending, free college tuition, expanded Social Security, legalized marijuana, a $15 minimum wage, breakups of Too-Big-To-Fail banks and other policies deemed electoral liabilities.
The Sanders campaign is centered on the idea that a majority of voters long ago came to embrace these positions. For this reason, Sanders feels he may be pushing the party in a direction that’s more electable, not less.
A key criticism of Sanders last time was his alleged lack of legislative accomplishments. His camp believes his profile campaigns against companies like Amazon and Disney, as well as leadership on issues like ending our involvement in Yemen, will head off a lot of those criticisms. His campaign also feels voters will respond to the fact that Sanders positions on Medicare-for-All, that $15 minimum wage and other issues have already become mainstream thinking among Democratic voters. He’s long trumpeted a Green New Deal, an idea as symbolically central to this brand of politics as the Wall is to Trumpism. Polls show the plan has 92 percent support among Democrats, and 81 percent support overall.
Four years ago, Sanders and his camp were taken by surprise when his “Let’s send a message” presidential run suddenly began attracting huge crowds. This time around, there are very different expectations.
From strictly a betting standpoint, there are arguments both for and against Sanders as a likely captor of the Democratic nomination. On the nay side, he is running in a much bigger field, against opponents like Warren and Tulsi Gabbard who are closer to him politically than Hillary Clinton.
On the other hand, he consistently sits at near the top of most polls, often ahead of Kamala Harris and behind Joe Biden, who has yet to formally enter.
The Democratic field is already absurdly crowded, however, with Sanders marking the twelfth candidate to formally announce. The field may have as many as 30 names or more by the time the dust settles and people like Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke, Sherrod Brown and Mike Bloomberg make up their minds.
This could set up a repeat of the “clown car” effect that paralyzed the Republican Party in 2016, when the over-large field of 17 entrants paved the way for a populist with high name recognition and a relatively insoluble base of support to ride consistent pluralities to the nomination, beating out a plethora of cookie-cutter Republicans who undermined each other at the ballot.
How many votes candidates like Warren, Gabbard and Sanders take from each other may end up determining whether something similar will happen in the Democratic field — whether a non-traditional candidate can prevail over a more “moderate” party favorite like Biden or Harris.
Sanders has drawbacks as a candidate. Currently 77, he would be sworn in as the oldest president in history. He has a not-insignificant public relations problem in regards to race, frequently branded as a white-only candidate backed by “Bernie Bros” (a term that has clear negative connotations even if its genealogy and social media ubiquity is suspicious).
Sanders also responded maladroitly to recent accusations of a harassing environment in his 2016 campaign, saying he didn’t attend to the problem because he “was a little busy running around the country trying to make the case.”
Time will reveal what voters think of the age issue, which will also come up with Biden (76). As to Sanders’ supposed weakness with minority voters, a Politico/Morning Consult poll showed him leading among potential Democratic candidates among Hispanic voters, and second to Biden among African-American voters.
His team already saw evidence last time that Sanders began to improve with nonwhite voters as he gained name recognition. His campaign also made some head-scratching decisions in 2016 that probably hurt him with nonwhite voters early.
A photo of Sanders being arrested at a 1963 Civil Rights march didn’t surface until the day of the Nevada primary, after more than half a year of campaigning, and after Georgia Congressman John Lewis famously said he “never saw” Sanders during the Civil Rights movement.
Nonetheless, Sanders years later is clearly still more comfortable talking about class than race — and what he does say doesn’t always aid his cause. This became clear in a recent GQ interview, when he drew criticism for saying, “There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino.”
Democratic opponents are sure to test Sanders here, to see if he’s found a way to make his core message about combating corporate influence and fighting for the working poor meld with modern ideas about diversity and social justice. He is expected to address these questions head-on in the coming weeks.
When first elected to the Senate, Sanders spoke to me of being surprised to learn how much power a Senator had. Instead of having to beg and plead for a few million dollars for a heating oil program or a regional health center, people like Ted Kennedy taught him that a Senator could make these things with a few words in the ear of the right committee chiefs.
That was over 10 years ago. Today, he speaks more often about frustrations with the limitations of legislative office. That frustration is one reason he resorted to using the bully pulpit in his recent successful campaigns to pressure Amazon and Disney to raise their company minimum wages.
The politician who has consistently said he’ll try anything to fix a problem has put himself in a place where the White House, and executive power, may be the only thing left to try. So as the last act in a long career, this flawed but compelling politician is running again. Whether it’s toward a mirage or real change, we’ll find out soon enough.
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RSN: Alleged "Spy" Monica Witt Is No Justification for US War on Iran |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 19 February 2019 13:39 |
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Boardman writes: "With a coordinated offensive of public relations strikes on February 13, the US government did its best to improve the climate for war by demonizing Monica Witt and further demonizing Iran. The Justice Department released a self-congratulatory press release together with a previously sealed indictment of Monica Witt and four Iranian nationals."
Monica E. Witt, a former United States Air Force intelligence officer, is accused of espionage on behalf of Iran. (photo: FBI/EPA/Shutterstock)
Alleged "Spy" Monica Witt Is No Justification for US War on Iran
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
19 February 19
Inside the government, some officials called her “Wayward Storm.” Her real name was Monica Elfriede Witt, an exemplary Air Force counterintelligence agent who had studied Persian and carried out covert missions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. – New York Times lede, February 13, 2019
… American authorities have struggled to conclude exactly why she turned on her country. – New York Times “think piece,” February 16, 2019
I served in the Air Force for 10 years and participated in both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. After viewing so much corruption and the damage we were doing both to Iraq/Afghanistan and to the perception of the U.S., I decided I needed to do as much as I could to help rectify the situation. – Monica Witt’s undated post on Iraq Veterans Against the War
 ith a coordinated offensive of public relations strikes on February 13, the US government did its best to improve the climate for war by demonizing Monica Witt and further demonizing Iran. The Justice Department released a self-congratulatory press release together with a previously sealed indictment of Monica Witt and four Iranian nationals. The Treasury Department issued a dry press release along with sanctions on two Iranian organizations and ten “associated individuals,” based on the authority of executive orders declaring national emergencies as far back as 2007. Other US agencies joining in the legal assault included the FBI, the US Attorney for DC, and the Air Force.
The government’s efforts sparked a few days of news stories generally following the official line as dictated by the Justice Department headline: “Former US Counterintelligence Agent Charged with Espionage on Behalf of Iran.” Or as the Justice Department summarized the story:
Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, a former U.S. service member and counterintelligence agent, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia for conspiracy to deliver and delivering national defense information to representatives of the Iranian government. Witt, who defected to Iran in 2013, is alleged to have assisted Iranian intelligence services in targeting her former fellow agents in the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC). Witt is also alleged to have disclosed the code name and classified mission of a U.S. Department of Defense Special Access Program. An arrest warrant has been issued for Witt, who remains at large.
And that’s pretty much how it was reported, with no attention to the internal contradiction: If Witt defected in 2013, why are we only hearing about it in 2019? Did anyone ask if the “news” was conveniently related to the US war-drumming coming out of the Trump administration? The US vice president, secretary of state, and other high-ranking officials were spending much of Valentine’s week trying to tempt its allies to be smitten with America’s burgeoning war fever for Iran. This is an obsession shared by Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Europeans were not impressed.
As for Monica Witt, American media soon lost interest, despite the heroic efforts of the Times to drag out a story with no legs. Well, no, that’s not right. The legs were there, the story’s deeper meaning is rooted in the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the myriad American war crimes committed there. But why would American media revisit such old news?
Monica Witt isn’t currently available, reportedly in residence in Iran, beyond the reach of American law and all but the most industrious American media (no known example).
But here, chronologically, is what seems to be known or alleged about Monica Witt’s life.
She was born in El Paso, Texas, on April 8, 1979. While she was still young, her family moved to Florida. Her father, Harry Witt, currently lives in Longwood.
In 1984, the US secretary of state designated Iran a “state sponsor of terrorism,” and has renewed the designation every year since. (The US also designates Syria, Sudan, and North Korea state sponsors of terrorism, but does not so designate Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Israel, or any other country.)
On March 15, 1995, the US president’s Executive Order No. 13224 declared a national emergency to deal with the threat from Iran.
Monica Witt’s mother died shortly before Witt enlisted in the Air Force “in or around August 1997” (according to the indictment). She served continuously till “in or around March 2008” (indictment). Apparently the Air Force doesn’t keep precise records, or the Justice Department doesn’t care. Air Force Times says Witt “joined the Air Force on Dec. 17, 1997.”
From February 1998, Witt spent 14 months at the US Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where she learned to speak Farsi, the Iranian language.
In May 1999, Witt “deployed to several overseas locations in order to conduct classified missions” (indictment). She remained overseas till November 2003. She served at various times in Saudi Arabia, Diego Garcia, and Greece.
On March 20, 2003, the US invaded Iraq. Witt’s conduct in the war earned her an Air Medal with the citation (omitted from the indictment):
Staff Sergeant Monica E. Witt distinguished herself by meritorious achievement while participating in sustained aerial flight from March 29 to April 18. During this period, the airmanship and courage of Sergeant Witt in the successful accomplishment of these important reconnaissance missions in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, under extremely hazardous conditions, demonstrated her outstanding proficiency and steadfast devotion to duty. The professional ability and outstanding aerial accomplishments of Sergeant Witt reflect great credit upon herself and the United States Air Force.
In November 2003, Witt was assigned as a Special Agent criminal investigator and counterintelligence officer for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), which has about 2,000 Special Agents. She conducted classified operations in the Middle East for AFOSI till March 2008. She served a tour in Iraq in 2005 and Qatar in 2006. She separated from the Air Force on June 12, 2008. From then till August 2010 she continued to work for AFOSI, but as a government contractor based. According to the indictment, Witt “held a TOP SECRET/SCI security clearance from the time she joined the Air Force in 1997 until she terminated her employment” in 2010. Her career awards and decorations include the Air Medal, three Air Force Commendation medals, and three Aerial Achievement medals.
In June 2008, Witt earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland University College. The next few years were somewhat sketchy, according to the Times: In 2011, she lived in low-income housing and at some point was homeless, but she also entered graduate school at George Washington University, from which she graduated in 2012. GW’s International Affairs Review published two of her articles sympathetic to Iran. A classmate recalled her having symptoms of PTSD, as well as talking about drone strikes, extrajudicial killings, and atrocities against children that her military colleagues would brag about. Later, in August 2012, she wrote a piece for Iranian PressTV about sexual harassment and rape in the US military (which reportedly is worst in the Air Force).
In February 2012, as the Justice Department press release puts it:
In Feb. 2012, Witt traveled to Iran to attend the Iranian New Horizon Organization’s “Hollywoodism” conference, an IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps] sponsored event aimed at, among other things, condemning American moral standards and promoting anti-U.S. propaganda.
New Horizon, the International Institute of Independent Thinkers and Artists, openly welcomes people with a wide range of views, including those who are anti-Zionist and anti-Imperialist, New Horizon is routinely demonized in the US as anti-Semitic and anti-American (as above). But objectively, what’s wrong with condemning “American moral standards?” Americans of all stripes do it all the time. And “Hollywoodism,” however defined, has long been a staple of moral indignation and cultural criticism. Are we all now vulnerable to federal indictment for such thought-crimes? According to Monica Witt’s indictment, this event is at the beginning of the alleged conspiracy to deliver secret information to Iran. The indictment also asserts that Witt’s position as a Special Agent during 2003-2008 was also part of the conspiracy beginning in 2012.
The US government also indicts Witt for calling herself a US veteran and making “statements that were critical of the US government, knowing these videos would be broadcast by Iranian media outlets.” The US also indicted her for converting to Islam in a ceremony she knew would be broadcast.
On May 25, 2012, the indictment notes, the FBI warned Monica Witt that Iran intelligence services might be trying to recruit her.
In February 2013, Witt attended another New Horizon conference and told Iranian officials that she wanted to emigrate to Iran. The Iranians were suspicious and reluctant. Clearly she was – and is – a possible double agent. The Daily Beast calls her (inaccurately) “Iran’s dumbest spy,” while inadvertently offering support for the double agent hypothesis: “that Witt’s digital fingerprints led to the exposure of a broader spy network.” The government’s belated indictment could be part of her cover. After several months of back and forth in 2013, Monica Witt allegedly defected to Iran on August 28, and may have been there ever since.
On April 2, 2015, Iran signed a multilateral agreement to limit its nuclear weapons development. On July 14, 2015, Iran and seven other parties signed a joint plan of action. The other signers were the US, France, GB, Russia, China, Germany, and the EU. On May 8, 2018, President Trump announced that the US would unilaterally withdraw from the agreement. The rest of the signers, as well as the international inspectors, continue to stand by the agreement that Iran has not violated.
Between 2013 and now, the US government would have you believe that Monica Witt “could have brought serious damage to the United States and we will not stand by and let that happen,” according to FBI official Nancy McNamara in 2019. The government alleges a variety of cybercrimes involving Witt in 2014 and 2015. That means that the Air Force was so lax that it took no precautionary measures after Witt left the service in 2008, despite her behavior being so overt that even the FBI noticed by 2012. That level of incompetence really isn’t that credible.
No doubt the government is constrained somewhat by security concerns – and embarrassment – but when it gets down to particulars, the most serious actual harm the Justice Department cites in its press release is from 2015:
The Cyber Conspirators created a Facebook account that purported to belong to a USIC employee and former colleague of Witt, and which utilized legitimate information and photos from the USIC [US Intelligence Community] employee’s actual Facebook account. This particular fake account caused several of Witt’s former colleagues to accept “friend” requests.
While the government also makes much more serious allegations that Witt revealed the names of US operatives, it does not allege specific damage from such revelations, nor from the naming of particular secret projects already many years old (if they still existed at all). Most of the other six counts in the indictment apply to Iranian nationals and the cyberwarfare that is part of current international reality and very much part of the US arsenal deployed against Iran. It’s not news that it’s a gritty world out there. For the US government to play the Monica Witt case as if it’s something that matters, when the indictment remained sealed for seven months, is dishonest. For mainstream media like the Times to promote threat inflation (especially where there is none) is reckless, especially when it feeds into a government determination to have a war at any cost. The Times helped brings us the illegal war in Iraq in 2003 and it’s well on its way to bringing us the war in Iran in 2019.
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.
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RSN: A Coup Attempt, Plain and Simple; It Could Succeed |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 19 February 2019 12:49 |
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Rosenblum writes: "Donald Trump's Wall is illusory, but the writing on it seems clear enough. He is plotting a coup d'etat, gambling that divided Democrats, media sycophants, big money and people who don't vote will enable his cult to make him a modern-day Mussolini."
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (photo: unknown)
A Coup Attempt, Plain and Simple; It Could Succeed
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
19 February 19
 UCSON, Arizona – Donald Trump’s Wall is illusory, but the writing on it seems clear enough. He is plotting a coup d’etat, gambling that divided Democrats, media sycophants, big money and people who don’t vote will enable his cult to make him a modern-day Mussolini.
Trump might watch next year’s elections play out as a disgraced has-been on the sidelines, perhaps behind bars, as Elizabeth Warren predicts. But that is a wishful long shot. If he is re-elected, America will find itself tested to a degree that is hard to imagine.
I’ve covered countless putsches since the 1960s. Military takeovers are swift, often bloody. Subverting democracy takes a lot longer. Either way, they require three essentials: fear of external threat; a rewarded ruling class that undercuts institutions; bullshit that buries truth.
Trump himself sketched out his scenario in singsong mockery when he elbowed aside Congress to confront his bogus border emergency. Legal challenges will work their way up past uncompromised judges to a Supreme Court that Mitch McConnell has allowed him to pack.
Robert Mueller has already nailed six Americans close to Trump, along with 26 Russians. Andrew McCabe says Rod Rosenstein worried enough that the president might be Vladimir Putin’s stooge to suggest on two occasions that he wear a wire into the Oval Office.
That alone would oblige a real president to clear himself of suspicion and determine whether America’s fiercest foe was perverting its elections. Trump condemns “a ridiculous partisan investigation” and repeatedly tweets “NO COLLUSION!” as if it were only about him.
The irony is breathtaking. A president who spouts a dozen untruths a day dismissed what he called Democrats’ falsehoods – in fact, official reports from U.S. agencies – that most drugs are smuggled through ports of entry. “It’s wrong,” he said. “It’s just a lie. It’s all a lie.”
Despite overwhelming evidence from veteran enforcement authorities, environmental scientists and historical experience dating back to ancient China, he declared: “Walls work 100 percent.”
Quality newspapers beaver away, reporting hard facts to the fraction of Americans who read them. Most people, instead, exchange dubiously sourced “news” on their phones when not obsessing on sports, celebrity follies and freak weather they don’t link to climate chaos.
On network television, profit supersedes public service. Ratings rule. CBS, which once gave us Murrow and Cronkite, featured McCabe on “60 Minutes.” Yet CBS Morning News undercut McCabe’s 21 years of established credibility with Sarah Sanders’ distorted slurs.
One recent morning, CBS ignored crucial news to dwell on a week-old story about a guy who fended off a mountain lion. Next up for citizens starting their day in an imperiled republic was “The Doctors.” The host’s opening line: “Do you get an erection when you poop?”
Which brings us back to Trump. He toadies up to dictators he admires. Rather than call out Xi Jinping on human rights, he lauds his solution to drug dealers: executions. And to distract from trouble at home, he beats on war drums with dire threats, risking global conflict.
Chest-bumping with North Korea, then Iran, falls somewhere between stupid and insane. Yet old GOP foes join in for their own political survival. Marco Rubio (“Little Marco,” who called Trump a con artist) now takes it upon himself to threaten an invasion of Venezuela.
Watch this space for analyses of how U.S. foreign non-policy strengthens China and Russia, while fortifying hard-right parties across Europe. India, the world’s largest democracy, is sinking fast into authoritarianism. For now, America’s existential crisis is at home.
Reporters are manhandled not only by goons at Trump rallies but also by police at the Capitol when they seek comment from legislators who represent that increasingly forgotten cohort at the heart of it all: we, the people.
Overweening authority combined with so many people who make snap judgments without weighing details create a polarized society in which extremists thrive.
A Slate dispatch just went viral under the headline: “11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.” That was in Lakeland, Florida, a year after a school massacre fired up national outrage over America’s new directions.
In fact, police said the boy was arrested because he was “disruptive” and “made threats” while being sent to the principal. School authorities faulted a substitute teacher who didn’t know that pupils are not obliged to stand for the pledge. They said police, not the school, decided on an arrest.
According to Slate, the substitute teacher asked the kid, “Why if it was so bad here he did not go to another place to live?” The answer is easy enough. Zealots don’t get to redefine America according to their own biases.
A Supreme Court justice wrote in 1943: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” There are, he added, no exceptions.
That was when America was fighting its last unavoidable war. When it ended, wise U.S. presidents repaired a broken world. They helped rebuild Germany and Japan into democracies that now do much to protect an imperiled globe from Trump’s repeated abuses.
Here is more of that breathtaking irony. Trump-think flouts America’s wealth and military clout with patriotic fervor as if those aspects were what mattered. That is fast destroying what actually makes America great: a history of defending human values.
With luck, I’ve got it all wrong. Much of America still works as it should, and smart young people are trying to fix insoluble problems bequeathed by us elders. But ask any teacher who stays in an underpaid, underappreciated profession about the bulk of today’s students.
Like the economic successes for which he takes credit, Trump inherited conditions that make America vulnerable. Since the 1980s, wealthy oligarchs have gutted public education to widen the gulf between a privileged few and the workaday majority.
It is hard to blame kids for wanting stuff flaunted everywhere in a society so focused on itself. A hedge fund tycoon just paid a $250 million for a Manhattan apartment, a year’s salary for 5,000 teachers who might inspire critical thinking about America and the world beyond.
And yet Trump brought cheers of “U.S.A.!” in his State of the Union speech with an audible-to-all dog whistle: “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country!”
What is it about that word? We live on social media. Rich matrons are socialites. Even during McCarthyism, neighbors gathered for pie socials. But add the suffix “ism” or “ist” and even America’s 99 percent freaks out.
Socialism is a wild-card word. France under Francois Hollande was hardly a communist gulag. Soviet socialism defined a capitalist system that George Orwell parodied in “Animal Farm.” Pigs ruled, walking on two legs. Some animals were more equal than others.
In essence, it simply means a system in which the rich allow the poor to have enough so they can live decently without having to take what they need by force.
Fascism, as Webster defines it, is more precise: “A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individuals and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.”
Last year someone on Facebook paired pictures of Trump and Mussolini, almost mirror images of men with jutting set jaws, and I-own-the-world gazes. I laughed at the captions: Il Duce and Ill Douche. Today, that is a lot less funny.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
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.
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FOCUS: Can Bernie Sanders Repeat His Surprising Success This Time Around? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 19 February 2019 11:43 |
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Reich writes: "It's easy to forget the condescension and amusement that greeted him when he announced his first campaign for president, in May 2015."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Can Bernie Sanders Repeat His Surprising Success This Time Around?
By Robert Reich, Guardian UK
19 February 19
Despite losing in 2016, he triumphed in other ways. Ironically, his success four years ago may impede his second candidacy
 ernie is back.
It’s easy to forget the condescension and amusement that greeted him when he announced his first campaign for president, in May 2015.
How, it was asked, could a rumpled, 73-year-old, self-described Democratic socialist – a junior senator from tiny Vermont, who was born in Brooklyn, Jewish, hadn’t even been a Democrat for most of his political career and eschewed money from Super Pacs – possibly triumph against Hillary Clinton?
In the end, he didn’t. But he triumphed in other ways.
Sanders won a surprising 46% of the pledged delegates to the Democratic national convention. His primary campaign had whipped up a storm of enthusiasm among young people and grassroots activists. He garnered more than 1m individual donations, including $20m in January 2016 alone ($5m more than Clinton), with an average individual donation of $27.
Most importantly, he showed Democrats they could run successfully on policies like Medicare for all, free public higher education, and higher taxes on the wealthy – instead of the cautious “New Democrat” centrism of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama.
Sanders put “progressive” back into the Democratic party of Franklin D Roosevelt.
Now, ironically, his success four years ago may impede his second candidacy. Not only is he four years older, Sanders is no longer the only progressive in town.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown are pushing many of the same themes and drawing enthusiasm from many of the same quarters.
And partly because of his success at mobilizing and energizing Democrats in the 2016 primaries, a slew of other presidential hopefuls are approaching the 2020 primary campaign the same way – foregoing big money, talking up the importance of reviving democracy, using social media and advancing ideas that would once have been considered too radical.
The conventional view is Sanders helped move the Democratic party to the “left”.
Wrong. Even before his primary campaign, American politics was moving away from the old right-left divide between “small government” conservatives from “big government” liberals.
Sanders helped reveal a new and deeper political divide in America – between oligarchy and democracy.
Rather than the size of government, he raised the more central question of who government is for.
Donald Trump rode a similar wave of populist anger at a political elite too cozy with big business and too concerned about its own survival to pay attention to average working people. But, as has become clear, Trump was a Trojan horse for the same oligarchy he condemned.
The American oligarchy is real. According to a study published in 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, although Americans enjoy many features of democratic governance, American policymaking has become dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans. The typical American has no influence at all.
This is largely due to the increasing concentration of wealth and economic power. In a recent research paper, one of my colleagues at Berkeley, Gabriel Zucman, found that the richest 1% of Americans now owns 40% of the nation’s wealth. That’s up from 25% to 30% in the 1980s.
The only advanced country Zucman found with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, whose oligarchy is notorious.
America has had an oligarchy once before – in the first Gilded Age, which ran from the 1880s until the first decades of the 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt called those oligarchs the “malefactors of great wealth”, and fought them by breaking up their monopolies and instituting a progressive federal income tax.
His fifth cousin, Franklin D Roosevelt, reduced their power further by strictly regulating Wall Street and encouraging the growth of labor unions.
“Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” FDR. thundered in 1936. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” Sanders effectively repeated these words 80 years later.
By the end of the second world war, the American oligarchy had dissipated – its wealth lost during the Great Depression, its power countervailed by government and unions.
But in recent years, the American oligarchy has returned.
Sanders has done more than any other politician in modern America to sound the alarm, and mobilize the public to reclaim our democracy and economy. For that alone, we are in his enduring debt.
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peaking in the first person, I personally find Andrew McCabe’s current degree of disclosure somewhat refreshing. The FBI, the CIA, and the U.S. Intelligence community, et al., have a generational credibility problem rooted in a disdain for transparency. So any reform in that regard, intended or unintended, feels constructive.
