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US Cluster Bombs Kill Children for Decades in Laos, and Now Yemen |
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Saturday, 10 September 2016 08:41 |
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Boardman writes: "The preposterous ironies of President Obama's unapologetic visit to Laos on September 6 have not yet generated the attention they deserve, but they provide an excellent measure of the self-righteousness of the monstrous continuity of American violence inflicted on the world from Viet Nam in the 1950s to Yemen more than sixty years later."
The wreckage of a car destroyed by a U.S. drone strike in Azan, Yemen, February 2013. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
US Cluster Bombs Kill Children for Decades in Laos, and Now Yemen
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
10 September 16
Does anyone think America is accountable for its own actions?
 he preposterous ironies of President Obama’s unapologetic visit to Laos on September 6 have not yet generated the attention they deserve, but they provide an excellent measure of the self-righteousness of the monstrous continuity of American violence inflicted on the world from Viet Nam in the 1950s to Yemen more than sixty years later.
The baldest irony of Laos is that the U.S. spent nine years bombing Laos, at a cost of more than $100 million per week in current dollars (on the order of $45 billion in all), powerfully documented in Mother Jones in 2014. Having tried to bomb Laos back into the stone age and then walked away, now, decades later, as the bombs continue to blow up Laotian civilians, the U.S. president is promising $90 million (the equivalent of less than a week of bombing) over the next three years to help clean up the mess the U.S. made. This promise of more bomb-removal aid was one of the few lines in his speech to elicit applause from his 1,000-person audience, who were likely more aware of the brutal context than most Americans. As the U.S. president described the bombing of Laos, then a neutral country:
At the time, the U.S. government did not acknowledge America’s role. It was a secret war, and for years, the American people did not know. Even now, many Americans are not fully aware of this chapter in our history, and it’s important that we remember today.
There are minor ironies in that passage. The U.S. government did not acknowledge bombing Laos then, just as it does not acknowledge now that bombing Laos was a war crime of major magnitude. The president says it was a secret war, which isn’t really true, since the Laotians and the Vietnamese certainly knew, and any American who wanted to know could find out, but now the number of Americans in denial is probably larger. And in saying “it’s important that we remember today,” isn’t it ironic that the president says this in the capitol of a country that has never forgotten, but in the U.S. his voice is as silent about these war crimes as it has been about the war crimes of his predecessor, as well as his own, in the Middle East. That allows for some future president to go to Yemen, for example, and echo President Obama by promising to help clean up the deadly debris from years of U.S. cluster bombs and drone strikes on the poorest country in the region (like Laos in Southeast Asia). The U.S.-supported atrocities in Yemen are only a few years old now but, with no end in sight, could eventually compare to the devastation dropped on Laos. In the U.S. president’s words:
Over nine years -- from 1964 to 1973 -- the United States dropped more than two million tons of bombs here in Laos -- more than we dropped on Germany and Japan combined during all of World War II. It made Laos, per person, the most heavily bombed country in history. As one Laotian said, the “bombs fell like rain.” Villages and entire valleys were obliterated. The ancient Plain of Jars was devastated. Countless civilians were killed.
In Laos, the U.S. made a whole country into collateral damage
Laos was doubly victimized by a war in which it had no part. The U.S. bombed Laos with unmerciful futility because Laos was unable to defend its eastern border with North Viet Nam, which used the mountainous region with impunity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail that was a supply route to guerrillas in the south. So when the U.S. president says with Orwellian sanctimoniousness that he acknowledges “the suffering and sacrifices on all sides of that conflict,” he’s speaking to people who were not on any side of the Vietnamese civil war or the U.S. criminal intervention in that civil war, thereby blaming the victims in Laos. Accepting responsibility for its own actions is not something the United States does. But the U.S. president has still another revision of history to offer:
And from the anguish of war, there came an unlikely bond between our two peoples. Today, the United States is home to many proud Laotian Americans.
A large proportion of those Laotian Americans are from the Hmong tribes that lived in the mountains along the Vietnamese border. U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets) recruited Hmong to help attack the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Once the U.S. lost the war and pulled out of Viet Nam, the Hmong were left to fend for themselves like so many local U.S. allies in other war zones (as in South Viet Nam, Afghanistan, or Iraq for example). Faced with the communist Pathet Lao takeover of Laos, thousands of Hmong fled, mostly to Thailand and beyond. Laos, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, remains a one-party state with close ties to China.
The U.S. is presently waging another criminal war mercilessly attacking civilians in Yemen, but this time the U.S. is on the side of the one-party state that is the lead aggressor, Saudi Arabia. Few if any American media have made the ironic connections between Laos and Yemen, but the Hong Kong based Asia Times nailed it despite running a half-wrong headline:
U.S. apologizes to Laos over cluster bombs,
then sells them to pound Yemen
The story that followed, by Johns Hopkins Fellow Christina Lin, does not mention the apology that never happened. She reports on President Obama’s speech in Laos this way:
Obama said, “Given our history here, I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to help Laos heal.” This gesture of trying to make amends for the damage U.S. caused in the past is laudable, especially since Obama is the first U.S. president to visit Laos. However, one wonders how sincere is this gesture, when U.S. turns around and sells the same cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia for a similar bombing campaign of another poor country—Yemen—that is maiming children and will likewise keep the population trapped in dire poverty and devastation for the next several decades.
The assertion, despite its relatively cautious academic prose, is as devastating and undeniable as the hypocrisy and war crimes it describes are palpable. But Lin, like others “concerned” about Yemen, keeps her rhetoric modest to the point of obscuring the truth. She describes the inhumanity of using cluster bombs without mentioning their criminality. She points out that the White House has approved another arms sale to Saudi Arabia for $1.15 billion to benefit U.S. arms makers. She does not say that without U.S. support, weapons, and ordnance the Saudi-led war on Yemen could not continue. She does manage to hint at outrage when she notes: “As a token gesture, Secretary Kerry announced a $189 million humanitarian aid for Yemen, a Band-Aid compared to the multi-billion dollar arms packages used to inflict harm on the very same people.” She does not connect this payment to the much smaller amount of conscience-salving money promised to the much smaller, but much more damaged Laos.
Reuters offers example of how to do journalism really, really badly
Whatever its shortcomings, this Asia Times piece is better than any of the non-coverage by most American mainstream media. For serious reporting on Yemen one has to go to this or other sources like Dissident Voice. International coverage is generally consistent with the official U.S.-Saudi line that usually alleges the necessity to resist Iranian influence, for which there is precious little evidence. At its worst in “respectable” media, Yemen coverage is like this Reuters filing that begins:
Egypt will host an international conference in March to coordinate humanitarian aid for Yemen, which has been devastated by a civil war, a minister in Yemen's Saudi-backed government said on Tuesday.
It’s bad enough that Reuters leads with a press release by one of the combatants. That’s sloppy and dishonest, but common enough, and at least the source is named for the careful reader to identify. It’s unconscionable to omit the Saudi role in bombing Yemen on a daily basis, and it’s unacceptable to hide that role behind the assertion that Yemen “has been devastated by a civil war,” when most of the devastation comes from the U.S.-Saudi criminal war. In this case, Reuters is in the tank for war criminals, which it makes clear in its third deceitful paragraph, which claims: “The conflict pits the Iran-allied Houthis and supporters of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh against President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who is supported by an alliance of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia.” This neat bit of propagandizing ignores the essential U.S. support that makes the war on Yemen possible, and also omits the reality that half the country or more is currently controlled by the forces of al Qaida and the Islamic State that are fighting each other as well as everyone else. As for that humanitarian aid conference in Egypt six months from now, Reuters reports that Egypt has said nothing about it.
J. Michael Springmann is a former U.S. diplomat who served in Saudi Arabia in 1987-1989, until he was fired in a whistleblower incident. To hear him criticize the U.S. participation in “a war of aggression” against Yemen, one has go to an Iranian PressTV clip on YouTube (which the Yahoo search engine warns against). In that clip he accurately expresses skepticism about the U.S. “withdrawing” military forces from Saudi Arabia. The incident he described in August involved moving the U.S.-Saudi command and control center for the bombing campaign from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, which Springmann calls “political theatre.”
Opposition to U.S. war on Yemen is tepid, laced with “Moral Idiocy”
A recent piece in Consortium News discusses the century-old psychological term “moral idiocy” in the context of American war-making since 1949. Lawrence Davidson’s main point is that the rules of war, in particular the Geneva Conventions, are not widely observed and that there’s rarely any penalty for committing war crimes, a term he eschews. He blames this on moral idiocy, the inability of our leaders to understand moral behavior and act on that understanding. He does not use the word “sociopath.” And his list of moral idiots contains only Republicans like Nixon, Bush, Cheney, and Kissinger. But is Barack Obama with his drone strikes not a moral idiot? Is Hillary Clinton with her Qaddafi killing glee not a moral idiot? Is John Kerry not a moral idiot when he says, as he did in June 2016, “I think the Saudis have expressed in the last weeks their desire to make certain that they’re acting responsibly and not endangering others.” Davidson doesn’t mention Yemen or other current wars. He doesn’t even wonder why there is virtually no anti-war movement in America today. He doesn’t seem to understand that his anodyne detachment is part of the problem, not least when he concludes: “And, who are those who most often take advantage of this loophole? Ironically, it is the very people who lead our societies and those assigned to defend the culture and enforce the law. Lack of accountability makes for very poor public hygiene.”
That sounds a lot like Pontius Pilate washing his hands.
Another Consortium News writer, Jonathan Marshall, began a piece on September 2 with wan donnish wit and profound disinformation:
If there were an Olympics for waging bloody wars, Saudi Arabia and its Arab coalition allies would surely win a medal for their relentless bombing of Yemen over the past year and a half to crush rebels who seized power in 2014.
This framing is tantamount to a lie, given that the “Saudi war” could not be waged, could not have begun, without U.S. intelligence, U.S. targeting expertise, U.S. mid-air refueling, U.S. pilot rescue, U.S. cluster bombs and other ordnance, U.S. planes, U.S. maintenance crews, and U.S. participation in the naval blockade that has brought roughly half of Yemen’s population of 26 million to the brink of starvation. By Marshall’s moral idiocy reckoning, the Saudis get only the bronze medal; the U.S. deserves the gold.
Marshall is not someone who could not know better. He started writing about Yemen in April 2015, when he said of the war, correctly:
This naked aggression against a sovereign state has never been approved by the UN Security Council and stands in apparent violation of the United Nations charter. Congress has not approved this latest act of war either.
“Right now (the operation) does not have any foundation in international law,” complained Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, not that anyone in the United States cared what he had to say.
American disregard for international law is so complete that hardly anyone cared what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had to say about the war in Yemen, either.
Even then, Marshall played the Iran card, claiming that “the Houthis also enjoy support from the Tehran regime,” without offering any detail or supporting evidence that Iranian “support” amounts to much more than a cheering section. But Marshall was also clear-eyed then about White House justifications for its new war:
In a typical example of unconscious doublespeak, Secretary of State John Kerry told an interviewer that Washington was “not going to stand by while the region is destabilized,” as if bombing will somehow stabilize Yemen.
That was then. Now, after almost 18 months of unjustified carnage that has accomplished nothing honorable, Marshall is seeing it as the Saudis’ war and is criticizing Congress for its belated opposition with a strange kind of moral detachment: “… the Obama administration’s support for Saudi Arabia’s criminal policies is at last beginning to trouble many legislators on Capitol Hill.” This “support,” unlike anything Iran is doing, is lethal, criminal, and crucial – without U.S. participation, Yemen does not suffer daily crimes against humanity.
Marshall ends with some quoted mild outrage from congressmen and senators whose anti-war efforts consist of trying to block the current $1.15 billion sale of more weapons to the Saudis. This effort is pathetic, meaningless, and quixotic – unless a lot of Republicans decide to go along. Even success in blocking this sale will do nothing to help Yemen. All it could do is send the Saudis to other markets and deprive U.S. arms merchants of some undeserved profits. Yes, blocking the sale is good in and of itself, but in the context of continuing U.S. war crimes in Yemen, it’s a deceitful bad joke.
If Americans want to do something decent for Yemen, then Americans need to hold their own country accountable.
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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Pipelines or Pipe Dreams: What Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Gets Wrong About Syria |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 09 September 2016 14:24 |
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Weissman writes: "Like so many Americans, Kennedy tells the Syrian story almost wholly from a U.S. perspective."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois, in 2007. (photo: WikiMedia)
Pipelines or Pipe Dreams: What Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Gets Wrong About Syria
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
09 September 16
  ur war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011,” writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.”
RFK Jr., the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, claims to speak here for many unnamed Syrians, as the controversial blogger Clay Claiborne pointed out. Like so many Americans, Kennedy tells the Syrian story almost wholly from a U.S. perspective. He disregards the ongoing conflict between Syria’s Sunni Arabs and the ruling Alawites and their minority allies. He ignores the long years of homegrown struggle against the brutal dictatorship of Bashar’s father, Hafiz al-Assad. He says little of the Turks, who at times backed Bashar and aided the Islamic State, or of the Turkish, Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian Kurds, who so often pursue very different agendas. And when he mentions the all-important rivalry between Bashar’s supporters in Shi’a Iran and his current opponents in Sunni Qatar and Saudi Arabia, he reduces it largely to a fight over competing natural gas pipeline proposals, which RFK Jr. gives as the primary reason for American intervention.
In 2009, he tells us, the Qataris and Saudi pushed Assad to accept their proposed pipeline, which would pass through Syria to Turkey and then to the European market. Assad refused. Going along with his Russian allies, he favored a proposed “Islamic pipeline” that would go from Iran through Syria to the ports of Lebanon. Assad’s refusal is the lynchpin of Kennedy’s argument.
“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link,” he says.
“In 2009, according to WikiLeaks,” he adds, “soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.”
Except for the WikiLeaked documents, Kennedy gives us no way to verify his “secret cables and reports” to see if they explicitly tie the decision to overthrow Assad to his rejecting the proposed pipeline. If they make the connection, Kennedy needs to tell us how they describe it. If they do not, he needs to tell us why not. Either way, ample evidence refutes his argument, since the U.S. was planning regime change in Syria and funding opposition to Assad years before he refused to go along with the Qatari pipeline.
Former NATO commander Wesley Clark happened to be at the Pentagon on September 20, 2001, when one of the generals called him into his office. “They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq,” the general told him. A few weeks later, Clark returned to the Pentagon. His friend had just received a piece of paper from the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
This appears to be the first official mention of taking out Syria. Gen. Clark makes no claim that the memo reflected any final decision by President George W. Bush, only that it came either from Rumsfeld or the people around him, which included several high-ranking neocons like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. It showed their thinking at the time, which went worlds beyond any proposed Qatari pipeline or Bashar’s much later refusal to accept it.
American officials increasingly berated Assad for helping insurgents in Iraq, and the State Department began trying to fund a handful of “pro-Democracy” individuals and groups at least as early as 2005. State also began the following year to consider military action against the regime, as Kennedy himself admits.
“WikiLeaks cables from as early as 2006 show the U.S. State Department, at the urging of the Israeli government, proposing to partner with Turkey, Qatar and Egypt to foment Sunni civil war in Syria to weaken Iran,” he writes. “The stated purpose, according to the secret cable, was to incite Assad into a brutal crackdown of Syria's Sunni population.”
With Assad’s rejection of the proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline, the issue gained some importance, but even then it remained only a small factor. The conflict between the Sunni kingdoms of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Shi’a Iran had grown far more geo-strategic, as I tried to explain in “Obama bin Sultan and Bandar ibn Israel.”
RFK Jr. is hardly the first to reduce such complexities to pipelines. During the early days of George W. Bush’s military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, many left-wing activists saw the primary motivation in the desire of Unocal and other U.S. oil companies to build an oil pipeline from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. They were often would-be Marxists using a knee-jerk economic determinism to “explain” a situation where the facts did not support the argument. But friends repeated it as gospel. Some probably still do.
The wonderfully entertaining writer Pepe Escobar takes the simplification even further – though with tongue in cheek, I suspect ? explaining most recent conflicts in the Greater Middle East as part of what he calls “Pipelineistan.” Pipelines may or may not play a role in a specific case. But they are rarely anywhere near the whole story. Lots of pipelines are proposed, touted in intergovernmental agreements, and bandied about in the global game. Many of the proposed pipelines never get built, as people in both the industry and government ministries know.
No question that oil and natural gas play a huge role in determining U.S. policy. But so does promoting a market in both the Pentagon budget and overseas sales for American aircraft, rockets, and other weapons of war. Along with U.S. bases and increasing numbers of military contractors throughout the region and around the world, these are what the military-industrial complex is all about.
Policymakers also factor in their desire to maintain what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls “American global primacy,” including an effort to impede the rise of any rival, whether Russia, China, or some coalition of Islamic or other nations.
One other element helps put all of this in perspective. Policymakers may choose to do the bidding of an influential ally, say Israel, as the Obama administration has at times done in Syria, but chose not to do in pursuing the nuclear deal with Iran. Take the WikiLeaked email from Hillary Clinton in which she says, “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.”
“What Israeli military leaders really worry about ? but cannot talk about ? is losing their nuclear monopoly,” she explained in December 2013. “An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that nuclear monopoly but could also prompt other adversaries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go nuclear as well. The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today. If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself.”
Clinton’s email goes a long way to explain the nuances of U.S. policy toward Israel and Iran. But it does not prove, as many have assumed, that Washington intervened in Syria primarily on Israel’s behalf. That is certainly part of the story, just as are Kennedy’s competing pipeline proposals. But, as journalist Patrick Cockburn reminds us, the conflict in Syria and U.S. involvement in it is infinitely complex, much like three-dimensional chess played by nine players and with no rules.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
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 | Our Revolution Board: "Honored to Be on Front Lines" |
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Friday, 09 September 2016 10:52 |
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Galindez writes: "I know that many of us have wondered what form the political revolution will take. We are finally seeing things take shape."
Hundreds of people marched peacefully on September 4, to protest the destruction of sacred sites and burial grounds in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. (photo: Dallas Goldtooth)
ALSO SEE: Dakota Access Pipeline
Decision Expected; National Guard on Alert
Our Revolution Board: "Honored to Be on Front Lines"
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
09 September 16
 know that many of us have wondered what form the political revolution will take. We are finally seeing things take shape. Many are disappointed with the tax classification, which does not allow coordination with electoral campaigns. Some are siding with former staff who resigned in protest of Jeff Weaver being named president. I do not share these concerns, and here is why.
501(c)(4) Status
Our Revolution is just beginning to build an organizational infrastructure. The organization needs to create its identity not just at the ballot box but also in supporting social movements. A 501(c)(4) tax exempt group focuses significant portions of its resources on social welfare work.
Our Revolution in my opinion needs to develop its mission outside the electoral arena as well as inside. I believe that once it establishes its role in the progressive movement, supporting things like the movement against the TPP, the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Fight for 15, etc., the organization can take the step to form a PAC focusing more on direct electoral work.
I guess what I am trying to say is let the movement form around the issues that we support and not around the candidates in the beginning. The candidates need to gain the support of the movement, so build the movement first.
As a 501(c)(4), Our Revolution can lay the groundwork for political activity by training activists and developing candidates for the future. Our Revolution can endorse and independently campaign for candidates as long as they don’t coordinate with the campaign. While there are limitations, quite frankly, I want candidates to be independent from the influence of PAC’s anyway. I want Our Revolution to support candidates who are worth supporting because of who they already are, not who we can mold them into. If a candidate only supports the Fight for 15 because we are supporting his campaign, he can be bought later by the other side.
So 501(c)(4) now, PAC later – once we identify who we are and what we stand for as a movement. That’s the model of groups like MoveOn and Progressive Democrats of America.
And let’s be honest, none of the options are perfect. It is a corrupt political system that we have to use to take power. Once in power we can transform it.
Bernie Trusts Jeff Weaver
Originally the president of Our Revolution was slated to be Jane Sanders. Concerns rose that since it was a 501(c)(4) it wouldn’t be a good idea for the wife of a United States senator to run the organization. So the person Bernie trusts most was replaced by another longtime trusted friend and advisor he has worked with for decades.
In my year and a half of covering the campaign, Jeff Weaver was always accessible and supportive of my work. Other campaigns treat the non-corporate media differently than they treat the big boys. Whenever I saw Jeff, he answered questions and took time to come on camera. Other campaigns’ management is not as accessible. In the beginning that may have been because any media attention they could muster was important. As the campaign grew and the size of the media pool covering the campaign grew, Jeff Weaver didn’t change; he treated me the same as he did when it was only a few of us covering the campaign.
I would have concerns if Jeff Weaver were what I will call a “campaign hack,” someone who jumps from campaign to campaign adjusting to the views of the client. That is not Jeff Weaver. He has been working with Bernie for decades, and has earned our trust.
According to Wikileaks:
“Jeff Weaver attended Boston University, where he participated in civil disobedience and was eventually expelled. Weaver became active in the anti-apartheid movement and he was arrested on April 24, 1986, for disorderly conduct, along with 10 other students; they became known as the “BU Eleven.” The group began building shanties on campus and tried to prevent university employees from tearing them down.
“Also in 1986, Weaver and three other students sued the university for the right to hang banners outside their dormitories. Yosef Abramowitz and two other students had displayed signs promoting divestment of the university with companies doing business with South Africa. When Abramowitz’s sign was taken down, Weaver hung an American flag and two signs, one a Marine recruiting poster and the other reading “In Solidarity With Yosef.” The university claimed it had a policy against dormitory banner displays, but the students argued it was selectively enforced, violating the right to free speech. The courts ruled in the students’ favor, providing an immediate injunction against the students being forced to leave their dormitories, and also issuing a permanent injunction preventing the university from taking disciplinary action against the four for exercising their right of free speech.
“Weaver’s first role as a campaign staffer was in 1986 when he worked for Bernie Sanders’s gubernatorial campaign as an Independent. Weaver served as a driver for Sanders.
“In 1987, one year after his involvement with the Sanders gubernatorial campaign, Weaver launched a campaign of his own, running for St. Albans City Ward 4 alderman. He was 21 years old and known locally for his efforts to register new voters. In 1990, Weaver challenged incumbent St. Albans mayor Ron Firkey for his seat. Weaver ran as an Independent and lost with 40% of the vote. In conceding the race, he said, “People haven’t seen the last of Jeff Weaver.”
“Weaver was a staffer for Sanders’ successful 1990 congressional race. Following the race, he worked as a legislative assistant, eventually working his way up to chief of staff. Weaver later managed Sanders’ successful 2006 Senate campaign and served as chief of staff.
“In 2009, following his role as Sanders’ Senate chief of staff, Weaver left the political scene to run a comics and gaming store, Victory Comics, in Falls Church, Virginia.
“In May 2015, after a break from politics, Weaver was appointed campaign manager for Sanders’ presidential campaign. The New York Times described Weaver as “a long-trusted adviser to Mr. Sanders, who has developed a reputation inside and outside his campaign as a hard-charging operative often willing to go further than the candidate himself.”
That is hardly a guy looking to continue politics as usual, as alleged by some of the former Our Revolution staffers.
I don’t want to take sides, and I understand that some of the concerns raised by the former staffers are legit. However, Bernie Sanders ignited this movement, and I trust that he knows the best way to keep it burning.
Our Revolution on Wednesday released the following statement, adopted unanimously by all 11 board members:
Founding Statement of Our Revolution Board of Directors
We are all honored to be members of the Board of Directors of Our Revolution, inspired by Bernie Sanders and his historic presidential campaign. The campaign was always about the movement we were building, as well as supporting a truly amazing candidate.
We are all volunteers in Our Revolution, as we were in the campaign, and we are honored to be on the front lines with tens of thousands of volunteers and millions of supporters. The launch of Our Revolution was viewed by more than 400,000 of us, including more than 60,000 who attended the 2,600 events.
We are committed to the following:
- Great groups – We pledge to support the diversity of the groups and networks that made Bernie 2016 unique. We will not all agree on everything, but we will work towards unity on many things.
- Great causes – We will support movements organizing around the critical issues facing us. Sometimes these issue campaigns will stretch out for months or years, like the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But we are also prepared to seize the moment, supporting campaigns like the fight against the Dakota Access Bakken pipeline in North Dakota and Iowa.
- Great candidates and ballot measures – We will back candidates in primaries and general elections. We will back ballot measures that help create a 21st century democracy and help get big money out of politics, as well as other issues that promote racial, environmental and economic justice.
We are all committed to Bernie’s bold progressive agenda. We are committed to conducting state-based outreach and political strategies. We are committed to leadership diversity, not only for this board, but in our staffing and leadership at all levels. We are committed to democratic decision-making, transparency, political independence and small-dollar fundraising.
Full board list:
- Nina Turner – Fmr. Ohio State Senator
- Deborah Parker – Native American Leader
- Ben Jealous – Civil Rights Leader
- Jim Hightower – Political Leader, National Radio Commentator & Writer
- Jim Zogby – Arab American Human Rights Leader
- Huck Gutman – Former Chief of Staff for Senator Bernie Sanders
- Jane Kleeb – Environmental and Rural Activist
- Lucy Flores – Fmr. Nevada Assemblywoman
- Larry Cohen – Labor Leader
- Catalina Velasquez – Immigration, Reproductive Justice and Trans Queer Liberation Activist
- Shailene Woodley – Actress and Environmental Activist
Will Our Revolution instantly transform America? Of course not. Will it succeed if we sit back and watch Nina, Ben, Lucy, and Jeff do all the work? Of course not. Our Revolution will go as far as we take it. It is dependent on grassroots participation.
Join us … It’s Our Revolution.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
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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The Unconquerable Trump |
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Friday, 09 September 2016 08:39 |
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Taibbi writes: "In the face of plummeting poll numbers and mocking headlines, Trump panicked and emerged from a campaign reorganization tethered to an insane plan to walk all of this damage back by singing homilies to African-American despair in front of all-white crowds. It should have been fatal. It wasn't."
Donald Trump. (photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)
The Unconquerable Trump
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
09 September 16
Seemingly imploding on the trail, Trump gains in a national poll. WTF, America?
 stunning new CNN poll came out this week, showing Donald Trump in the lead against Hillary Clinton, 45-43 percent. Naturally, the release of this new survey coincided with my own Rolling Stone feature describing Trump in a "freefall," having "lost his mojo."
What can I say? Sometimes in journalism, you can't help looking like a buffoon.
Let's look at that poll, for if there's any truth to it (and there has been some other evidence a "tightening" in the race), it would mean the ultimate worst-case scenario.
On the surface, Trump and new "campaign CEO" Steve Bannon appear to be employing one of the dumbest campaign strategies presidential politics has ever seen.
The recent rebrand is a transparent effort to rehabilitate Trump's image as a racist loon. Bannon's play has been to wheel Trump out at campaign events shackled, Hannibal Lecter-style, to teleprompters. At each stop, the candidate tries to focus just long enough to read out a robotic script offering "minority outreach," while also signaling a "softening" and a "pivot" on his chief issue, immigration.
In person, watching Lecter-Trump labor to push this "minority outreach" script up a hill for 45 minutes or so is embarrassing to the point of being physically uncomfortable.
His "What do you have to lose?" appeals to African-American voters recall the cringe-inducing "My heart is as black as yours" routine of infamous New York Democrat Mario Procaccino, whose 1969 mayoral run has been described as the most incompetent campaign in American history.
It seems impossible that Trump's Dr. King act would convince an educated person of anything. Just try to picture the mind that would be persuaded by these speeches. It's not an easy image to conjure.
But in perhaps the ultimate demonstration of Murphy's Law, it seems to have worked. The Bannon-Trump strategy at least looks this week like a success, even if it was just in the area of scoring one headline in one perhaps-flawed poll.
It's developments like this that explain why the most successful third-party candidate in polls this season – and the only one who attracts wide support among liberals, conservatives and independents – is a giant meteor hitting the earth. (The "Sweet Meteor O'Death" scored 13 percent support, including an impressive 27 percent of independents, in a July poll).
After all, if Trump-Bannon's nitwit strategy can succeed, that's a powerful argument in favor of the species needing a reboot.
Or maybe the problem is confined to those of us here in America.
Just look at the math. The total popular vote in 2012 was 129,237,642 people. Assuming a similar turnout, in a theoretical world where Donald Trump scores 45 percent of the vote, that would mean a hair over 58 million human beings casting a vote for a man who thinks vaccines need to be administered one at a time, because "tiny children are not horses."
Unlike George W. Bush, a pliable ignoramus surrounded by cunning government lifers who were the real candidates for the job, Trump is surrounded by determined conspiracy theorists incapable of speaking English or completing a coherent thought.
His spokesperson Katrina Pierson said Barack Obama's policies "probably" caused the death of a soldier killed in Iraq – in 2004! When confronted about her mistake, she said, "That's why I used, 'probably.'"
These are the sort of people whose first move upon entering the Oval Office would probably be to order the file on Area 51, or to check the back of the Declaration of Independence for treasure maps. And yet, somewhere north of 55 million voters, and huge majorities of white people, seem prepared to cast votes for this crew.
Trump would probably require miraculous reversals in demographic trends to win. Most likely, he'd need either absurdly low turnout among minorities and college-educated voters, or an unheard-off increase in turnout among non-college-educated white voters.
But such eventualities can't be counted out. Trump has enjoyed an extraordinary run of sinister luck since the beginning of this race. The seas have parted for him over and over again in a pattern so improbable, it makes one guess at the existence of a Supreme Being with a serious grudge against the United States.
I bet on Trump to win the Republican nomination last summer, but it didn't seem like easy money then. Trump's path to victory in the nomination seemed to depend upon the unfolding of something like a conspiracy of incompetence by his primary opponents.
The likely victory scenario required some combination of John Kasich, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz staying in the race too long, preventing Trump from having to win a one-on-one race.
That did happen, thanks in part to a series of unhappy accidents. Marco Rubio's New Hampshire implosion, for instance, may have opened the door for already-conceding John Kasich's surprise second-place showing in the same state. This kept both candidates in through Super Tuesday, allowing Trump to waltz to victory needing only a plurality of voters.
Trump's Republican opponents proved perfect foils for his suicide-bomber political style. One by one, they each walked into the trap of engaging him in exchanges of schoolyard insults, causing senators and governors to quickly lose their respectable titles in favor of new monikers like "low-energy Jeb" and "Little Marco" and "Lyin' Ted."
Trump's opponents all looked offended and thrown off-script by his attacks, while Trump came across as the same bleating, thin-skinned nut whether anyone engaged him or not. His opponents never figured out that Trump is incapable of losing such contests of insults, since he lacks the self-awareness to feel it when verbal punches land.
The physical proximity afforded by the endless debates was another factor. When you have to share a stage with a candidate determined to turn every event into a circus, it's pretty hard to play the "I'm above the fray" card. He devoured camera time even in moderated debates, enhancing the impression that he was the dominant personality.
But all of these advantages were supposed to evaporate in general-election season. Instead of needing a plurality of Republicans, he now needed a plurality (and perhaps a majority) of all voters. Moreover his opposition was no longer a field of 16 nincompoops, but a single historically skilled political infighter who happened also to be one of the most famous and admired women on earth.
Unlike Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton was not going to get into a "mine's bigger than yours" bro-brawl with Trump on live TV. She was sure to do the smart thing: let Trump hang himself with his own stupidity for as long as possible, and then ultimately turn the election into a referendum on dull competence versus cattle cars, race war and global isolation – an easy choice, the political version of Eddie Izzard's "cake or death" joke.
This is exactly how it seemed to play out. After the conventions, Trump plunged into new scandals and controversies on a nearly minute-to-minute basis, from a loony battle with the family of a dead war vet to a claim that Obama "founded ISIS" to a bizarre remark about what daughter Ivanka should do if sexually harassed in the workplace by a Roger Ailes type ("find a new career").
Then, in the face of plummeting poll numbers and mocking headlines, he panicked and emerged from a campaign reorganization tethered to an insane plan to walk all of this damage back by singing homilies to African-American despair in front of all-white crowds.
It should have been fatal. It wasn't. Whether the CNN poll taken at the end of this incredible sequence of events that shows him in the lead is accurate or not, is irrelevant. The fact that it's even close is an awesome indictment of us all.
It's also a testament to Trump's uncanny inability to fail even when he seems to be trying his hardest to do so. Not even the most exaggerated view of Hillary Clinton's deficiencies as a candidate explains it. It feels a lot more like Idiocracy coming powerfully to life at exactly the wrong moment.
I still don't think Trump really has a chance, but we're sure headed toward a scary ending.
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