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Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 Letter to the Future More Relevant Today Than Ever Before |
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Sunday, 31 July 2016 12:17 |
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Kennedy writes: "In 1988, my then Hyannis Port neighbor the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote a prescient letter to the Earth's planetary citizens of 2088 for Volkswagen's TIME magazine ad campaign. His seven points of advice are perhaps more relevant today than at any time in human history. We should keep this advice in mind this election year and adopt Vonnegut's recommendations while we still can."
Kurt Vonnegut. (photo: Daniele Prati/Flickr Commons)
Kurt Vonnegut's 1988 Letter to the Future More Relevant Today Than Ever Before
By Kick Kennedy, EcoWatch
31 July 16
 n 1988, my then Hyannis Port neighbor the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote a prescient letter to the Earth's planetary citizens of 2088 for Volkswagen's TIME magazine ad campaign. His seven points of advice are perhaps more relevant today than at any time in human history. We should keep this advice in mind this election year and adopt Vonnegut's recommendations while we still can.
Here's his letter:
Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088:
It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet: 'This above all: to thine own self be true'? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: 'Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come'? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.'
Our century hasn't been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?
For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn't do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
Yes, and as you people a hundred years from now must know full well, and as your grandchildren will know even better: Nature is ruthless when it comes to matching the quantity of life in any given place at any given time to the quantity of nourishment available. So what have you and Nature done about overpopulation? Back here in 1988, we were seeing ourselves as a new sort of glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything and then make love—and then double in size again.
On second thought, I am not sure I could bear to hear what you and Nature may have done about too many people for too small a food supply.
And here is a crazy idea I would like to try on you: Is it possible that we aimed rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?
Now that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time they have been catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do.
The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:
- Reduce and stabilize your population.
- Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
- Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
- Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
- Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
- Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
- And so on. Or else.
Am I too pessimistic about life a hundred years from now? Maybe I have spent too much time with scientists and not enough time with speechwriters for politicians. For all I know, even bag ladies and bag gentlemen will have their own personal helicopters or rocket belts in A.D. 2088. Nobody will have to leave home to go to work or school, or even stop watching television. Everybody will sit around all day punching the keys of computer terminals connected to everything there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astronauts.
Cheers,
Kurt Vonnegut
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FOCUS | Trump and Russia: Even Historians See No Precedent |
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Sunday, 31 July 2016 10:31 |
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Mayer writes: "Like a maddeningly provocative amateur sportsman, Trump had once again served a ball that was so wild it was hard to tell if it was a mistake or a deliberate attempt to destabilize all of the accepted rules of the game."
Donald Trump travelled to Moscow in 2013 to meet Vladimir Putin hoping to discuss plans for a Trump Tower near Red Square. (photo: AP/Getty Images)
Trump and Russia: Even Historians See No Precedent
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
31 July 16
 hree U.S. senators huddled worriedly last night amid the crush of Democrats in the corridors of the Wells Fargo Center, the site of their national Convention. Leaning in closely, in hopes that no one would overhear, one urgently complained to the others that Hillary Clinton’s campaign wasn’t doing enough to counter the bizarre statements made that morning by Donald Trump.
In one of his impromptu press conferences, Trump had all but begged Russia, which U.S. intelligence officials alleged had hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails, to go back for more. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing,” the Republican nominee had declared. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Trump, now the official candidate of the Republican Party, seemed to be urging Russia, one of America’s most formidable and historically hostile rivals, to engage in cyber espionage against the Democratic nominee. “Someone needs to call for an investigation!” one of the senators in the corridor exclaimed. “It’s a violation of the Logan Act!” he said, referring to the law that criminalizes private citizens interfering with U.S. policy.
Realizing that they had been overheard, the senators insisted that their heated, private strategizing was off the record, and dashed farther down the windowless channel of packed-in humanity that surrounded the arena’s floor. But the frustration and confusion they exchanged caught, in an instant, the tenor and talk of the Democratic campaign. Trump had once again disrupted American politics at the highest level, and even the most practiced and powerful professionals were beside themselves at the inability of anyone on their side to adequately react.
Like a maddeningly provocative amateur sportsman, Trump had once again served a ball that was so wild it was hard to tell if it was a mistake or a deliberate attempt to destabilize all of the accepted rules of the game. In the past, Presidential nominees have taken brief vacations during the opposing party’s Convention, deferentially ceding the spotlight. But Trump, who made in-person appearances nearly every night of his own Convention, had grabbed the world’s attention during the Democratic Convention, too. His statement had been so extraordinary that no one knew whether to dismiss it as a joke (which he later insisted it was) or to take it deadly seriously—as one ordinarily would the words of someone with a near-even chance of becoming the most powerful elected official in the world. Trump and his campaign officials have laughed off suggestions that they had any connections to the murky Russian actors behind the hacking of the D.N.C.’s e-mails, but they also failed to condemn the illegal breach.
Working yesterday morning on the other side of town, at the National Constitution Center, the historian Sean Wilentz was among those who regarded Trump’s conduct as borderline treason. Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton (and a longtime supporter of Hillary Clinton), described himself as “flabbergasted.” “I can’t think of anything that has happened like this before,” he said.
It’s rare for historians to identify any act as a first. Ordinarily they are full of caveats, precedents, and nuances. But in this case, Wilentz said, he could think of no comparison in American history. If a sitting President, rather than a candidate, had called for a foreign power to commit an act of espionage in order to influence the outcome of an election, “it would be an impeachable act,” Wilentz said. “Watergate was nothing in comparison with this. This is beyond partisanship. It’s stunning, in my view,” he added.
If Trump’s open plea to Russia shocked Wilentz, he did note that there has been at least one instance of a Presidential candidate clandestinely trying to collude with foreign powers to advantage his campaign. In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon secretly used an emissary to scuttle peace talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War. At the time, Nixon, the Republican nominee, was locked in a fierce campaign against Hubert Humphrey, the sitting Vice-President to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had declined to run for reëlection. The country was riven by conflict over the unpopular and failing Vietnam War. After dithering for much of the campaign season, Humphrey finally distanced himself from Johnson and promised to unilaterally end the war if elected. His poll numbers began to soar, to Nixon’s dismay. Peace talks in Paris, which had seemed interminably bogged down, began to take on new vigor. An end to the long and bloody war finally seemed in sight. But, instead, unknown to American voters at the time, Nixon opened a private channel to the South Vietnamese officials, convincing them to hold off on accepting peace by promising that he would get them a better agreement if he became President.
Johnson learned of this treachery through eavesdropping conducted by U.S. intelligence agencies. But he was unwilling to speak out against Nixon’s actions for fear of compromising the country’s intelligence capabilities. Instead, he stayed silent as Nixon was elected.
“One difference, though, was that that was done through subterfuge,” Wilentz noted. “If the reports on Trump are accurate, he is openly calling on a foreign government to commit a crime, to affect a Presidential election. As far as I know, we have never seen anything like this before.”
The historian Beverly Gage, who teaches twentieth-century American history at Yale, also regards Trump’s behavior as unique. She noted that there have been other incidents of politicians accusing opponents of treasonous foreign alliances, but they relied on dark conspiratorial theories, not the candidate’s public statements at a press conference.
In the nineteen-fifties, she said, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, claimed that both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Harry Truman had been involved in collusion with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union for two decades. However, McCarthy wasn’t himself a Presidential candidate. During the 1964 election, the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, embraced the John Birch Society, a far-right fringe group whose founder, Robert Welch, had accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, of being a “dedicated, conscious agent” of the Soviet government.
“Of course, in both of these cases, this was a far cry from encouraging a foreign government to spy on the United States,” Gage acknowledged. “For that, despite all of the scandals and mudslinging of past U.S. elections, I cannot think of any clear precedent.”
By picking Philadelphia as the setting for their national political Convention, the Democrats were inviting historic comparisons. They probably hoped that the history they would make was their nomination of the first woman who could conceivably win the Presidency. But it was another historic first that dominated much of the talk during the third day of the Democratic National Convention. As has been a pattern during this strange election year, long-anticipated highlights were again upstaged by historical new lows, and what remained to be seen was how much the country grasped the enormity of the disruption under way, and how much it cared.
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FOCUS: Trump's Hillary Email Baiting Sets Off Stupidity Storm |
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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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Sunday, 31 July 2016 10:27 |
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Boardman writes: "This is old school Red-baiting (applied to a no longer Red Russia) with even less intellectual integrity than McCarthy-era smearing. No wonder that no evidence was produced by these unnamed spooks, all they had to do was impugn Putin, Putin, Putin, and people's minds started shutting down with pre-programmed fear."
Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks as he accepts the nomination during the final session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 21, 2016. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Trump's Hillary Email Baiting Sets Off Stupidity Storm
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
31 July 16
“… Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.”
hat’s the money quote that was widely reported as what Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump said that day about Russia and Hillary Clinton’s emails. It is hard to read those sentences as anything but cynical joking, but most of the media, the empty-headed commentariat, and Democratic shills all made a fundamentally bad-faith effort to inflate the joke into something sinister to serve their various agendas.
Trump’s offhand comment was almost universally misreported in a provocative, interpretive, and stupid manner – even Democracy NOW! headlined the story: “Trump Asks Russia to Hack Hillary Clinton’s Email.” That is just wrong.
There is nothing in Trump’s snide remarks inviting anyone to hack anything. Trump expresses “hope” that Russia can “find” 30,000 emails that are missing because Clinton had them deleted from her private server after unilaterally deciding they were not government property. It would be more accurate to say that Clinton hacked herself to eliminate the emails, except she didn’t need to hack, she just needed reassurance from other pliable lawyers that destroying potential evidence was no problem.
As for any invitation to the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails now, that’s so stupid that it’s more than likely deliberately stupid. Clinton’s private server was disconnected many months ago (or years?) and is literally hack-proof. It’s also in FBI custody. And there’s no reason to believe it would be worth hacking by anyone, since Clinton has already deleted, disabled, or destroyed pretty much everything on it.
Saying that “Donald Trump invites Russia to hack into Clinton’s emails,” as the Los Angeles Times did July 27, is at best dishonest mindless sensationalism, but most likely a deliberate political lie. A more accurate interpretation of what Trump actually said would be along the lines of: maybe Russia can find Clinton’s deleted emails somewhere, in the cloud or something, since the U.S. government has failed to figure out what’s been concealed from the American public (or has kept it concealed). If Trump was baiting the Democrats, they took the bait – hook, line, and sinker.
Trump called for selective transparency
Trump implied that if the Russians could find Clinton’s missing emails, they should share them with the media and “probably be rewarded mightily.” There is nothing wrong in asking for this particular transparency, which is clearly in the public interest. But Trump is no more honest than the rest. If reciprocity is a measure of fairness, then he should also be calling for the Russians, or some 15-year-old geek in a basement somewhere, to hack the IRS and release Trump’s tax returns. That, compared to hacking Clinton’s out of service servers, is at least a theoretical possibility.
Compounding its duplicity, the L.A. Times went on to reiterate the lie that has become a widespread media meme: “Donald Trump dared a foreign government to commit espionage on the U.S. to hurt his rival….” Not only are Clinton’s emails beyond the reach of any hacker, it would be impossible to commit espionage even if it were possible to hack them. Clinton had a private server precisely to keep her emails outside U.S. government control and any prying eyes, official or not. Even when the Clinton server was up and running, hacking it would have been legally and morally ambiguous. That hack would have been essentially a crime against another criminal set-up.
The larger context for this herding of the media wagons around the Clinton candidacy was the actual hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) email system that went undetected for about a year. When Wikileaks started releasing DNC emails, attachments, and voice mails on July 22, the Democratic Party’s professional staff was revealed to be small-minded, biased, and dishonest. That was actually a public service. It was also no great surprise, especially to Sanders supporters, but it was a bit startling to see it all revealed so nakedly and shamelessly.
Corrupt DNC exposed just as convention about to begin
Damage control suddenly became a Democratic Party necessity lest the party’s venality and corruption become the issue. Within days of the exposure of the campaign, the government rushed to the rescue. Led by the Democrat-in-chief (who kept his hands clean), the partisan executive branch countered with anonymous leaked stories, attributing the DNC hack to one of its favorite scapegoats, Russia. Right on cue, Clinton allies were accusing Trump of treason. Welcome to Cold War II (which has been on for awhile now, actually). The basic framing meme, as it appeared in a New York Times lede July 26, was straight forwardly disingenuous:
American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have been briefed on the evidence.
This is old school Red-baiting (applied to a no longer Red Russia) with even less intellectual integrity than McCarthy-era smearing. No wonder that no evidence was produced by these unnamed spooks, all they had to do was impugn Putin, Putin, Putin, and people’s minds started shutting down with pre-programmed fear. A few days later head spook (and the first to go on record) James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, kept the story alive by pretending to downplay it (sort of) in good spook fashion, while also slyly influencing the presidential election. Some of what Clapper said about the DNC hacks:
Was this to just stir up trouble or was this ultimately to try to influence an election? Of course, that’s a serious – a serious – proposition… We don't know enough [yet] to ... ascribe a motivation, regardless of who it may have been. [Emphasis added]
Having said the intelligence community doesn’t know who did it or why, intelligence chief Clapper went on to identify and ascribe motive to – you guessed it – Russia:
They believe we’re trying to influence political developments in Russia, we’re trying to affect change, and so their natural response is to retaliate and do unto us as they think we've done to them.
Is there any reason to think the U.S. doesn’t do this stuff to Russia when the U.S. does it to Germany and other allies? Clapper knows better, that’s why he made an apparent allusion to the movie “Casablanca,” winking to the insiders while hoping most people don’t get it:
I’m somewhat taken aback by the hyperventilation on this…. I’m shocked someone did some hacking – that’s never happened before.
In “Casablanca,” Captain Renault, a cynical state official, bowing to the Gestapo, decides to shut down Rick’s café because of illegal gambling:
Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! [a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
And so it is with DNI Clapper, who is shocked to find that hacking is going on in the world, although he stops just short of admitting the U.S. presumably is or tries to be at the cutting edge of world hackery. In Clapper’s case, his “winnings” would be a wider acceptance by Americans of others doing to them what their own government does to others – as well as to Americans:
I think we’re going to be in a state of suppression of extremism in whatever manifestation or form it takes, whether it’s al Qaeda or ISIS or some other group that’s spawned. This is going to be a long-haul proposition, and I think the same is true in the whole realm of cybersecurity…. I think we just need to accept that, and not be quite so excitable at yet another instance of it.
Wait, say what? Weren’t we talking about Russia, or did al Qaeda or ISIS hack the DNC? Or did they all? Is there anyone who didn’t hack the DNC?
Political hacking is so much worse than, say, torture, or assassination
In what plays like a comic version of good cop/bad cop, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, an avowed Clinton partisan who spoke at the Democratic Convention, used his speech to add to the hyperventilation over the DNC emails release. Panetta, long a defender of Bush-era torture, raised the stakes of the false political charge that Trump asked Russia to hack Clinton. Panetta, without a scintilla of evidence on display, claimed that Trump was asking Russia to involve itself in the U.S. presidential election on Trump’s behalf, all but calling it treason (which others have done):
He asked the Russians to interfere in American politics…. Think about that for a moment. Donald Trump wants to be president of the United States [and] Donald Trump is asking one of our adversaries to engage in hacking or intelligence efforts against the United States to affect our election.
It would be at least as true to argue that Trump asked the Russians to contribute to American justice, which has failed to hold Clinton meaningfully accountable for her missing emails, or any other aspect of her unilateral effort to personally privatize a corner of government.
Panetta also repeated the lie that Trump asked Russia to hack the currently unhackable Clinton computers. Then he expanded that deceit to include the entire Clinton campaign, which he dishonestly equated with the United States. It’s worth remembering that Trump’s remarks were directed at the emails that have gone missing from Clinton’s private server when she was Secretary of State (2009-2013). The inspector general of the State Department has found that Clinton’s server was vulnerable to outside intruders during all or most of the time Clinton was responsible for managing its security. In that respect, it’s possible or even likely that Russia (and others) could have copied and kept all of Clinton’s emails, both the ones she turned over and the ones she deleted. That state of affairs is in itself another kind of joke. It’s also an unresolved Clinton scandal. For Trump to make fun of it as he did is to mock a perverse reality. It’s a reality that Panetta, like other Clinton loyalists, would like to deny it into non-existence, or at least distract from it with his own unreality. Panetta’s demagoguery would have you conclude that Putin is actually Trump’s metaphorical running mate:
No presidential candidate who’s running to be president of the United States ought to be asking a foreign country, particularly Russia, to engage in hacking or intelligence efforts to try to determine what the Democratic candidate may or may not be doing…. This just is beyond my own understanding of the responsibilities that candidates have to be loyal to their country and to their country alone, not to reach out to somebody like Putin and Russia, and try to engage them in an effort to try to, in effect, conduct a conspiracy against another party….
Keeping the public’s eye off the ball is no laughing matter
Panetta is a smart, experienced guy, so he must be aware of what a colossal joke this is, even though CNN chose to swallow it whole. The DNC hack had little to do with the current presidential campaign and almost everything to do with the Democrats’ covert campaign against Bernie Sanders. Any honorable Democrat would denounce that. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned under pressure, without noticeable contrition, and Hillary Clinton promptly rewarded her with an honorary chairmanship of the Clinton campaign. The last thing Clinton wants is to run against the specter of a martyred Sanders. She would much, much prefer to run against Vladimir Putin and his imaginary alliance with Donald Trump. This is consistent with her decades-long demonization of Russia and support for American/NATO soft aggression against Russia initiated by President Clinton more than 20 years ago.
By omission, Panetta endorses this Clinton policy of needlessly risking war, making endangerment equivalent to patriotic loyalty and, in time-dishonored fashion, equating the reduction of war between Russia and the U.S. somehow with disloyalty. It’s neo-liberal logic, so it doesn’t have to make sense. Especially not when it’s part of the framing of a false campaign trope.
“The Russians are hacking, the Russians are hacking” cry is already losing steam. New reports that someone hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) or the Clinton campaign itself were downplayed or later minimized in quasi-denial. Early in the week, even before Trump’s provocation, Robert Mackey of The Intercept had assessed the sketchiness of evidence that the Russians were to blame.
Principled pushback against Panetta would not be difficult. For all his disdain for Putin’s Russia, Panetta has long been a champion of American authoritarianism that is unmatched in the world: the “right” of the president of the U.S. to assassinate by drone, in any foreign country, any person the president determines, in secret, with no due process, to be a legitimate target, even a U.S. citizen. There’s a difference between hacking and beheading. Is there any other chief executive in the world with such freedom to kill people with no accountability?
It is a reality of American life these days that there is little public objection to having a President exercise arbitrary, life-or-death power over any one of 7.4 billion people in the world. More common than objection to this plain crime against humanity is widespread acceptance, and sometimes even gratitude for the president’s “restraint” in assassinating only a few hundred people, maybe only half of them innocent civilians.
Hillary Clinton has not opposed the U.S. having an executioner-in-chief. Neither has Donald Trump objected. Even Bernie Sanders hasn’t objected, although he said the power should be used carefully and sparingly. Trump’s sarcastic joke about 30,000 missing emails may not have been all that funny, but the self-serving windbaggery and open deceit the joke provoked are actually hilarious, or would be if the stakes were not so high. Unless something unexpected happens, come January 2017, either Trump or Clinton will have the power to kill at will.
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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Progressives Must Build on Bernie's Movement to Transform the Country, but First We Must Elect Hillary |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Sunday, 31 July 2016 08:04 |
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Reich writes: "Now that the convention is over, I want to say something to those of you who understand that the American political-economic system is at a crisis point - that the widening inequalities of income and wealth are undermining our democracy"
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
Progressives Must Build on Bernie's Movement to Transform the Country, but First We Must Elect Hillary
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
31 July 16
 ow that the convention is over, I want to say something to those of you who understand that the American political-economic system is at a crisis point -- that the widening inequalities of income and wealth are undermining our democracy, and are creating a vicious cycle of wealth translating into power and thereby enhancing wealth. This must be reversed.
First, big changes in the structure of power don't happen easily or quickly. They take great energy and tenacity. That's why the movement Bernie's campaign spawned is so important. In many ways it is still just beginning. So if you have "felt the Bern," don’t be discouraged or cynical. The moneyed interests would like nothing better than for all of us to give up. Then they win it all. We must keep building that movement.
Second, even if you take Hillary Clinton at her word and believe she will fight to reform the system, she can't possibly do it on her own. She will need a large, tough, energetic movement to push her and others in Washington to do the right thing. I have served in Washington and I know the truth: Nothing good happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington are mobilized and organized to demand good outcomes.
Third, we must act soon and not wait until just before the midterm elections of 2018 or the year before the presidential election of 2020. At this point I don’t know what Bernie is planning to do with his list of contributors and activists; hopefully he will use it in ways that help you and others at the grass roots to continue to mobilize and organize. Regardless, you can accomplish a great deal on the basis of the contacts you’ve already made, and the organizations you are already engaged with.
Fourth, I don’t think it possible to build and sustain this movement within the Democratic Party – not because the Democratic Party is stupid or evil but because there is no Democratic Party as such. Like the Republican Party, it’s mainly a giant money-raising machine designed to raise big donations from wealthy people and corporations. Which is precisely the problem.
Fifth, the most immediate and important goal is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Some of you think a Trump presidency would galvanize a more forceful progressive movement in response, but rarely if ever in history has a swing toward the authoritarian right moved the political pendulum further back in the opposite direction. Instead, it tends to entrench and legitimize authoritarianism, and move the “center” further rightward. Besides, Trump could do huge and unalterable damage to America and the world in the meantime. Think of the Supreme Court.
What all this means is that over the next months you will need to do two things that seem superficially contradictory but which, as a practical matter, are not: Support Hillary (or at the least do nothing that increases the odds of Donald Trump becoming President). And also continue to build on the momentum of the Bernie campaign toward the long-term goal of reclaiming our economy and our democracy for the many, not the few.
What do you think?
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