Forever Forward

By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

12 July 16

 

cott,

I am writing you today to express my deep pride in the movement – the political revolution – you and I have created together over the last 15 months. When we began this historic campaign, we were considered fringe players by the political, economic and media establishment. Well, we proved them wrong.

We showed that the American people support a bold, progressive agenda that takes on the billionaire class, that fights for racial, social, economic and environmental justice and that seeks to create a government that works for all of us and not just the big campaign donors.

We mobilized over 13 million voters across the country. We won 23 Democratic primary and caucus contests. We had literally hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country. And we showed – in a way that can change politics in America forever – that you can run a competitive national grassroots campaign without begging millionaires and billionaires for campaign contributions.

Most importantly, we elevated the critical issues facing our country – issues the establishment has pushed under the rug for too long. We focused attention on the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in this country and the importance of breaking up the large banks who brought our economy to the brink of collapse. We exposed our horrendous trade policies, our broken criminal justice system, and our people's lack of access to affordable health care and higher education. We fought aggressively to address the crisis of climate change, the need for real comprehensive immigration reform, the importance of developing a foreign policy that values diplomacy over war, and so much more.

We have shown throughout this election that these are issues that are important to voters and that progressive solutions energize people in the fight for real change. What we have accomplished so far is historic – but our work is far from over.

This movement of ours – this political revolution – must continue. We cannot let all of the momentum we have achieved in the fight to transform America be lost. We will never stop fighting for what is right.

It is true that in terms of winning the Democratic nomination, we did come up short. But this election was never about me or any candidate. It was about the powerful coming together of millions of people to take their country back from the billionaire class. That was the strength of our campaign and it will be the strength of our movement going forward in the months and years ahead.

In the coming weeks, I will be announcing the creation of successor organizations to carry on the struggle that we have been a part of these past 15 months. I hope you will continue to be involved in fighting to transform America. Our goal will be to advance the progressive agenda that we believe in and to elect like-minded candidates at the federal, state and local levels who are committed to accomplishing our goals.

In terms of the presidential election this November, there is no doubt that the election of Donald Trump as president would be a devastating blow to all that we are fighting for. His openly bigoted and pro-billionaire campaign could precipitate the same decades-long rightward shift in American politics that happened after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. That rightward shift after Reagan’s election infected not just politics as a whole but led to the ascendancy of the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party – an era from which we are still recovering.

I cannot in good conscience let that happen.

To have all of the work we have done in elevating our progressive ideals be dashed away by a complete Republican takeover of Washington – a takeover headed by a candidate that demonizes Latinos, Muslims, women, African Americans, veterans, and others – would be unthinkable.

Today, I endorsed Hillary Clinton to be our next president. I know that some of you will be disappointed with that decision. But I believe that, at this moment, our country, our values, and our common vision for a transformed America, are best served by the defeat of Donald Trump and the election of Hillary Clinton.

You should know that in the weeks since the last primary, both campaigns have worked together in good faith to bridge some of the policy issues that divided us during the election. Did we come to agreement on everything? Of course not. But we made important steps forward.

Hillary Clinton released a debt free college plan that we developed together which now includes free tuition at public colleges and universities for working families. This was a major part of our campaign’s agenda and a proposal that, if enacted into law, would revolutionize higher education in this country.

Secretary Clinton has also publicly committed to massive investments in health care for communities across this country that will increase primary care, including mental health care, dental care, and low-cost prescription drug access for an additional 25 million people. Importantly, she has also endorsed the enactment of a so-called public option to allow everyone in this country to participate in a public insurance program. This idea was killed by the insurance industry during consideration of President Obama’s health care program.

During the Democratic platform proceedings in St. Louis and Orlando, we were victorious in including amendments to make it a clear priority of the Democratic Party to fight for a $15 an hour federal minimum wage, expand Social Security, abolish the death penalty, put a price on carbon, establish a path toward the legalization of marijuana, enact major criminal justice reforms, pass comprehensive immigration reform, end for-profit prisons and detention facilities, break up too-big-to-fail banks and create a 21st century Glass-Steagall Act, close loopholes that allow big companies to avoid taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens and use that revenue to rebuild America, approve the most expansive agenda ever for protecting Native American rights and so much more.

All of these progressive policies were at the heart of our campaign. The truth is our movement is responsible for the most progressive Democratic platform in the history of our country. All of that is the direct result of the work that our members of the platform committee did in the meetings and that you have been doing over the last 15 months.

But none of these initiatives will happen if we do not elect a Democratic president in November. None! In fact, we will go backward. We must elect the Democratic nominee in November and progressive Democrats up and down the ballot so that we ensure that these policy commitments can advance.

It is extremely important that we keep our movement together, that we hold public officials accountable and that we elect progressive candidates to office at the federal, state, and local level who will stand with us.

As part of that effort, we still have a tremendous amount of work left to do in the Democratic Rules Committee that will be meeting in the coming weeks. We have to enact the kinds of reforms to the Democratic Party and to the electoral process that will provide us the tools to elect progressive candidates, to allow new voices and new energy into the Party, and to break up the excessive power that the economic and political elites in the Party currently have. As with our fights on the platform committee, that will only be possible if we stand together.

You should know that I intend to be actively campaigning throughout this election season to elect candidates who will stand by our agenda. I hope to see many of you at events from coast to coast.

In conclusion, I again want to express my pride in what we have accomplished together over the last year. But so much more must be done to make our vision a reality. Now more than ever our country needs our movement – our political revolution. As you have throughout this historic campaign, I ask for your ongoing support as we continue through the fall and beyond.

On a personal note, I cannot say with words how appreciative Jane and I are of the kindness, dedication and love we experienced from so many people across the country. We are deeply touched by it and will never, ever forget it.

Please let me know that you will stand with me to defeat Donald Trump, and to elect candidates who will stand by our agenda as part of the future of our political revolution. Add your name now.

Forever committed, forever fighting, forever forward,
Bernie Sanders

The Clintons & a Crime Far Worse Than Missing Emails or Votes!

By Dennis J Bernstein and Greg Palast, Reader Supported News

12 July 16

 

t’s been an action-packed week in politics. Hillary Clinton has been given the official all-clear by the FBI, who have said she won’t have to face charges for the Clorox cleaning job she did on her email server. And with her path to power given the personal red carpet treatment by FBI director James Comey, the fact that a hundred thousand votes or so have yet to be counted in California has been swept under the high thread count rug — where a lot of inconvenient votes end up these days! But the missing emails and votes haven’t been forgotten by our resident sleuth, Greg Palast. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, he gives Dennis J Bernstein the skinny on Sanders’ stolen California win, Clinton’s bleached communications — and a multi-million dollar Kazakhstan bribery and corruption scandal that got Cloroxed with them!

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on July 6, 2016)

Dennis Bernstein: There has been a lot going on. We’ve got the announcement today that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted, after a little visit that Bill had with the Attorney General. There are still some leftover results that we’re trying to figure out in terms of what happened in California. And you’ve got a big event coming up. So there’s a lot to talk about. Why don’t we start back in California?

Greg Palast: Well, I was reading something called The Washington Post, which is like the American Izvestia, and it said, “Greg Palast made a mistake.” Because I had announced on your show — we’re infamous now — that 2 million ballots were not counted when they declared Hillary Clinton the winner in California with 100% of precincts reporting. In fact, there were 2 million ballots that were uncounted, according to the Secretary of State, on the night that CNN announced that 100% of the results were in. And that doesn’t change, even if The Washington Post doubts it.

Even today, one month after the primary, over 100,000 ballots have yet to be counted — provisional ballots, what we call placebo ballots, which have a danger of not being counted at all. I was also attacked in The Washington Post — I’m not being defensive about this, I just want to correct the record — because I said on this show that the majority of the provisional ballots were, given the demographics, likely Bernie Sanders voters. And I was accused of being The Great Carnac and knowing how people voted without seeing their ballots. No, it was demographics. In fact, of the provisional ballots that have now been counted, exactly 75.0%, 3 out of 4 ballots, went for Bernie Sanders.

What is a provisional ballot? … I call them placebo ballots, because they make you think you voted when you haven’t. They let you believe you voted … There’s a one in three chance it won’t be counted. In a high risk race, a majority chance it will not be counted … There’s likely to be 3 million given out in the upcoming election — far more than the margins of victory. Supposedly Hillary Clinton initially won in California by 400,000 votes. That margin has officially shrunk substantially. But the margin is far, far less than the number of provisional ballots that have been given out, and, as I projected, 75% of those that get counted go to Sanders. If you count all the provisional ballots, all things equal, Bernie Sanders won.

DB: Well, that begs my next question: how long do you have to wait for a vote count before it becomes irrelevant? Like how long does it take them to count the votes to figure out what happened in Britain?

Palast: Let’s see, by 5 a.m. British time they’d counted 37 million ballots … In California, we were waiting one month. This is Silicon Valley country, right, and we cannot figure out how to count a bunch of pieces of paper in over a month. Part of it is, they’re not trying to figure out how to count these things — that’s easy. They’re trying to figure out how not to count them. How many they can cut out, reject, and throw in the garbage … This is the problem here. We are not counting all the ballots in the United States. That’s why it takes so long, over a month in California, as they figure out how many ballots they don’t want to count — that’s ugly. And when it gets down to the rest of the nation, the racist smell of the ballot rejection is heavy … If a ballot is thrown away as non-countable, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission says it’s 900% more likely that voter is black than white. It’s an apartheid vote-counting system. Everyone in America gets to vote, but not every color gets to have their vote counted.

DB: Well, big announcement, Hillary Clinton is not going to be indicted, at least according to the FBI … But what does this have to do with voter protection? This is not about one candidate or another, but this is an important story, isn’t it?

Palast: Very. Because people know me as the guy who’s the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. And there’s a direct relation between vote-rustling and billionaires buying up our politics … I’m not partisan on that. Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, they discovered that she was basically hiding them because there were Freedom of Information Act requests for her documents from journalists like me. What they wanted to do is tell us that these e-mails didn’t exist. I was interested in finding out about Hillary Clinton’s relationship to the murderous dictatorship of Kazakhstan. Follow the money here …

This is a story reported by The Times, The New Yorker … an investigator named Peter Schweizer … Seymour Hersh too. I went to Kazakhstan to check out these stories. A guy named Frank Giustra, who is a big resource magnate, gave $30 million to the Clinton Foundation … Then Giustra went to Kazakhstan and got the exclusive agreement to mine the uranium from Kazakhstan. This was when nuclear power was making an ugly little comeback, coming out of its crypt. Right after Giustra shows up, Bill Clinton shows up. This guy just got $30 million from Giustra and shows up and he meets privately with the president of Kazakhstan. Hmm, okay …

Hillary Clinton becomes Secretary of State, and Seymour Hersh, myself, and others discovered that there was massive bribery paid by U.S. oil companies to the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. A Mobile executive went to prison for the bribery payments, but Nazarbayev, himself, the president of Kazakhstan who received the money, about $160 million in bribes … his name was never mentioned in the indictment of the bribers who went to jail. Rather, he was listed as something called KO2, or Kazak official 2. Now, why do we care about that? Because my inside sources at the Justice Department told me that that was arranged by Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State … And, by the way, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a dictator, because journalists tend to end up dead in Kazakhstan for doing that. Nazarbayev said that anyone in his nation who mentions that he is subject of a bribery investigation, or that he had taken bribes, goes to prison — and they are lucky if they come back out with all their fingers on. So what Hillary Clinton did was, by taking his name out of the indictment and just putting in those initials KO2, it may seem minor, but what that did is allow this guy to clamp down, imprison, and torture journalists in his nation who would bring up the question of bribery from oil companies. Did Hillary Clinton do that to favor the oil companies, to stroke a blood-thirsty oil potentate in the Caspian Sea? Or did she do that to make sure that her foundation kept getting pleasured by Mr. Giustra?

All I wanted to do was get the information in the e-mails between Hillary and her husband regarding this transaction. But according to Hillary Clinton, that’s a personal message, cause it’s to her husband. Well, it’s not really to her husband, it’s to her co-recipient of millions of dollars. They run a business together, basically, called The Clinton Foundation, a political operation called The Clinton Campaign. Hillary Clinton took it not only upon herself to withhold this information by putting it on a private server — and here’s what really disturbs me — when she was caught and told to turn over those e-mails, she took it upon herself to order the erasure of 56,000 e-mails.

If you did that, Dennis, if you were subject to a federal investigation and you erased the e-mails that were subject to that investigation, I guarantee you this broadcast would be from a federal prison. There is zero question. In fact, Comey, the FBI director, even said so. He said a lower official would be in real trouble. He almost gave a lèse majesté defense, saying, “Well, the Secretary of State can kind of make up her own rules.” No, we are a nation of rules. Those documents were the public’s documents, not hers. And she definitely erased documents of public interest to keep them out of the hands of journalists. If the standard is she’s not going to jail … is that what we want in an open administration?

By the way, it’s not all for their foundation. Bill Clinton also got $500,000 from Nazarbayev himself, for a talk — that’s pretty golden words. And I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that Nazarbayev’s name was left off the indictments? We need to know. It can’t really be up to federal officials — whether it’s Hillary Clinton or anyone else — to simply erase the e-mails in question. I don’t know what obstruction of justice means anymore if that aint it.

DB: Greg, I know that you’re excited. You’ve got a screening for the new film you’re working on, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It’s happening in St. Louis, at the Netroots Nation gathering. What is Netroots Nation, by the way?

Palast: It’s a gathering of media and activists groups that are web-based. It’s a well known, decades-long gathering. We’re doing a sneak preview screening of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits at 6 p.m. on Saturday, July 16. If you’re at Netroots there’s no charge, and we’re working it out so that members of the public can come … We’ve got Willie Nelson in there, and Rosario Dawson, but the main thing is to make sure that the alarm goes out that there are billionaires and ballot bandits ready to snatch the 2016 election. This is not a partisan matter, it’s a civil rights matter. So come, we’ll have some fun, eat some popcorn watching the dissolution of that thing that used to be called American democracy.

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Dennis J Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.

Greg Palast has been called the “most important investigative reporter of our time — up there with Woodward and Bernstein” (The Guardian). Palast has broken front-page stories for BBC Television’s Newsnight, The Guardian, The Nation Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Harper's Magazine. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and the highly acclaimed Vultures’ Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC’s Newsnight Review. His books have been translated into two dozen languages. Palast's investigation and production team are currently finishing the final frames of his new film on the theft of the 2016 election: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.

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.