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Reviewing for the Test
Even those who thought they had a pretty good grasp of political science, civics, and the American election process have been learning a lot throughout this interminable presidential election, one that seems to have been going on since even before Barack Obama began his second term. Though I can’t claim to speak for other students who’ve been required to take this course, I know I learned a whole bunch of stuff, and I’m willing to share my notes, though they were jotted down in no particular order. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned. Maybe you, too.
--With enough free air time, free floating discontent, and oodles of discretionary spending cash, a nitwit “star” of reality television can parlay name recognition, personal grandiosity, bad taste, racism, xenophobia, and a cotton candy coiffure into a very real shot at occupancy of the White House, a dowdy domicile compared to the digs to which he’s become accustomed.
The old debate goes something like this:
‘You don’t believe women have reproductive rights.”
“You don’t value human life.”
Or this:
"Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?"
— Robert Orben
It's over, and it wasn't close. It was, in fact, a wipe-out. The state of New York took the two big-money front-runners and catapulted them over the moon. Hillary Clinton trounced Bernie Sanders by more than 15 points, placing her firmly in the driver's seat for the Democratic nomination. Clinton's victory margin, however, was left in deep shade by Donald Trump, who utterly obliterated his remaining two opponents. He beat John Kasich by 35 points and beat Ted Cruz by 46 points. The Washington Generals do better against the Harlem Globetrotters most nights.
First, live from New York….
Francesca Rheannon, whom you may know as the host of Writers’ Voice radio, did the civic thing by volunteering to work the polls in a town east of New York City.
“I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election district, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit ballots. The last [election] I worked in, exactly ONE voter needed an affidavit ballot.”
That’s nearly one of four voters. Why? Their names had gone missing from the voter rolls.
Other countries, not the U.S., have oligarchs apparently.
Billionaire and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker came and went to the National Press Club with hardly a tough question on Monday — see video and PDF.
I’d submitted several questions, but first a word on the choreography of the event: Virtually every “news maker” event I recall seeing at the Press Club had the speaker at the head table which is on a stage a few feet up, speaking at a podium. This event, it was just her and the moderator, Press Club President Thomas Burr on two cushy chairs on the stage, with the “head table” below them. Whether this was to elevate the two of them, save her the trouble of having prepared remarks, a new thing, an attempt to cast the billionaire in a more casual light — inspired by Davos type events — I don’t know. But it was weird.
“Only Bernie Sanders can break the power of capitalism in the U.S.” So read a bizarre headline in an online edition of the Guardian. It is just one example of the drivel, magical thinking, misplaced concerns and out and out lies produced by liberal love for Bernie Sanders.
How would Bernie Sanders, or any other presidential candidate, break the power of capitalism? The answer is simple. He can’t. It is difficult to imagine capitalists quaking in their boots because a liberal darling was in the oval office. Then again Sanders has never made a claim to want anything of the kind so the headline is doubly foolish.
When I first met Richard Painter some months ago, I thought he must be the loneliest man in the Republican Party. He’s a conservative, and, of course, I’m not. But he believes, as I do, that there’s too much money in politics.
Political insiders know Richard Painter well as President George W. Bush’s White House counselor and chief ethical advisor. He’s now teaching law at the University of Minnesota, and he’s causing heads to turn with a book advocating that we reduce the power of big money in politics. Its title is Taxation Only With Representation: The Conservative Conscience and Campaign Finance Reform. There’s a lot to learn from it, and I urge you to read it, because it is rare today to find a conservative who will admit, as Mr. Painter does, that money corrupts politics, and then makes his case with so much passion and logic.
On the day before Easter, PEZ Candy USA had to cancel its annual egg hunt in Orange, Connecticut. Adults rushed the fields where the eggs and candy had been put out, pushing aside and trampling the little ones in a mad scramble to grab the goodies for their own children. Noses bled, tears were shed and next time — if there is one — PEZ will have to have lots of security guards on hand to keep the grown-ups from behaving like idiots.
The debacle kind of reminded me of this year’s election.
As this grim electoral season cycles on, I sometimes think we’re all living in Ghostbusters II, with that river of ugly pink slime coursing underneath our feet, violently reacting to our collective negativity and hate and making them worse.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
Among the Kwakiutl and several other indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, the potlatch was a ritual of hospitality. The host would invite guests to a big feast and then distribute gifts. The distribution was a way of demonstrating the host’s status: the more significant the gifts, the more important the host. Think: swag bags for the pre-celebrity era.
Although this sophisticated social ritual reflected the host’s generosity and connectedness to the community, the potlatch could sometimes lead to a destructive one-upmanship.
“At times these contests would escalate to the point where the distribution of property became inadequate for the expression of a chief’s disregard for wealth and property,” writes anthropologist Neal Keating. “The next step would be to actually destroy property, often by burning it up. He might burn up his canoes, or his house, or the entire village.”
In our part of the world, it’s not often that potential “collateral damage” speaks, but it happened last week. A Pakistani tribal leader, Malik Jalal, flew to England to plead in a newspaper piece he wrote and in media interviews to be taken off the Obama White House’s “kill list.” (“I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead.”) Jalal, who lives in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, is a local leader and part of a peace committee sanctioned by the Pakistani government that is trying to tamp down the violence in the region. He believes that he’s been targeted for assassination by Washington. (Four drone missiles, he claims, have just missed him or his car.) His family, he says, is traumatized by the drones. “I don’t want to end up a ‘Bugsplat’ -- the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone,” he writes. “More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized.”
China is producing much more steel than the country and the world can use, and is “dumping” it onto international markets. But when China was confronted with the dumping charge at a conference in Brussels this week, the Chinese government refused to back down.
The Chinese actions are causing steel operations around the world to shut down their own production and lay off workers. So far in the U.S., more than 13,500 steelworkers have been laid off or are facing layoffs.
China has again and again promised to reduce its steel production and help bring stability to world markets. Instead, China has actually increased production. In fact, the Alliance for American Manufacturing says, “Exports of Chinese steel last month were actually up 30 percent from where they were a year ago.”
So much for political bravery! Sen. Bernie Sanders had the audacity to say that the Palestinians are human beings, that there are two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “not right all of the time” – and lost the New York primary by more than 15 percentage points.
Obviously, there were many other factors, including the tightly closed rules for the New York primaries, requiring voters to have declared their party affiliation by last October or be barred from participating.
But still New York Democrats did not appear to reward Sanders for breaking with Official Washington’s orthodoxy on Israel, which holds that the only permissible political stance is total obeisance to Netanyahu and his government. Whether Sanders’s stance hurt him may be debatable but the election result could resonate nonetheless with future candidates who might be more chary about taking a more even-handed position on Israel-Palestine.
One concrete outcome that President Obama could pursue on his visit to Saudi Arabia is saving the lives of three Shia youth sentenced to be executed, most likely by beheading, for participating in nonviolent protests. Sparing their lives could also help ease the Shia/Sunni tensions that have engulfed the region.
Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon, and Abdullah al-Zaher are members of the minority Shia community that has, for decades, been demanding equality and full civil rights. The Shia represent 10-15 percent of the Saudi population and live mainly in the oil-rich Eastern province. Ever since the Saudi state was founded in 1932 by forming a pact with the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, the Shia in Saudi Arabia have endured state-sponsored discrimination, social marginalization, and campaigns of violence waged by anti-Shiite hardliners. According to Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, “All the Saudi Shia want is for their government to respect their identity and treat them equally. Yet Saudi authorities routinely treat these people with scorn and suspicion.” The persecution of the three youth is deeply sectarian, and reflects the long history of oppression the Shia have faced in Saudi Arabia.
— from Foreign Policy In Focus
It’s difficult to quantify how many the Islamic State have killed in Iraq and Syria. But, along with its barbaric practices and attacks in Europe, it has generated significant blowback. The number of Islamic State fighters killed by allied airstrikes has been put at 25,000. In other words, as Al Qaeda found when its base was attacked in Afghanistan after 9/11, its misconceived attacks lead to a world of pain.
In a National Interest article titled Death and Taxes in Islamic State, John Ford writes about another threat to the Islamic State — its dwindling tax base. Besides defecting fighters due to severe pay slashes,
Nearly a half century ago, a serious candidate for the presidency actually went around telling the voters the truth, and daring them to try to make this a better country.
"Some men see things as they are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not." Robert Kennedy said that over and over in the spring of 1968.
When he spoke at a medical school in Indiana, to call for something like universal health care for all, one of the white students asked sarcastically, "Where are we going to get the money to pay for all these new programs you're proposing?"
Kennedy said, "From you. You are the privileged ones here." He noted that they were virtually all white, and studying in comfort while poor black kids were fighting in Vietnam.
Sometimes this whole election season seems like a weird journalism experiment designed to determine just how out of whack Hillary Clinton’s campaign press coverage can become; how one-sided and nasty the media chronicling of her can be.
As the Democratic front-runner moves closer to likely securing the nomination and potentially becoming the first female president in United States history, the press prefers to often treat her campaign as a mess that's perpetually facing looming pitfalls and possible setbacks. (When not critiquing the volume of her speaking voice.)
The tone of the gloomy coverage should surprise no one who’s paid close attention to how the Beltway press has depicted Bill and Hillary Clinton over the last two decades. (Hint: With boundless snark and endless suspicion.)
My wife Rachel, whom some of you know as Crane-Station, just returned from Seattle where she was visiting her dying father. Her mother is in declining heath and unlikely to survive him by more than a year. I've been through this end-of-life experience with my parents. They passed in 1999 (father) and 2000 (mother).
She is close to her parents. I was not close to mine. She has siblings to share the experience. I was an only child. Despite different relationships with our parents, both of us have experienced emotional storms that are difficult to describe.
My father succumbed to Alzheimers. I watched him die by inches and that experience damn near killed me. I do not want to die that way. I'm willing to take my life, if I find myself drifting down the river of forgetfulness.
This Week: Making sense of the election season with a historian. From Confederate monuments and the Black Lives Matter movement to election politics and utopian communities, Foner discusses today’s politics through the legacy of the past, and Laura takes a new look at a hundred-year-old proclamation.
The Bush administration negotiated the Panama free trade agreement without addressing Panama’s bank and corporate secrecy. Panama has little to “trade” with the U.S., so maybe leaving secrecy out of the agreement wasn’t an accident; it was the point. It provided a stamp of legitimacy and protections for “investors” moving their money to Panama.
Panama Trade Agreement
The Panama–United States Trade Promotion Agreement, negotiated by the Bush administration, was finalized by the Obama administration and went into effect in 2012. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) website promotes the agreement as removing “barriers to U.S. services, including financial services.” It removed some duties and tariffs on U.S. exports and phased out others, like agricultural goods and technology products. It provided “protections” for U.S. “investors.”
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Why isn't he in prison? Friends in high places, a great many of them (source).
I've been wanting to write for a while about all the reasons the bipartisan Establishment — the people at the top running the "big game" that makes them all rich and keeps them in power — can't ever let Bernie Sanders get control of the Executive Branch of government. There are quite a few reasons, including the fact that people like Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, would certainly be prosecuted and most likely jailed for fraud.
But one story that's been making the ginned-up news rounds lately is that Sanders, in an interview with the NY Daily News, seemed in the Clinton camp's telling not to know how to go about executing one of his own policies, breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks.
— from American Herald Tribune
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry say that allowing family members of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for its complicity in that crime would set a terrible precedent that would open the United States up to lawsuits from abroad.
Wonderful! Let the lawsuits rain down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream!
Suing Saudis over 9/11 will only set a precedent if it succeeds, which is to say if there is evidence of Saudi complicity. We know that there is, according to former Senator Bob Graham and others who have read 28 pages censored from a U.S. Senate report. Pressure is building in Congress both to reveal those 28 pages and to allow lawsuits. And yet another Senate bill gaining support would block further U.S. arming of Saudi Arabia.
My son left a 2015 Guinness Book of World Records lying around. It's largely a mix of athletic feats, extravagant spending, freakish body conditions and diseases, and people who do dumb stuff in order to get into the book. It also features two sections focused on mass-murder. One celebrates the technology used to kill people. In that section, the United States is featured almost exclusively. The other section looks more at the wars, killing, and dying. In that section, the United States could not be avoided, but every effort was made.
Starting with the celebration of the tools of death, Guinness chooses to include these awards for the United States of America:
[click image to enlarge]
A Los Angeles jury will soon decide whether Led Zeppelin ripped off the Spirit song “Taurus” for their monster hit “Stairway to Heaven.” How would the candidates weigh in?
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
There are two things we all need to know about the upcoming 2016 election:
- Millions of likely Democratic voters have already been stripped from the voter rolls in critical states like Ohio. The key reporting on this has been done by the great Greg Palast, who has shown that a computer program coordinated by the Republican secretary of state of Kansas is being used in some two dozen states to steal from a substantial percentage of the citizenry their right to vote. The raw numbers are high enough that they could have a significant impact on the presidential, US Senate, House and many other elections this fall. The ACLU has now sued Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, over the stripping of two million citizens from Ohio's voter rolls.
Americans don't trust the media. In fact, studies show that we like, really, really, really don't trust the media.
A new survey from the Media Insight Project, for examples, shows that just 6 percent of Americans "say they have great confidence in the press."
Six percent! Just for some perspective, that's about the same number of Americans who say they have trust in Congress, which is about 4 percent.
It's up for debate whether that reflects worse on Congress or the media, but one thing is clear: The US public's almost total distrust of the press isn't going away anytime soon.
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