Please sign the petition http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/repeal-the-helms-burton?source=c.em.mt&r_by=8638452
Month: December, 2014
worker |
December 27, 2014 |
11:33 pm | Action, Cuba, International, Latin America, National |
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worker |
December 27, 2014 |
11:11 pm | Action, Analysis, Cuba, Cuban Five, Economy, International, National, police terrorism |
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◠Congratulations to the Cuban patriots (the Cuban Five), the remaining three of whom were finally released from US jails for the “crime†of making the world a safer place from US imperialism (How extensive and racially and economically selective must a prison system be before we can refer to the installations as concentration camps?) All fair-minded people should rejoice at the moving reunion of these internationalists with their families and their countrymen and women!
Before we are overwhelmed by adulation for President Obama’s role in the release of the remaining Cuban Five, a fawning process that has begun in earnest, we should remind the adulators that it is bad form to praise someone for doing what he or she should have done long before. Nothing has really happened to precipitate a change in US-Cuban relations at this moment except the passing of Obama’s final national election cycle– a fact that suggests that Obama’s welcome moves are more political expediency than any serious change of heart. Those who sense faux-liberal stroking in anticipation of the forthcoming election season are probably on solid ground. The U-turn regarding policy towards Cuba demonstrated recently on the editorial pages of the New York Times also point to a strategic shift in the thinking of key elements of the US ruling class.
â— John Pilger, by way of Michael Munk’s always interesting blog, lastmarx, asks what became of Malaysian flight MH17, which crashed in the Eastern Ukraine. After the July disaster, the Western media proceeded to blame Eastern Ukrainian resistance fighters and Russia without a shred of hard evidence beyond “unnamed†Western intelligence “sources†(How do journalists acquire access to intelligence sources yet remain uncompromised?).
Despite recovering black boxes, debris and bodies, the Western investigators have been strangely silent since August. No evidence has come forth apart from Russian sources. No indictments from the notorious International Court of Justice (from which the US refused to honor its jurisdiction in 1986 despite having a permanent judge and frequently imposing jurisdiction on others). Compare this to the Western-induced hysteria surrounding earlier incidents like Korean Airlines 007, a media frenzy that demonized the Soviets for years. Even the crazed General Breedlove– Pilger calls him NATO’s “Dr. Strangelove‖ has remained relatively silent. Could it be that the facts are pointing the wrong way?
â— The 2014 Brazen Hypocrisy award goes to President Barack Obama for his two-faced appeal to the right of self defense. Esteemed Cuban blogger Manuel A. Yepe lauds research by Brandon Turbeville that recovers a statement from November 2012 by the self-righteous Peace Prize Winner. President Obama, in defense of Israeli aggression, argued: “… there is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.†Of course this is unabashed hypocrisy for a leader who daily signs off on drone, cruise missile, and bomb attacks on Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen, a glaring contradiction that Yepe credits Turbeville for exposing.
Certainly there are plenty of candidates for the Hypocrisy Award, most of whom nest in US seats of power: the recent sanctions imposed by a serial human rights violator (the US) against Venezuela for imaginary “human rights†violations count as first degree hypocrisy. Imagine a government that spies on ALL of its citizens, tortures foreigners, and allows militarized police forces to kill unarmed citizens punishing Venezuela and lecturing the rest of the world about good behavior.
Or consider the hypocrisy of ferreting out other countries deficient in democracy– a favorite activity of US media pundits– while never mentioning Japan, a country ruled by one party, the Liberal Democratic Party, since 1955 with less than four years of respite. Many of those dubbed “dictators†would be jealous.
And then there’s the shameless Henry Blodget, the blue-blood, consummate Wall Street insider, who has been banned for life from the securities industry for fraud. Addicted to the celebrity spotlight, Blodget regarded the claim that the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea hacked a US entertainment company as a sufficient basis for declaring the alleged hack “effectively an act of war….†Blodget’s panic arises from his concerns that the DPRK might “get into the moneyâ€: “’It’s not just they get some credit card numbers which we’ve been seeing forever. But they actually get into the money’ at large corporations and banks†(Yahoo Finance, 12-19-14).
Truly, we swim in a sea of hypocrisy.
◠But hypocrisy is only tolerated because we refuse to hold public figures and the media accountable for their statements; as Gore Vidal put it, we reside in the “United States of Amnesia.†He drew attention to an adult population narcotized by shallow entertainments and denied any sense of history or continuity. Actually, Martha Gellhorn said it much earlier (1953) when she noted the “consensual amnesia†rampant in the US.
It is wrong, however, to blame the US people for the cowardice and lack of accountability of the media and academia. We cannot blame collective ignorance on the victims when it is the product of the massive, suffocating machinery of capitalist disinformation and vulgar culture.
Imagine if we could hold all of the opinion makers and policy pundits accountable for their slavish promotion of the unprovoked invasion of Iraq and the subsequent destabilization of the entire Middle East. Imagine if we could exile them to write for the Metropolis Daily Planet until they reclaimed their integrity. Soon, we would forget the names Friedman, Krauthammer, and the other cheerleaders of imperialism, maybe even the loudmouth, Cheney. Exactly what journalistic crimes must they commit, what disasters must they endorse before their bosses and colleagues turn them out?
Similarly, the economic collapse of 2007-2008, unpredicted and unsolved by the “wise men†of the economics profession, has spawned no new thinking or rejection of the old.
Sadly, most of our public intellectuals have become courtiers and not truth seekers.
â— We must not ignore the amnesia of the US left. Forgotten is the mass euphoria over the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Virtually all of the liberal and soft left was swept away by the overwhelming Democratic Party victory, affording a two-year window to pass a whole laundry list of legislation benefiting labor, minorities, women, the elderly, undocumented and other components of the Democratic Party coalition. Except for a health care initiative that has failed to live up to anyone’s expectations other than insurance companies, none of these promises came to fruition, even to serious consideration. As the Democrats gin up for another Presidential campaign behind Hillary (after she disposes of the Quixote-like campaign of Elizabeth Warren), this miserable performance will be forgotten. With the Obama well running dry, liberal and the moderate left will drill a new Clinton well of hope. Memories are short.
â— While the signs of mass militancy are positive, most recently from the anger and activism springing from criminal police behavior, the left seems to find diversions and distractions that create speed bumps, if not detours, from clarity and united action.
The energy of the Occupy movement was welcome, but the embrace of the organizing principles of disorganization proved– once again– a damper on movement building. Seemingly, every generation must champion group therapy as an antidote to “hierarchies†and “leadership,†alleged features of the “old left,†“the establishment,†“elites†or other evils imagined by self-anointed ideological gurus.
The New Left of the sixties pioneered this posture, shattering enormous mass movements against racism and war into a thousand pieces. The shallow and idealistic emotions conjured by the words “participatory democracy†arise again and again with the same result.
◠The latest obstacle to ideological clarity and effective action is the amorphous and ideologically confounding “Sharing†Economy movement. The “New†or “Sharing†economy projects occupy two distinct poles.
At one pole are the liberal/left activists who have been shocked by the human carnage of economic crisis, but are afraid of or disillusioned with the socialist option. While many may see capitalism’s flaws, they are cowed by the enormous task of defeating and replacing it. Rather than joining Marxists, who are confident and determined to revive the fight for a world without exploitation and without rule by the rich and powerful, they propose that we simply drop out of the global economy, that we live and work outside of it. In collectively owned cooperatives, they propose an alternative to capitalism. But is it really an alternative?
Certainly there is nothing, in principle, wrong with cooperatives. Indeed, they are sometimes an answer for small-holders to improve their destiny against large capitalist enterprises. That is, they can postpone, but rarely derail the laws of capitalist development, the tendency for the large to devour the small.
But it is silly to believe that cooperatives in any way challenge capitalism as we know it today. State-monopoly capitalism– the merger of the power of the state with the largest, most economically dominant corporations– will not shudder in the face of the cooperative movement. Nor should it. If cooperatives posed any kind of threat, the mega-corporations would swat them like flies.
Instead, the New Economy (cooperative) movement does offer an alternative– an alternative to small businesses. Cooperatives, where they exist, compete against small businesses. They mesh a small-business mentality with an immature social consciousness, a program that only succeeds at the expense of those businesses marginally able to survive while leaving the rich and powerful untouched.
At best, the cooperative movement offers a safe haven for the few to hone their entrepreneurial skills in commercial combat against some of our potential allies in the anti-monopoly movement, the under-capitalized, marginal small business owner.
â— The other pole, however, is more insidious. The “sharing†economy, as exemplified by Uber and other creatively named Google-era projects, does not pretend to be anti-capitalist. While “sharing†poses as a kinder, gentler, freer capitalism, it really counts as a way for a new generation of entrepreneurs to pry open markets long dominated by well ensconced services. At the same time, this well-educated, supremely self-confident cabal have seduced many into believing that predation on these service industries is somehow “progressive.â€
In fact, Uber and the sharing model are a step back to proto-capitalism, a return to the putting-out”system, where providing the labor and resources is the responsibility of others and not the capitalist. Uber, for example, uses the human capital (drivers) and fixed capital (their cars) of its “employees†to undermine services that are capital intensive (taxis, insurance, benefits, maintenance, fuel, etc) and available to even the most disadvantaged (subsidized public transportation). Like charter schools and package-delivery services, they cherry-pick the most profitable, least risky, or least costly niches of a service and leave the rest for someone else (most often, the public sector). In that way, they most resemble the hyper-exploitative cottage industries of the pre-industrial era. Like those industries, they rely upon sweated labor and forgo all worker protections.
Of course not all those embracing the sharing model begin as predators. Many see the internet as creating new opportunities for matching people and services. But centuries of capitalism teach us that every entrepreneur afforded the opportunity of matching people with services has leaped at the opportunity to commercialize it. Elite universities and business schools have not purged that tendency from their students.
Whether it is cooperatives or the “sharing†model of entrepreneurship, those looking for answers to the rapaciousness and vulgarity of our society must look elsewhere.
We will come no closer to achieving social justice and democracy until we understand the malignancy of capitalism. There are no other diagnoses.
Zoltan Zigedy
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/12/26/bernie-sanders-announces-deadline-presidential-decision
Sanders: ‘I don’t want to do it unless we can win this thing’; Will decide by March
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said he would decide by March if he would run for president in 2016.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) announced Friday that he will decide by March if he will enter the 2016 presidential race—and whether he’ll run on a Democrat or Independent platform. In an interview with the Associated Press, Sanders said his nomination would be more than a political game. “I don’t want to do it unless I can do it well,” he said. “I don’t want to do it unless we can win this thing.” Sanders said he would make a “gut decision” about running and acknowledged that Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton would be his primary opponent. Although Sanders is a socialist, his views on many issues regularly align with Senate Democrats. Still, he has criticized his colleagues in the past for their weaker approach to issues he sees as particularly dire, such as the income inequality, climate change, and campaign finance reform. In an interview with C-SPAN‘s “Newsmakers” program in November, Sanders attributed the Republican midterm sweep of the Senate to lackluster campaigns on the Democrat side, stating, “I think many of the Democratic candidates did not run on an agenda which resonated with working people.” On Friday, he reiterated that point, telling the AP, “You have one family, the Walton family of Walmart, owning more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. We have 95 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent. You have millions of families unable to afford to send their kids to college. People are desperately worried about whether or not they are going to retire with dignity.” The growing wealth gap has led to a “collapsing” middle class, he said. AP continues:
Sanders has a 12-step plan that he says will restore the economy and especially the middle class, most of it dependent on higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Among the proposals: A $1 trillion infrastructure building program that would “create 13 million decent-paying jobs,” more worker-friendly international trade deals and legislation to strengthen unions, and transforming the U.S. energy system “away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy.”
Tad Devine, a political consultant and former employee of Sanders’, told the AP, “Even the majority of Republicans believe that the deck is stacked against the people in this country. That’s exactly what Bernie has been talking about for a long time.”
http://www.dsausa.org/sanders_petition
Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) has announced that he is considering a candidacy for President in 2016 to further a desperately needed political revolution in the USA.
Senator Sanders is a lifelong champion of the public programs and democratic rights that empower working class people. His 
candidacy could help expand both the progressive movement and the democratic socialist voice within that movement.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) strongly encourages Senator Sanders to create a formal exploratory committee. We further encourage him to meet with grassroots activists throughout the country to discuss how his candidacy might effectively promote their varied struggles for social and economic justice, human rights, world peace and a healthy environment.
By running in Democratic Party primaries, Independent Senator Sanders would challenge the dominant discourse of the neoliberal Democrats that privilege corporate business interests over those of all working people. Thus he would contribute to building a strong movement to halt the vicious attacks of Tea Party Republicans at all governmental levels on workers’ rights, voting rights, and people of color in general.
http://ideologicalfightback.com/oil-coup/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/16/the-oil-coup/
US-Saudi Subterfuge Send Stocks and Credit Reeling
“John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, allegedly struck a deal with King Abdullah in September under which the Saudis would sell crude at below the prevailing market price. That would help explain why the price has been falling at a time when, given the turmoil in Iraq and Syria caused by Islamic State, it would normally have been rising.†(Stakes are high as US plays the oil card against Iran and Russia, Larry Eliot, Guardian)
U.S. powerbrokers have put the country at risk of another financial crisis to intensify their economic war on Moscow and to move ahead with their plan to “pivot to Asiaâ€. Here’s what’s happening: Washington has persuaded the Saudis to flood the market with oil to push down prices, decimate Russia’s economy, and reduce Moscow’s resistance to further NATO encirclement and the spreading of US military bases across Central Asia. The US-Saudi scheme has slashed oil prices by nearly a half since they hit their peak in June. The sharp decline in prices has burst the bubble in high-yield debt which has increased the turbulence in the credit markets while pushing global equities into a tailspin. Even so, the roiled markets and spreading contagion have not deterred Washington from pursuing its reckless plan, a plan which uses Riyadh’s stooge-regime to prosecute Washington’s global resource war. Here’s a brief summary from an article by F. William Engdahl titled “The Secret Stupid Saudi-US Deal on Syriaâ€:
“The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called IS. It involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabian flooding the world market with cheap oil. Details were concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Saudi King… ..the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been flooding the market with deep discounted oil, triggering a price war within OPEC… The Saudis are targeting sales to Asia for the discounts and in particular, its major Asian customer, China where it is reportedly offering its crude for a mere $50 to $60 a barrel rather than the earlier price of around $100. That Saudi financial discounting operation in turn is by all appearance being coordinated with a US Treasury financial warfare operation, via its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in cooperation with a handful of inside players on Wall Street who control oil derivatives trading. The result is a market panic that is gaining momentum daily. China is quite happy to buy the cheap oil, but her close allies, Russia and Iran, are being hit severely… According to Rashid Abanmy, President of the Riyadh-based Saudi Arabia Oil Policies and Strategic Expectations Center, the dramatic price collapse is being deliberately caused by the Saudis, OPEC’s largest producer. The public reason claimed is to gain new markets in a global market of weakening oil demand. The real reason, according to Abanmy, is to put pressure on Iran on her nuclear program, and on Russia to end her support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria….More than 50% of Russian state revenue comes from its export sales of oil and gas. The US-Saudi oil price manipulation is aimed at destabilizing several strong opponents of US globalist policies. Targets include Iran and Syria, both allies of Russia in opposing a US sole Superpower. The principal target, however, is Putin’s Russia, the single greatest threat today to that Superpower hegemony. (The Secret Stupid Saudi-US Deal on Syria, F. William Engdahl, BFP)
The US must achieve its objectives in Central Asia or forfeit its top-spot as the world’s only superpower. This is why US policymakers have embarked on such a risky venture. There’s simply no other way to sustain the status quo which allows the US to impose its own coercive dollar system on the world, a system in which the US exchanges paper currency produced-at-will by the Central Bank for valuable raw materials, manufactured products and hard labor. Washington is prepared to defend this extortionist petrodollar recycling system to the end, even if it means nuclear war. How Flooding the Market Adds to Instability The destructive and destabilizing knock-on effects of this lunatic plan are visible everywhere. Plummeting oil prices are making it harder for energy companies to get the funding they need to roll over their debt or maintain current operations. Companies borrow based on the size of their reserves, but when prices tumble by nearly 50 percent–as they have in the last six months– the value of those reserves falls sharply which cuts off access to the market leaving CEO’s with the dismal prospect of either selling assets at firesale prices or facing default. If the problem could be contained within the sector, there’d be no reason for concern. But what worries Wall Street is that a surge in energy company failures could ripple through the financial system and wallop the banks. Despite six years of zero rates and monetary easing, the nation’s biggest banks are still perilously undercapitalized, which means that a wave of unexpected bankruptcies could be all it takes to collapse the weaker institutions and tip the system back into crisis. Here’s an excerpt from a post at Automatic Earth titled “Will Oil Kill the Zombies?â€:
“If prices fall any further, it would seem that most of the entire shale edifice must of necessity crumble to the ground. And that will cause an absolute earthquake in the financial world, because someone supplied the loans the whole thing leans on. An enormous amount of investors have been chasing high yield, including many institutional investors, and they’re about to get burned something bad….. if oil keeps going the way it has lately, the Fed may instead have to think about bailing out the big Wall Street banks once again.†(Will Oil Kill the Zombies?, Raúl Ilargi Meijer, Automatic Earth)
The problem with falling oil prices is not just mounting deflation or droopy profits; it’s the fact that every part of the industry–exploration, development and production — is propped atop a mountain of red ink (junk bonds). When that debt can no longer be serviced or increased, then the primary lenders (counterparties and financial institutions) sustain heavy losses which domino through the entire system. Take a look at this from Marketwatch:
“There’s ‘no question’ that for energy companies with a riskier debt profile the high-yield debt market “is essentially shut down at this stage,†and there are signs that further pain could hit the sector, †senior fixed-income strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management, Dan Heckman told Marketwatch. “We are getting to the point that it is becoming very concerning.†(Marketwatch)
When energy companies lose access to the market and are unable to borrow at low rates, it’s only a matter of time before they trundle off to extinction. On Friday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) renewed pressure on prices by lowering its estimate for global demand for oil in 2015. The announcement immediately sent stocks into a nosedive. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) lost 315 points by the end of the day, while, according to Bloomberg, more than “$1 trillion was erased from the value of global equities in the weekâ€. The world is awash in cheap petroleum which is wreaking havoc on domestic shale producers that need prices of roughly $70 per barrel to break-even. With West Texas Intermediate (WTI) presently headed south of 60 bucks–and no bottom in sight–these smaller producers are sure to get clobbered. Pension funds, private equity, banks, and other investors who gambled on these dodgy energy-related junk bonds are going to get their heads handed to them in the months ahead. The troubles in the oil patch are mainly attributable to the Fed’s easy money policies. By dropping rates to zero and flooding the markets with liquidity, the Fed made it possible for every Tom, Dick and Harry to borrow in the bond market regardless of the quality of the debt. No one figured that the bottom would drop out leaving an entire sector high and dry. Everyone thought the all-powerful Fed could print its way out of any mess. After last week’s bloodbath, however, they’re not nearly as confident. Here’s how Bloomberg sums it up:
“The danger of stimulus-induced bubbles is starting to play out in the market for energy-company debt….Since early 2010, energy producers have raised $550 billion of new bonds and loans as the Federal Reserve held borrowing costs near zero, according to Deutsche Bank AG. With oil prices plunging, investors are questioning the ability of some issuers to meet their debt obligations… The Fed’s decision to keep benchmark interest rates at record lows for six years has encouraged investors to funnel cash into speculative-grade securities to generate returns, raising concern that risks were being overlooked. A report from Moody’s Investors Service this week found that investor protections in corporate debt are at an all-time low, while average yields on junk bonds were recently lower than what investment-grade companies were paying before the credit crisis.†(Fed Bubble Bursts in $550 Billion of Energy Debt: Credit Markets, Bloomberg)
The Fed’s role in this debacle couldn’t be clearer. Investors piled into these dodgy debt-instruments because they thought Bernanke had their back and would intervene at the first sign of trouble. Now that the bubble has burst and the losses are piling up, the Fed is nowhere to be seen. In the last week, falling oil prices have started to impact the credit markets where investors are ditching debt on anything that looks at all shaky. The signs of contagion are already apparent and likely to get worse. Investors fear that if they don’t hit the “sell†button now, they won’t be able to find a buyer later. In other words, liquidity is drying up fast which is accelerating the rate of decline. Naturally, this has affected US Treasuries which are still seen as “risk freeâ€. As investors increasingly load up on USTs, long-term yields have been pounded into the ground like a tentpeg. As of Friday, the benchmark 10-year Treasury checked in at a miniscule 2.08 percent, the kind of reading one would expect in the middle of a Depression. The Saudi-led insurgency has reversed the direction of the market, put global stocks into a nosedive and triggered a panic in the credit markets. And while the financial system edges closer to a full-blown crisis every day, policymakers in Washington have remained resolutely silent on the issue, never uttering as much as a peep of protest for a Saudi policy that can only be described as a deliberate act of financial terrorism. Why is that? Why have Obama and Co. kept their mouths shut while oil prices have plunged, domestic industries have been demolished, and stocks have gone off a cliff? Could it be that they’re actually in cahoots with the Saudis and that it’s all a big game designed to annihilate enemies of the glorious New World Order? It certainly looks that way. MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.
Web Only / Features » December 19, 2014 
Why Bernie Sanders Needs to Run for President—As an Independent
The corporate capture of both parties, explosion of energy in grassroots movements, and popular disgust with politics as usual make this the perfect moment for Sanders to run outside the Democratic Party.
Source: In These Times
It’s time for a new course of action—and Bernie Sanders has the name recognition, the resume and the gravitas to be the face of a new national democratic socialist political party that has the potential to change the direction of U.S. politics.
Bernie Sanders, the fiery, independent, populist U.S. Senator from Vermont, has been mulling a presidential campaign in 2016. There is no question about it: He should absolutely run.
Mr. Sanders has the credentials, the charisma and the community support he needs to seize the populist moment we are in and help spark a grassroots insurgency against the billionaire class.
Somebody has to take on Hillary Clinton from the Left—otherwise the 2016 elections will be nothing more than two corporate politicians making hollow promises to the American people while selling their souls behind the scenes to war profiteers and Wall Street banksters. And while Elizabeth Warren is also a compelling candidate, chances are at least moderately high that she may not run, opting to play it safe in favor of maintaining good standing with the party’s leadership.
And even if Warren does run, her candidacy will not contribute to the building of a genuine third party movement—which is what the Left really needs to do to build long-term independent political power.
That’s why Bernie Sanders must run—and it’s why he should run on a third party ticket, not as a Democrat.
Merely impacting the 2016 presidential elections through the Democratic primaries is too small of a goal given the times we are in, and will not go far or fast enough to move the people and the planet away from the brink of corporate and climate catastrophe. The last thing we need is a firebrand like Mr. Sanders to spearhead a populist electoral charge and raise expectations, only to concede after a few weeks, endorse Hillary and urge his followers back into the folds of the establishment Democratic tent.
It would be disappointing, to say the least, to see a lifelong independent and self-described democratic socialist using the specter of a Republican boogey-man to scare millions of everyday people back into the two-party closet. The truth is, our country’s neoliberal turn advanced tremendously under the Carter, Clinton and Obama Administrations, and it was the Supreme Court that stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, not Ralph Nader.
Neither should Mr. Sanders run only as an independent without attempting to build the kind of organizational and party infrastructure that can live on after his campaign is over, as Nader failed to do in 2004. Mr. Sanders should instead aim higher and strive to change the course of U.S. history by making 2016 the year that an independent third party broke through the white noise and became a permanent fixture in American politics. This should not be done through the Green Party, but through the construction of a new, broad-based democratic socialist party.
Building a nationally viable third party in less than two years will be challenging, but Mr. Sanders has long enough coattails to pull it off. For one thing, the conditions in this country are ripe for this kind of move. Grassroots social movements, from Madison to Occupy Wall Street to #BlackLivesMatter, have been growing steadily since the economic crash in 2008, and have articulated a reform agenda that neither political party appears willing to embrace.
The 2014 midterm elections saw the lowest voter turnout of the modern era, after which the much ballyhooed left turn by President Obama and Senate Democrats turned out to be little more than liberal hype. (See, for example, the party’s capitulation to the corporate right without much of a fight during the recent “Crominbus†budget debate.) The incident serves as yet another example of a political culture that has become thoroughly corrupted by big corporate money.
Voters aren’t stupid. Their apathy in these elections comes from a lack of appealing choices. In a system where neither party is willing to address the bread-and-butter issues that impact us most like jobs, education, housing, health-care and debt, our only options are to stay home or to “vote the bums out,†replacing them with another set of bums we’ll want to vote out, ad infinitum.
That’s why the history of U.S. electoral politics is such a schizophrenic seesawing of power back and forth between two wings of the same corporate power structure. One party swoops into office using the voter backlash against the other’s broken promises as a wedge, and then once in power does very little (at best) to make everyday people’s lives better in material, tangible ways.
Such a system will never be able to solve the staggering number of social problems confronting us. A third party candidacy led by Bernie Sanders, perhaps with a strong running mate like Seattle council woman and fellow socialist Kshama Sawant as his running mate, can give voice to the aspirations of millions of working-class Americans who have been effectively shut out of the governing process by the corrosive influence of corporate power. Their goals should include winning at least a third of the popular vote, concrete victories in dozens of local, county, statewide, and federal down-ballot races, construction of permanent party infrastructure and close collaboration with social movement actors independent of the Democratic Party.
There is already an emerging electoral precedent that suggests such a strategy is not outside of our ambitious reach. Ms. Sawant’s successful campaign in Seattle in 2013 not only elevated a card-carrying socialist to office, it helped catapult (alongside tenacious street demonstrations) the national Fight for $15 movement that has seen several major American cities pass significant minimum wage increases.
The success of Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones on the Green Party ticket in November’s New York gubernatorial race is also strong evidence that the appetite for third-party movement-building is there—if organizers and activists are willing to seize the initiative and take some risks.
The liberal establishment will cry “spoiler,†but their strategy has long proven to be bankrupt. It’s time for a new course of action—and Bernie Sanders has the name recognition, the resume and the gravitas to be the face of a new national democratic socialist political party that has the potential to change the direction of U.S. politics.
David Goodner is union organizer in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Originally from Iowa, he worked in Des Moines as a community organizer and Catholic Worker between 2009-2014. He may be reached at david.a.goodner [at] gmail.com or @davidgoodner.
by James Thompson
In the article previously posted on this website from the Huffington Post, Igor Bobic writes:
“Rubio, who is the son of Cuban immigrants, loudly protested the shift in policy all week. He chided the president on Wednesday for “coddling dictators and tyrants” and for dealing with a regime that has “harassed, imprisoned and even killed” its own people.” He is writing about Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
It appears there may be some weaknesses in the esteemed Senator’s argument. The rhetoric has been intense among congresspeople from both the Republican and Democratic party on the President’s admirable actions towards Cuba. The president is to be commended for his brave new policies towards Cuba. With the actions he took last week, President Obama has earned his Nobel Peace Prize.
Now the hypocrites are coming out of the woodwork. Sen. Rubio’s remarks stink of hypocrisy. The USA has a long history of “coddling dictators and tyrants.” Prior to the Cuban revolution, the US fully supported Batista. Batista was one of the most terroristic dictator/tyrants in human history. He terrorized the Cuban people, harassed them, imprisoned them and murdered them mercilessly with full US support. Similar terrorists receive full financial and propagandistic support from the US government around the world today.
The Zionist regime in Israel receives full US support for its terroristic activities towards the Palestinians. Dictators throughout Africa continue to terrorize their populations with full US support. The right wing regime in Colombia receives full US support for its terroristic activities towards its own citizens and towards the people of Venezuela. The US imposed fascist government in the Ukraine receives full support from the US as it advocates the extermination of Jews and Russian speaking people in the Ukraine. Saddam Hussein received full US support when he used gas purchased from the US on the Kurdish people. However, when he refused orders from the US, shock and awe was unleashed on him. The US supported the terrorist regime of Diem in Vietnam and slaughtered innocent people in Vietnam who opposed this nasty dictator.
Not only has the US supported petty dictators around the world who do the bidding of the wealthiest elite, agents of the US state (including CIA, NSA, etc.) have carried out terroristic operations directly. The US now has a reputation for violating international law and previous US heads of state cannot travel to many parts of the world since they risk arrest for war crimes. The US has a reputation for torture, drone attacks and the list goes on and on.
Rubio’s application of the phrase “‘harassed, imprisoned and even killed’ its own people” to Cuba is particularly egregious. The USA leads the world in the number of incarcerated people and in the application of capital punishment.
We must also remember the spectacular police killings of African-American males in the USA. These murders are on a par with the terroristic activities of the vicious Nazi regime in Germany. It should be remembered that the Nazi regime in Germany was partly financed by the Bush family, Henry Ford and many other wealthy people of the US.
Of course, it should be remembered that the only military use of nuclear weapons in the history of the world against a foreign country, i.e. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, occurred as a result of the direction of a President of the United States who was a member of the Democratic Party. The US also participated in the firebombing of Dresden at the same time in history.
No one has accused Cuba of using nuclear weapons against a sovereign nation. No one has  accused Cuba of waging terroristic, imperialistic wars against sovereign nations.
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So, perhaps Sen. Rubio should also criticize President Obama for attempting to normalize relations with a country, i.e. Cuba, that wants to normalize relations with its northern neighbor, i.e. the USA, that has a history of “coddling dictators and tyrants” and has “harassed, imprisoned and even killed its own people.”
Sen. Rubio and many others are fighting hard to make the world safe for hypocrisy.
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