Election 2016: A Political System In Crisis.

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The outcome of strangest and most consequential election cycle in recent American history will soon be upon us. Regardless of who becomes the next president, this election will forever be synonymous with the rogue candidacy of Donald Trump and the demographic shifts that have emboldened the right.

Though it may be a close election, it is widely presumed that public antipathy towards Trump – the first major party candidate who is near-universally opposed by both major parties – will tilt the odds in Hillary Clinton’s favour. Nonetheless, Trump’s support base of primarily white, blue-collar Americans will be a major factor for the political establishment to contend with in the years ahead.

These voters are frustrated by their economic marginalisation wrought by neoliberal trade deals and economic policies and are contemptuous of traditional political elite, their internationalism and liberal identity politics. For these voters, fear of immigration is entwined with the precarity of being working class, their troubling prejudices notwithstanding.

Economic disempowerment and political disenfranchisement have accelerated under President Obama, to the detriment of the American middle class. White, blue-collar Americans have witnessed the offshoring of their jobs and the erosion of their status in society, and Trump has masterfully stroked their resentment and discontent by playing on their fears of Muslims, immigrants and minorities.

Trump’s views often contain unusual contradictions and seem to be delivered impromptu. What remains consistent are his authoritarian views on crime and justice, vows to close the borders to refugees, Muslims and economic migrants, scepticism of overseas ‘democracy promotion’ and America’s role in international alliances, foreign policy views both isolationist and belligerent and of course, his distinctive megalomaniacal hubris.

Trump’s real problem with the Washington establishment is that he isn’t part of it. His campaign represents an insurgent faction of the oligarchical class that aims to displace and replace the standing political elites. Bipartisan opposition to Trump is grounded in the belief that he would be an unreliable proxy and a liability, someone too narrow and unpredictable to manage the common affairs of the ruling class and the US deep state.

Moreover, the US establishment is not interested in being led by such a contentious figure, who would draw protest and public opposition in a way that more conventional establishment candidates largely do not. For example, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration seems to engender more public outrage than the immigration policy under Obama, who has deported more people than any other president in history.

That being said, Hillary Clinton is a more dangerous candidate in many ways. Trump understands that the political system is rigged and the economy is oriented to serve various elite interests, a message that resonates across the political spectrum, even with anti-Trump segments of the electorate. As a hated political outsider not tied directly into the power and the money structure of the political system, there would be no shortage of gridlock and checks on the authority wielded by Trump in the unlikely event that he becomes president.

By contrast, Clinton wields enormous political influence inside the corridors of political and corporate power through personal relationships and connections. Policy and legislation shaped by donor money, lobbyist groups and special interests have been a hallmark of the Clintons’ time in public office. The very fact that she is standing for office while being investigated by the FBI, having committed actions that would have ended the careers of other politicians and government employees, speaks for itself.

It has been reported by various sources that the FBI’s recent decision to reopen the investigation into the Clinton email scandal less than two weeks before election day has been motivated by an internal backlash within the agency’s rank and file, forcing FBI director James Comey’s hand as a means of addressing internal critics who believe he buried the Clinton probe for political reasons.

Clinton’s email scandal is not the real issue. She has spent her political career ruthlessly advancing the interests of high finance, the military industrial complex and corporate America, with dramatic repercussions for minorities and the marginalised inside the United States, and the civilian populations of countries targeted for US military intervention and destabilization during the her time as an influential first lady, senator and secretary of state.

Clinton has spent her long career advocating hawkish US military supremacy and banking deregulation, expanding the private prison industry to the detriment of impoverished African-American communities, dismantling the social safety net that marginalised families rely on, and enabling the consolidation of corporate power through secretive trade agreements. On the campaign trail, she has characterised her work as advancing the interests of women and families.

The Clinton campaign has repeatedly evoked the historic struggle for civil rights and aspirational rhetoric of ‘breaking glass ceilings’ in the interest of a faux-feminism which prioritizes the equal opportunities of women to lead the nation’s highest office, while at once tone-deaf to the consequences faced by women and families on the receiving end of executive policies. The Democratic Party has become a parody of moral posturing, self-relishing its candidates with rhetoric that has no connection with policies in reality.

It is the party of establishment insiders and corporate donors who openly engineer the presidential nomination process to favour their preferred candidate by virtue of the undemocratic super-delegate system. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign inspired millions of Americans for good reason, has proven himself to be tepid and cowardly in the face of practices that have proven beyond doubt that the Democratic Party establishment conspired against him.

Bernie’s campaign centred around a rather modest, comparatively tame centre-left progressive platform that did not seriously question US militarism and the values of American exceptionalism. For the Democratic Party at large, the Sanders campaign represented a concession too far. The Clinton campaign even had the impudence to directly hire disgraced Democratic chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz after leaked emails exposed her partisanship.

Rather than addressing the political substance of revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign, backed by Obama administration officials, has reverted to neo-McCarthyism by labelling opposition voices as surrogates of Russia, explicitly accusing Moscow of meddling in the US election process. Accusations of Russian interference without accompanying evidence are at best a short-sighted means of deflecting responsibility for the corrupt actions of the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party insiders.

The next American president will have to confront the realities of strained relations with Russia. Clinton is known for her public enmity toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and would at best perpetuate the status quo of mutual distrust and limited cooperation. At worst, her policies could risk a military confrontation with Russia should she pursue the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syrian airspace, which she publically advocated during the presidential debates.

Trump is the most prominent American political figure to advocate détente with Russia, openly breaking with his neoconservative running mate Mike Pence. Trump has criticised Clinton for supporting anti-government insurgents in Syria and called for jointly targeting ISIS with the Russian, and by extension, Syrian militaries. Trump, being very critical of Iran, also signalled he was willing to fight against ISIS on the same side as Tehran.

He has also offered support for the establishment of a safe zone inside Syrian territory, potentially in cooperation with the Syrian government and its allies. Both candidates would pursue a different policy approach from the incumbent administration in Syria, but Clinton’s no-fly zone holds greater potential to deepen military hostilities between major powers. Clinton has generally been critical of Obama’s foreign policy in Syria and elsewhere for not asserting US power strongly enough.

Despite the differences in style and demeanour, the range of policies offered by the entrenched two-party system is limited to varying shades of centre- to far-right. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least trusted and most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history. Despite the public disillusionment with major party candidates, it remains to be seen whether American voters will cast ballots for third parties such as the Libertarian Party or Green Party, which are seeking to garner 5 percent of the popular vote to become eligible to receive public campaign funding.

More likely than not, American voters will cast their ballots ‘against’ Trump by voting for Clinton and vice versa, fueling the cyclical politics of the lesser evil that have been a feature of American presidential elections for decades. More than any other US election in recent history, the candidates represent the rot of an American political establishment marred by scandal, hypocrisy and the relentless pursuit of hegemony. To advocate one over the other is ultimately defeatist.

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Nile Bowie is a columnist with Russia Today (RT) and a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), an NGO based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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The Coming Plague of Poverty Among the Elderly: Clinton’s Plan For Gutting Social Security



In the recent Wikileaks revelations confirming Hillary Clinton’s duplicity, one of the clearest disclosures of her policy plans concerns her intention regarding Social Security. She stated that she would return to the position of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, charged with producing recommendations for reducing the deficit, i.e. cutting government social spending.

The Commission, or “Simpson-Bowles committee” -named after co-chairs former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, and Erskine Bowles, former Morgan Stanley board member and chief of staff under Bill Clinton- was appointed by Obama in 2010. Among its members were some of the most persistent deficit hawks. Most significantly, the Commission was stacked with leading enemies of Social Security flailing their arms over the “impending insolvency” of the program. The day before his appointment as co-chair, Simpson said in an interview with the Washington Post: “How did we get to a point in America where you get to a certain age in life, regardless of net worth or income, and you’re ‘entitled’? The word itself is killing us.” (Feb. 17, 2010) In a later e-mail he described Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million teats,” and had characterized its beneficiaries as “greedy geezers.” Bowles’s record was in line with Simpson’s. He had earlier negotiated with Newt Gingrich how best to cut safety net programs. The ultimate objective was to privatize Social Security.


In a rare moment of candor, a then-editor of The New York Times, Fred Brock, wrote an article critical of the Social-Security-is-going-broke alarmists titled “Save Social Security? From What?” (Business section, November 1, 1998). Brock attributed the faux hysteria to “hidden agendas…..Wall Street would love to get its hands on at least some of the billions of dollars in the Social Security trust fund . . . But knowing that the idea [of full privatization] won’t fly politically, [politicians] are pushing for partial privatization, in which individuals would invest a portion of their contribution in the stock market, all in the name of rescuing the system.”

Bowles’s efforts to undo Social Security through “partial privatization” began during the Clinton regime. The left-liberal economist Robert Kuttner, in his 2007 book The Squandering of America, detailed how Washington elites of both Parties had been planning to weaken Social Security since the Clinton Administration. Steven Gillon’s 2008 book The Pact included letters and interviews with reliable sources illustrating Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich’s collaboration to get Congress behind a plan to begin turning Social Security’s so-called trust fund over to Wall street, which would manage, for a fee, retirees’ benefits. Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin had prodded the president to work with Gingrich not merely to reduce benefits and extend the retirement age, but to begin the privatization of Social Security. Clinton appointed Bowles as his intermediary. But the Monica Lewinsky scandal caused both embarrassed Congressional Democrats and Gingrich to distance themselves from Clinton. The privatization plan fell apart.

A waiting game was now under way.

Hillary Clinton’s speeches to the captains of finance strongly imply that she would resume the project of privatizing Social Security. Hers will be a gradual, stealth approach. The opening salvo will be further cuts in benefits and extensions of the full-benefit retirement age. But these alone will not satisfy Wall Street. The privatization plan will be resurrected, first in the form of legislation once again to begin “partial privatization.” In the end, the objective will be to turn the program into a broker’s-fee-for-service plan entirely in the hands of Wall Street. Retired workers will no longer be unqualifiedly entitled to Social Security benefits. Their fortunes will be tied to the vagaries of the stock market and other speculative ventures favored by brokers. And retirees will pay for this “service.” There will be no refunds when the market goes belly-up.

What Do Retirees Now Get From Social Security?

Because so many seniors have scant savings and have been employed in low- to middle-wage jobs, poverty threatens the majority absent government income supplements raising them above the poverty line. 1 in 3 working Americans has zero retirement savings, and the median working-age couple has a mere $5,000 in retirement savings. The Social Security Administration reminds us that “Social Security is the major source of income for most of the elderly.” (1) It is in fact the federal government’s biggest domestic program, paying benefits to around 1 in 6 Americans and to over 90% of the elderly. With Social Security benefits in decline as the retirement age is steadily raised, the future portends especially hard times for old folks and for the population as a whole, because the elderly are a growing percentage of the entire population.

An outstanding feature of American society well before my 20 year old daughter reaches middle age will be a serious poverty plague among the growing numbers of the elderly. This is evident in the current state of Social Security and the most reliable projections for its future.

Social Security benefits are conspicuously modest. In the countries included in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average public pension benefits replace about 61% of median earnings. The corresponding figure for the U.S. is 37%, after subtracting (escalating) Medicare premiums. The U.S. ranks 26 out of the 30 OECD nations in this respect. The average retiree receives $1,328 a month in Social Security benefits. A third of beneficiaries receives 90% of their income from the program and 61% receive more than 50% of their income from the program. It is a telling indication of the niggardliness of the median household income that paltry Social Security payments kept 22 million from poverty in 2015. Thus, without Social Security benefits, 41% of elderly Americans would have incomes below the official poverty line, whereas with the program, “only” 9 percent do.

Social Security also benefits the non-elderly, and they too will be hit by Clinton’s announced offensive. More than 1 million children were lifted from poverty last year. Some received benefits because a parent died or became disabled or retired, and some live with relatives who receive Social Security. (2) Some 12 million disabled persons received benefits in 2015. According to the Social Administration itself, “That is barely enough to keep a beneficiary above the 2014 poverty level ($11,670 annually).” (3) All in all, without Social Security 20.5% of the total population would be in poverty; because of the program, “only” 13.5% are in poverty. The total number lifted out of poverty by Social Security in 2015 is 22,090,000. (4)

The Simpson-Bowles Recommendations for Social Security

The figures above make it clear that Clinton’s planned attack on Social Security will significantly raise total poverty, particularly among the elderly, the disabled and children. Clinton’s planned revival of Simpson-Bowles virtually guarantees this outcome. What were the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform? The emphasis is on cutting benefits by three means.

First, the retirement age would be increased. The then-retirement-age of 66 was to be increased to 67 by 2022 for people born in 1960 and later. Early retirees would be able to claim reduced benefits at 62. The Commission recommended that both the full and the early eligibility age would continue increasing after 2022. At an unspecified time before 2050 the early eligibility age would rise to 63 and the full retirement age would increase to 68. By 2070 the early eligibility age would reach 64 and the full retirement age would climb to 69.

The recommendations would force the elderly either to work full time into the years when their physical capacities have undergone normal decline, or stop working when their bodies tell them that persistent work effort is bad for their mental and physical health and thus suffer the penalty of reduced benefits and an even lower standard of living. The recommendations amount to escalating cruelty to the elderly.

What may not be obvious at first glance is that any increase in the full retirement age entails a cut in benefits for each and every retiree irrespective of the age at which they file. (5) Because the full retirement age is the age at which full benefits are paid, so that workers who file sooner collect permanently reduced benefits and those who file later get larger benefits, raising the retirement age means that the early retiree suffers a deeper reduction and the later retiree gets a smaller increase. The economic security of everyone in the system is jeopardized whenever the retirement age is raised. And Social Security “reform” means gradually raising the retirement age.

Clinton’s announced plan means a wholesale assault on the entire elderly population.

The second means of cutting benefits consists in changing the formula for determining payments so as to reduce benefits.

The third way the Committee would lower benefits is to reduce cost-of-living adjustments. The idea is to devise a different measure of inflation in order to lower cost-of-living adjustments by 0.3 percentage points a year. A number of tricks have been effected to underestimate inflation and hence lower the estimated cost of living. E.g., the substitution hypothesis assumed that when the price of hamburger went up the typical consumer would substitute chicken in the “basket of goods” stipulated to reflect the cost of living. Hence, the measure would not count a rise in the price of ground beef as inflation. What was actually measured was the cost of maintaining a declining standard of living.

All these strategies functioning to put the squeeze on seniors are implemented on top of a system whose basic structure already fails to do what it is allegedly intended to do, to protect the elderly’s buying power. In addition to fudging inflation estimates, the weight attached to various components of the basic market basket of goods is skewed against the elderly, precisely in order to depress Social Security payments. Older Americans tend to spend a greater portion of their budgets on medical care and housing than do younger people. Yet less weight is assigned to medical care and housing costs, which have risen more than 7% and 5% respectively since this time last year, and more weight to gasoline, which has declined deeply over the same period. And because the Consumer Price Index excludes the spending patterns of those over the age of 62, it does not include one of the fastest growing costs for retirees, rising Medicare premiums. It is as if the idea was to hit the elderly especially hard. As if indeed.

It is no surprise, then, that the scandalously inaccurate estimates of increases in the cost of living actually increase the cost of living for everyone, especially seniors. The COLA increase for 2017 will be a niggardly 0.3%. From 2010 to 2016, the COLA was increased, respectively, by the following percentages: 0.0, 0.0, 1.7, 1.5, 1.7, 0.0 and 0.0.

Clinton vs. Obama on the Simpson-Bowles Recommendations

Obama opted not to endorse all of the recommendations of the Commission but to “build on the fiscal Commission’s model.” (6) He accepted most of the major tenets of the Commission but went slower on their implementation. Austerity measures would be implemented over 12 years instead of 10. But he adhered to one of his principal reasons for putting the Commission together, that Social Security benefits would soon increase deficits to unsustainable levels. He supported the Commission’s aim to cut Medicare and Social Security. But his Social Security and Medicare cuts would be smaller than the Commission’s recommendations.

Clinton will at the least swallow whole the Simpson-Bowles recommendations. All stops will be pulled. The woman holds popular sentiment in contempt, so public disapproval will count for nothing. Let us not forget that a principal function of neoliberal policy is to do away with democratic government, a requirement if the distribution of private and public resources is to be consistently to the benefit of the plutocracy. Those most dependent on government assistance -the elderly, the unemployed and the disabled- will be hit hard.

The elderly tend to be more politically active, at least with respect to voting behavior. Their demographics are noteworthy. Between 2012 and 2050, the United States is expected to experience considerable growth in its older population. People 65 and over represented 14.5% of the population in the year 2014 but are expected to grow to be 21.7% of the population by 2040. (7) By 2050, the population aged 65 and over is projected to be 83.7 million, almost double its population of 43.1 million in 2012. By 2060 there will be about 98 million older persons, more than twice their number in 2014.

The elderly are growing both in number and as a percentage of the population. They will be hit very hard under financialized neoliberal capitalism. Will they quietly bemoan their fate, or will they be among the historical descendants of Occupy and the Sanders movement, making up a growing force of resistance to an increasingly austere and repressive (dis)order?

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College. His website is:http://www.alannasser.org. His book, United States of Emergency American Capitalism and Its Crises, will be published by Pluto Press early next year. If you would like to be notified when the book is released, please send a request to nassera@evergreen.edu

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It Didn’t Have to Be Hillary

Hillary Clinton, our next President, is inept, intellectually shallow and morally obtuse.

She is also a Russophobe, a neocon, and a liberal (“humanitarian”) imperialist, who is fond of military “solutions” to problems she and her co-thinkers have created. When she becomes Commander-in-Chief, she will be a disaster waiting to happen.

The prevailing view, however, is that foreign policy is her strong suit, and that she is a seasoned and capable leader, a “progressive pragmatist” who knows how to get things done. Conventional wisdom often conflicts with reality. Sometimes it inverts it. This is one of those times.

Shame therefore on The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN (the Clinton News Network), MSNBC (=MSDNC), and other so-called liberal media; and extra shame on publications like The New Yorker, where intelligent journalism still sometimes appears, and on the purportedly left-leaning Nation, and Mother Jones. For helping to concoct and reinforce the illusions that have made Hillary the reigning Queen of the War Party, they have a lot to answer for.

No doubt about it, though: as propagandists, they are good. They can’t “fool all of the people all of the time,” but they come close. Their achievement is especially impressive inasmuch as the truth is not just out there – it is staring everyone in the face.

Hillary has been, after all, almost as awful a candidate as she was a Secretary of State and, before that, a Senator and official wife of America’s forty-second President, the horn dog who finally did what Ronald Reagan and the first Bush could not. With Hillary by his side, that rascal closed out the “Vietnam Syndrome,” making America free again to run roughshod over the world. And, by neutralizing the opposition in ways that no Republican could, he, more than anyone else, including Ronald Reagan himself, implemented some of the most pernicious, corporate and bankster friendly elements of Reagan’s neoliberal agenda.

All leading Democrats these days think like Hillary to some extent, but, by making her their standard bearer, Democratic Party “donors” and functionaries, and the media flacks who serve them, scraped the bottom of the barrel. All of the Party’s nominees this century — Barack Obama, John Kerry, and even Al Gore – have been a cut above.

There are liberal scribblers and talking heads who, when pushed, will grudgingly admit that Hillary comes with a lot of baggage and many serious flaws. But they then go on to insist that for being about to break through “the glass ceiling,” that should all be overlooked.

Perhaps they have forgotten that even the hapless Walter Mondale realized, as long ago as 1984, that the glass was already broken. Is there anyone on earth, or any second wave feminist still writing for The Nation, who actually believes that Geraldine Ferraro’s gender is what cost Mondale that election?

The Obamas, Michelle especially, are going all out for Hillary. They are counting on her to make Barack look good. He is a serial violator of international law and of that pesky “thou shalt not kill” Commandment, a terrorizer of large swathes of the Muslim world, a deporter of Hispanics of almost Trumpian dimensions, and, like other Democrats, an exponent of the ideological commitments the Clintons hold dear.

But he is a prince compared to her.

By far, the most important mark in Obama’s favor is that we are all still here to talk about how awful his presidency was. This will be the case with Hillary, four or eight years from now, only if we build a peace movement large enough and militant enough to hold her back, and if we are lucky.

There is more: Obama really did have a daunting barrier to break through: a color line, a real one, fraught with momentous significance. No one – not Jesse Jackson, not anybody – could have broken through that “ceiling” three decades ago. It was far from obvious, even eight years ago, that the situation had much improved. Nevertheless, Obama got himself elected – twice.

He won the second time because, in the end, Mitt Romney was unable to Etch A Sketch his way out of the corner into which he had painted himself. To win the GOP nomination, he had to pander shamelessly to the Tea Partiers and other retrogrades that Republican grandees, always on the lookout for useful idiots, had recruited into the Republican base. And then, to have any chance of winning in the general election, he found that he had to keep on pandering right up to the bitter end.

Defeating Romney was therefore no great feat. It was different in 2008.

Getting elected then was the signal achievement of Obama’s presidency. It is worth noting, though, that it occurred before he took office, and that it has all been down hill since then.

To anyone willing to face reality, it was already apparent, by the time of that memorable pre-Inauguration Day concert at the Lincoln Memorial, that the Obama presidency had peaked on election night in Grant Park. But there was little appetite for facing reality in those salad days; and so, for several months more, willfully blind Obamaphiles continued to cut him slack.

Even so, it didn’t take long for Grant Park memories to fade, and for the scales to fall from the eyes of even his most ardent supporters. Obama bailed out Wall Street, leaving the ninety-nine percent to fend for itself; he let Bush era war criminals off scot-free; and, time and again, he proved himself impotent in the face of Republican obstinacy. For these reasons and more, by the end of his first summer in office, the shape of things to come was clear to all.

Obama will be remembered for breaking through the color line, but also, once in office, for things that hardly do him credit — continuing the wars he inherited from George W. Bush, for example, and then surreptitiously starting a half dozen or so more on his own; for an Affordable Care Act that, for whatever good it has done, set back efforts to provide health care as a universal right, the way civilized countries do, for perhaps another generation; and for doing too little too late to slow down, much less reverse, the ecological catastrophe into which the world is careening head on.

Nevertheless, he will be sorely missed once Hillary takes his place.

Of all the reasons why, one stands out above all the rest: the fact that she is hell bent on causing “regime change” in Russia and containing China. With a lesser evil like that, who needs a temperamentally unfit billionaire buffoon to bring on a nuclear war?

Did it have to come to this?

The short answer, I think, is No. To change the world fundamentally and for the better, electoral politics is radically insufficient. But it still makes a difference. We can do, and could have done, a lot better.

***

I don’t just mean that there was never anything inevitable about Hillary herself. Obviously, the ordinary vicissitudes of life and the whims of fortune can put the kybosh on the best-laid plans of highflying political schemers, just as on everyone else.

Had her path forward somehow been blocked, someone similarly acceptable to America’s economic, political and media elites, but a tad less bellicose and noxious, would probably now be in her place; and the future would look slightly less bleak.

I meant that we can do better because, as we now know, thanks to the Sanders and Trump insurgencies, that, when the stars are properly aligned, even a system as “rigged” as ours can fail to deliver the outcomes our elites demand.

To be sure, it is as plain now as it always has been that there are no purely, or mainly, electoral roads to the fundamental political and social transformations that we urgently need if the world is to survive.

Electoral campaigns can be useful for educating people and for mobilizing them, but, in the end, the most they can do is ratify changes that have already effectively taken place outside the electoral arena.

But this is not to say that their outcomes don’t matter. Quite to the contrary, they can matter a lot – for making situations better or worse.

Needless to say, presidential elections in the United States matter most to Americans. But since the United States is still a global hegemon, with a military presence throughout the world, they also matter to everybody on the planet. Americans therefore have a special responsibility to reflect on how this election could have gone better this time around.

Gaining a purchase on that question now could be useful too for planning what to do next — not immediately, it is already too late for that, but in the months and years to come; assuming, of course, that our next President’s reckless, ideologically-driven provocations of nuclear powers don’t make worries about the future moot.

As it happens, it doesn’t take a whole lot of counter-factual imagination to think of not too improbable paths not taken over the past year and a half that could have resulted in better outcomes than the one the American people are about to foist upon themselves.

Three examples come to mind; two of them are fairly obvious.

For one, had Sanders done just a little better in the primaries and caucuses, enough, say, to have won a majority of elected delegates, and then if he had had the will not just to complain about, but actually to fight against, the super-delegate system, he might well have become the Democratic Party’s nominee. Then, he, not Hillary, would be the one who will win November 8.

It would likely be a hollow victory, however, inasmuch as anything smacking of the “political revolution” he talked about would soon run up against determined ruling class opposition.

Obama’s problems with obstinacy came about because Republicans discovered that he had feet of clay, and because they realized that to keep their base on board, they needed to sink his presidency by appealing to their racism, nativism, and Islamophobia. Trump didn’t start the GOP down that road; the kinds of Republicans that conventional wisdom deems respectable did.

Were he President, Sanders would have to deal with an even more formidable problem: a ruling class determined to retain its power, wealth and privileges.

It would hardly matter that the “socialism” Sanders speaks of is only a twenty-first century version of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. America’s “economic royalists” are of one mind in thinking that whatever challenges, or seems to challenge, their economic and political power must be blocked at every turn, even if the challenge is only superficial.

Were Sanders the candidate of a political movement that derives its strength from the militancy and solidarity of its members, he could perhaps overcome the obstacles they would place in his way. But he had only a top-down electoral campaign behind him. How, then, could he be expected to govern effectively?

This is an excellent question, but the concern it expresses is not what did Sanders in. For that, blame the Democratic Party and the political machines associated with it, especially the African American ones in the South.

Even so, he could have won a majority of elected delegates, and then gone on to make the super-delegates offers they could not refuse. There were no structural obstacles in his way.

That this didn’t happen was largely his own fault – inasmuch as it took too long for him to understand just how much Black Lives Matter, not just to African Americans and to American society generally, but also to the fortunes of his own campaign.

Not all the fault is his, however. The famously polarized Democratic and Republican Parties also bear some of the blame.

They have been working together for years to schedule primaries and caucuses in ways that give Southern states undue influence over the nomination process. Their intent, it seems, is to drag the political center rightward — and, in the process, to diminish the prospects of electoral insurgencies like the one that Sanders ignited.

That strategy worked this time, as it usually does; but it did not work perfectly. After “Super Tuesday,” Sanders’ prospects were dim, no matter how well he would go on to do. But they were still good enough to give the Clinton juggernaut pause.

The Electoral College votes of most of the states that the primary and caucus schedule unduly empowers are likely to go to the Republican candidate in any case. This has the perverse consequence of assigning more weight to the preferences of Democratic voters in “red” states than in states that Democrats are sure to win. One would think that the Democratic Party leadership would have the concerns of their base enough in mind to find this objectionable; the fact that they don’t speaks volumes.

Of course, Trump could turn out to be so toxic that even the most retrograde states turn “blue.” Even if that happens, however, the political machines in those states would already have set the tone. They have been courted by the Clintons for decades, and it shows.

Had Sanders been more willing to take on superannuated civil rights era “icons” whom the Clintons bombard with charm offensives, people like Jim Clyburn and John Lewis, and to identify wholeheartedly with the struggles of the present generation of African American activists, he might have been able to fight Clinton and the Clintonites back, even in the South.

But, of course, he didn’t. Hillary therefore prevailed – for reasons that are political, not structural. Had Sanders been more savvy and politically adept, he could have beaten her.

Similarly, if, early on, (small-d) democrats, left, right and center, had come together to fight the duopoly’s Commission on Presidential Debates, insisting, say, that the debates be run on the old League of Women Voters rules, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and also Gary Johnson, the Libertarian would have had to be included.

Then, if nothing else, the intellectual and moral tone of the debates, and of the larger electoral contest in which they play such an integral role would have been a hundred-fold improved. Who knows what good might have come from that – if not on November 8, then in the struggles against Clinton and Clintonism that lie ahead?

The less obvious path not taken that I have in mind is a hobbyhorse of mine that others are not as likely as I am to find intriguing.

In the early days of this electoral season, in what already seems like another era, I went out on a limb – suggesting, several times, on this site, that the Democrats should consider making Jim Webb, the former Senator from Virginia, their standard-bearer. For my reasons why, see here and here.

I cannot say that I agreed with Webb’s politics; I knew, and still know, very little about his views.

But I was impressed by the fact that, where the Clintons are chicken hawks and warmongers, he had been a professional soldier whose life path, in and out of the military, reflects a deep understanding of war – at both a theoretical and experiential level.

Webb was a Vietnam War hero, awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts. Swift boat that! He also served in the Defense Department (under the villainous Ronald Reagan) and in the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.

This is why I thought, and still think, that his views on war and peace, right or wrong, merit serious consideration and respect; unlike the views of Hillary Clinton and the harpies she is likely to empower – Michele Flournoy, Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and others of their ilk.

I was impressed too by the fact that Webb is a first-class writer, especially of war fiction. This ought to count for something in a race against a dunce whose ghostwriters churn out self-serving, mindless pablum.

Most impressive of all, Webb is and long has been an assiduous critic of American military policy and imperial overreach.

He has never repudiated his support for the Vietnam War. But, in the years since, he has devoted considerable time and effort helping to make the Vietnamese people whole again. Webb has a Vietnamese wife, speaks fluent Vietnamese, and has, by all accounts, a deep understanding of Vietnamese culture and of Southeast Asia generally. Evidently, he is evidently a man of unusual intelligence and moral depth; everything Hillary is not.

Most important of all, he is a populist in the tradition of the class, not race, based populist insurgencies that have erupted, from time to time, in the rural South and Southwest, and in the mountain states.

By my lights, Webb gave out a better version of the vibe that John Edwards evinced when he ran against Clinton and Obama in 2008, before his prurient nature got the better of him.

The Vietnam War ended Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” and what little of it that survived was, for all practical purposes, terminated decades ago by the Clintons and their co-thinkers. Edwards talked about reviving it. Webb seemed like someone who could and would.

Back when Webb was still in the race, neither I nor anyone else took the Donald seriously. However, I can now see that my thought was that Webb would appeal to future Trump supporters – not the “deplorable” ones, but the pissed off and defiant men and women who harbor a visceral hatred of Hillary and Bill and who are susceptible to being mobilized along class lines.

This turned out to be a pipe dream. At the time, though, the idea that a Democrat with roots in rural Appalachia could revive the best traditions of multi-racial American populism seemed no more far fetched than the idea that a septuagenarian Jewish man from Brooklyn and Vermont, who espouses the merits of European Social Democracy, would stand a chance of handing Hillary her comeuppance.

It became clear early on, however, that Webb’s candidacy would go nowhere, not just for the usual reasons — because the Party leadership was indifferent when not hostile, and because corporate media dutifully ignored him — but also because, as it happened, the beginning of this year and a half long electoral season coincided with that brief span of time in which attention was being paid, not always fairly, to ways that white supremacists appropriated Confederate flags and other symbols of the old South.

This was therefore not a good time to promote Southern pride or to talk about ways to relieve poverty in what Great Society liberals used to call “the other America.”

It is worth recalling that, in those days, the Black Panthers, the (mainly Puerto-Rican) Young Lords, and the (mainly white Appalachian) Young Patriots made common cause. My hope was that a later-day version of that alliance could be forged around Webb’s candidacy.

That never happened, needless to say. Webb’s candidacy fizzled out instead.

But, in this case too, there is no structural reason, inherent in the logic of late (overripe) capitalist development, why this had to happen. With better luck, Webb or someone like him could have become, as it were, an anti-Trump – a progressive populist.

In these ways and others, the outcome could have been better than it will be when Hillary takes over.

When that day comes, Task Number One will be to do everything possible to assure that we make it to Task Number Two; in other words, to make it impossible politically for Hillary to act as her nature and convictions incline.

Task Number Two will be to work to assure that nothing like Task Number One becomes necessary again.

It can happen, if we get the politics right. It could even have happened this time around – with the right people and a few good breaks.

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ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

[X.Playa]

Hillary Clinton’s Blitzkrieg Campaign: the Savage Politics of the Oligarchs

by Richard W. Behan

It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say. We need to win this motherfucker.

—Mr. Scott Foval, Field Director, Americans United for Change, retained by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee

An elite stratum of wealthy and politically dominant people intends to make Hillary Clinton our next president. These are the oligarchs, the “1%” whose wealth and incomes continue growing while most American struggle. In her private life Hillary Clinton is well-positioned among this cohort, and they expect her as President to protect their wealth and maintain their dominance. She will.

To assure the oligarchs’ success, the Democratic National Committee is brutalizing the presidential electoral process, willfully violating rules, laws, and precedent. The strategy succeeded in the primary elections, and it will win the general.

Who are these people? The top 1% of wealth-holders numbers about 3.25 million. Predominantly they are citizens whose wealth depends on the huge American domestic and transnational corporations, either directly—executives, directors, investors, contractors, suppliers—or indirectly in other ways (e.g. investment bankers, hedge fund managers, consultants, top law firms). Two preeminent names in this grouping are Hillary and Bill Clinton, whose net worth (about $125 million) qualifies the couple for the 1% stratum by a factor of 16. Others are Wall Street bankers—the Clintons’ primal financial benefactors and first-name friends: Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, Robert Rubin, Brian Moynihan, Michael Corbat, James Gorman, Timothy Geithner, John Stumpf, etc. A more accurate description of the “1%” would be the corporate elite.

Candidate Clinton’s relationship to her elite compatriots is one of rigid interdependence: she needs their financial and political resources to win the election, and they need her in the White House to sustain their privileged status.

This privileged status did not result from accident, random chance, or neglect. It is a consequence of public policies consciously adopted over the past three or four decades which shift wealth and incomes systematically upward. (Cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, for example, while exporting 1/3 of the nation’s manufacturing jobs.) In the process our democracy was transformed. Public policy is crafted today not primarily to advance the welfare of the nation’s people, but to create, protect or enhance the financial interests of American corporate enterprise. This is acknowledged in the statements of public figures and supported in rigorous scholarly research.

Though easily identifiable, the corporate elite has not constructed a conscious conspiracy against the American people at large with a preplanned agenda, strategy, and tactics. But they share a common mindset, they are networked by personal acquaintance, and they are driven by a common imperative. Their wealth and political dominance depend on the existing configurations of American domestic and foreign policy, both of which must be maintained essentially intact to sustain the group’s position of privilege. Alterations in the status quo can be tolerated only if they are cosmetic, slight, and at the margin.

Instead of conspiracy, the preeminence of the oligarchs is better seen as a malignant condition of contemporary American government, resulting from years of institutional decay and corruption. (The story of moribund democracy is detailed here.) The economic and political power of mega-corporations—increasingly fewer but ever larger—has displaced functional democracy.

(Yes, we vote as we always have, but voting and democracy are not interchangeable terms. The Russian people voted for Vladimir Putin, the Iraqis voted for Saddam Hussein. And voting isn’t a prerequisite for democracy to function: the ancient Greeks chose their representatives by lottery.)

The priority of corporate interests has been achieved by three powerful mechanisms.

Perhaps the least recognized is the degree to which corporate personnel enter government to staff the highest levels of the Executive Branch.

A new book by political scientists Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Nana de Graaff carries a sobering title: American Grand Strategies and Corporate Elite Networks. They looked into the “grand strategy makers,” the 30 most influential people in cabinet-level and senior advisory positions in the last three administrations—Bill Clinton’s, Bush’s, and Obama’s. In the Clinton Administration, 25 of the 30 “grand strategy makers” (83%) were linked to 197 different transnational or financial corporations, as executives, directors, senior associates, or partners in law firms, either prior to their public service or after it. In the Bush Administration 27 of the 30 (90%) had connections to 157 corporations. In the Obama Administration 23 of the 30 (over 70%) had such “top-level corporate affiliations” with 111 companies.

Smoking guns? Examples of wealth-shifting upward to the already rich? Certainly. (1) The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, rammed through in the Bill Clinton Administration by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin from Citigroup. This enabled the subprime loan frenzy, enriching the New York banks but destroying $13 trillion in Americans’ household wealth. (2) Halliburton’s no-bid, obscenely profitable contracts in Iraq, served up by Vice President Richard Cheney during the Bush Administration; billions of taxpayers’ dollars to the corporation Mr. Cheney once chaired. (3) In the Obama Administration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner from Wall Street administered the Troubled Asset Relief Program, bailing out his colleagues’ banks, again with billions of taxpayers’ money.

For the last 24 years the Executive Branch has been dominated by the corporate elite.

Two other mechanisms of corporate influence are far more familiar: the corporate financing of political campaigns and the ubiquitous enterprise of lobbying.

The two practices are related in direct proportion: the more you accept in contributions from Boeing, say, the more you feel obligated to yield to their lobbyist’s wishes.

Your policy-making independence will decrease, then, as the costs of campaigning rise, and contemporary costs are staggering. A Representative today must raise on average $1.7 million in campaign funding, a Senator $10.5 million. A presidential race runs in the hundreds of millions. (Hillary Clinton has taken in $688 million.) Since Citizens United corporate campaign funding has no limits, and with candidates in need of so many millions, the corporate capture of federal governance is undeniable and scarcely surprising.

Undeniable but easily surmounted. We once had a law on the books (the UK still does) limiting not campaign contributions, but campaign expenditures. The limits were $10,000 for a Senate race, $5,000 for a Representative, sums easily provided from personal assets and those of family and friends. Reenacting such a law would break the corporate stranglehold; intense lobbying might continue, but no Senator, no Representative would feel the courteous urge to accommodate. The welfare of the American people could regain priority. The impact on the oligarchs, however, would be apocalyptic.

The commitment of the corporate elite to sustain the status quo is apparently absolute. By April of 2015 the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign were one indistinguishable juggernaut, intent on blitzing the presidential campaign like Hitler’s Wehrmacht stormed through Europe. The watch words seemed to be “first and most.” They amassed an early war-chest of a hundred million dollars or so and lined up 400 superdelegate endorsements—all before there was a single announced opponent. They invited 65 print and television journalists to meetings in early April, to help in “framing the HRC message and framing the race.”[ii] Among them were George Stephanoplous and 4 others from ABC; Rachel Maddow and 4 more from MSNBC; Gloria Borger and 7 of her colleagues from CNN; and 5 from the New York Times. Bloomberg, Politico, and CBS each sent along two.

The first-and-most strategy worked. Secretary Clinton preempted the candidate space; the only others attracted to the race were lackluster lightweights, especially the wooly socialist from Vermont. But Senator Sanders’ electrifying rallies made tangible the disgust of the American people with the status quo. Sanders’ proposals were anything but cosmetic, slight, and at the margin: they posed a mortal threat to the corporate elite and its guardian, the Clinton campaign. To minimize Sanders’ exposure, DNC Chair Wasserman-Schultz limited the number of debates and scheduled them on weekends and opposite football games. Sanders had to sue to gain access to the DNC’s voter database. The deliberate tilting of the Democratic primaries gained momentum.

This may not be the first election in which ethics and law were abandoned, but never before has it been so reliably exposed.

Not by the mainstream media, though. They either ignored the increasingly evident fraud or were complicit in it. From the Iowa caucuses onward, the press treated Clinton’s superdelegate endorsements as tallied votes. This continued even after the distortion and dishonesty of doing so were pointed out. Based on precisely that deception, however, the Associated Press announced Clinton’s presumptive nomination on Monday, June 6—one day before primaries were held in California, Montana, New Jersey, North and South Dakota, and the District of Columbia. From Iowa forward also the Washington Post and the New York Times hammered the Sanders campaign without mercy or interruption. (The story was detailed later by Thomas Frank in Harper’s Magazine.[iii] Frank concludes: “I have never before seen the press take sides like they did this year, openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not meet with their approval.”)

No, the major media failed to expose the fraud, but the social media and the Internet abounded with skepticism. Sanders fans questioned the uncounted caucuses in Iowa; the 70% reduction of polling places in Maricopa County, Arizona; the disqualified Sanders delegates at the Nevada convention; the cheap-shot call by the Associated Press. Many were certain the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee were joined at the hip, but there was scant factual evidence.

Enter Julian Assange and the leaked DNC emails. Now the illegal collusion was documented, the sabotaging of the Sanders campaign exposed. Wasserman-Schultz resigns as DNC chair. Then the Podesta emails and Hillary’s paid speeches: “you need both a public position and a private position.” “My dream is a hemispheric open market, with open trade and open borders.” DNC vice-chair Donna Brazile, a CNN pundit, emails the Clinton campaign prior to the debate: “From time to time I get the questions in advance.” The attempt to reschedule the Illinois primary. Another tranche of emails arrives: Brazile’s complicity with the Clinton campaign is broadened, she is fired/resigns from her CNN post. The Clinton Foundation hosts pay to play, the Clintons’ personal enrichment, the $12 million deal with King Mohammed VI of Morocco….

Finally the compliant mass media did take note: this is, after all, fine spectacle. Noted but not pursued. No determined effort was undertaken to investigate, to document further the deceit and dishonesty, and to assess its magnitude.

Once again that was left to the citizenry. The first careful, detailed study was published June 7, 2016 by two scholars, Axel Geijel of Tilburg University and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan at Stanford. It is entitled, Are we witnessing a dishonest election? They compared states who’s voting systems produced verifying paper trails against states which did not. Sanders won the paper-trail states, where tampering with machine tallies could be quickly discovered; Clinton overpowered in states without paper trails, where tampering could never be detected. The authors also compared voting machine tallies with exit poll figures, and found disturbing discrepancies. They concluded, “…these data suggest that election fraud is occurring in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary election. This fraud has overwhelmingly benefited Secretary Clinton at the expense of Senator Sanders.” (The paper can be found here.)

Then, with the primaries concluded a group of outraged patriots with day jobs, organized as Election Justice USA, published an exhaustive report. The study is entitled, Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries, and it is available here. It details, in 99 pages of carefully assembled and compelling evidence, examples of election fraud uncovered in four categories: voter suppression, registration tampering, illegal voter purging, and fraudulent voting machine tallies. In eleven states the group found discrepancies between exit polls and voting machine counts exceeding the statistical margins of error. Every single discrepancy favored Secretary Clinton—and no such discrepancies occurred in the Republican counts. The group’s conclusion was troubling: 184 elected delegates, their report argues persuasively, were awarded fraudulently to Clinton and denied Sanders, accordingly.

That gave her the edge in delegate count going into the convention. In the end, however, she needed the additional votes of 163 unelected superdelegates, those empowered by the Democratic National Committee. Even after a primary season documented as fraudulent, then, Hillary Clinton’s nomination was achieved by fiat, not democracy.

But the corporate elite will not be denied. Given the Clinton/DNC expertise and success in tipping the primary elections, she will be elected President in the general election, guaranteed.

The manipulation of the primaries was obscure but not invisible; a backlash of outrage might have been anticipated. The Clinton/DNC people, however, are unmatched in hubris and geniuses in the practice of deceit. Scandals were not even acknowledged, defiantly ignored. And the language of progressive democracy is omnipresent in the campaigning, brilliant deception. Hillary Clinton promises to work for Main Street, not Wall Street. She promises to bring back jobs, improve education, seek equal pay for women, boost the minimum wage, expand civil rights, provide free college education, move toward Medicare for all, oppose TPP, break up the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks. Fine, appealing proposals all, but this is the language of Sanders’ revolution, and the corporate elite will stand for none of it.

But folk wisdom tells us to take campaign promises lightly, and the American people are forgiving and trusting. Hillary Clinton is a woman of long experience, and we want to believe our democracy is robust.

Here, now, we need to be vigilant.



Notes.

See “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” by Martin Gillens and Benjamin Page. They conclude, “…economic elites and business interests have substantial independent impact on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

[ii] See, http://www.fury.news/2016/10/wikileaks- ... g-hillary/

[iii] Thomas Frank, “Swat Team: the media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders—and real reform,” Harper’s Magazine, November, 2016.

[FAH1223]

Social Security could simply be made solvent by raising the cap on taxable income above $118,000.

The elites are deliberately ruining America.

$6 trillion spent on then War on Terra since 2001. Could have transformed the country.

[theyuusuf143]

Who cares.

[X.Playa]

Who cares.

Are you serious!! The president of the world's is whom eve becomes the U.S. President. It concerns the entire world.

[FAH1223]

[Basra-]

Finally! Its over, and done,
Trump all dumb,
is bye and gone!
NO more ad, NO more -noise, and NO more-Trump!
Go Hillary, rise like the commanding Sun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!