On Friday (May 30), the DNC’s powerful executive committee will convene. That meeting, in Little Rock, Ark., will be the executive committee’s first since mid-December.

The petition, with 7,000 signers, warns that “the Democratic Party has failed to confront the urgency of this perilous moment for the future of the United States.” The petition contends that the DNC, the governing body of the Democratic Party, “should convene an emergency meeting of all its members – fully open to the public – as soon as possible. Waiting until the next regular meeting in late summer would be irresponsible and unacceptable.”

The petition adds: “Business as usual must give way to truly bold action that mobilizes against the autocracy that Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their cronies are further entrenching every day. The predatory, extreme and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.”

The “Emergency Petition to the Democratic National Committee” with signers and their comments is posted here.

Click here to sign up for full livestream coverage of the DNC’s executive committee meeting on Friday, provided by RootsAction’s Progressive Hub.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

That political party, that institution which understood and worked for everyday people – the blue collars of the lower class and the white collars of the middle class – that political force which invested its energy to foster an America for all, to serve the citizenry equally regardless of class status, the party which took seriously the constitutional mandate “to promote the general welfare”, no longer exists.

The transition took place during the 90s under the saxophone president, Bill Clinton, and was complete by the turn of the century. No longer was the Democratic Party a party of the people. It ended up serving the same monied class as the Republicans. As Ralph Nader puts it, choice at the polls now was deciding between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Democrats currently wonder why party loyalty has been diminishing, why Hillary Clinton lost to a glib reality show host/gambling casino magnate in 2016, a manifestly dishonest, terminally shallow, narcissistic, manipulative, self-serving, completely unqualified candidate in Donald Trump. It’s not difficult to explain: The new Democratic Party is the party which railroaded one of the most popular candidates in recent history, Bernie Sanders, out of the race, stranding the largest populous uprising in decades.

As if that weren’t insulting enough, Hillary made no secret of her disdain for the “deplorables” of America, the unwashed masses who didn’t benefit from pedigree educations, bulging stock portfolios, and natty wardrobes from Prada and Armani. Her elitist predilection was then reinforced by the leak of a speech she gave to top banking executives, where she claimed she had “both a public and private position” on Wall Street reform. The execs got the real story and the voting public was served up the usual campaign blather. Is it any wonder that her bid for the presidency was crippled by plummeting trust?

The feel-good campaign mounted by the Democrats for Kamala Harris is likewise revealing. It completely lacked substance, saturated with word salad and puerile rhetoric. Openly on display was how cynical Democratic Party leaders are and just how disconnected the party is from doing anything to improve the lives of everyday citizens living real lives in real time.

To his credit in both 2016 and 2024, Trump said many of the right things which resonated with the masses of voters alienated by the new corporate trimmings of the DNC and its penchant for supporting centrist establishment-friendly candidates. To his discredit, in 2016 Trump apparently didn’t mean what he said and managed to avoid fulfilling most of the promises he made in his campaign. But it was too late. And it’s still too late. Huge numbers of frustrated and angry voters are so fed up with the tone-deaf Democratic Party, they seem to be willing to forgive Trump for just about anything. We shouldn’t do what the Dems did in 2016 and underestimate the Orange Oligarch. Because he is perhaps the most gifted smooth talker to come down the pike since ‘Slick Willy’. Fool me twice.

Of course, the Democrats couldn’t leave it at just being disconnected from flesh-and-blood entities – the voting public, real life people. They made the existential leap of disconnecting from reality itself. I refer to Russiagate.

I’m not going to get into the messy details of this scam. As there are still folks out there who believe the Earth is flat, there are a frightening number of individuals who believe that Russia, in collusion with KGB mole Drumpf – code name Agent Orange – stole the election from the universally-adored Hillary and dropped it off at the Mar-a-Lago clubhouse. Many of these folks also think that Saddam Hussein attacked the Twin Towers, Iraq had nuclear bombs ready to lob at the Lincoln Memorial and on Disney World, and the space shuttle tiles are oven-crisp taco shells.

Suffice it to say, the ham-fisted subterfuge created to cover Hillary’s embarrassing electoral failure has, to put it mildly, created extensive collateral damage. Granted, the project to disappear Russia as a nation, dismember it, and parcel it into manageable chunks for maximum exploitation, already had legs, thanks to the PNAC neoconiacs. However, Russiagate went the extra mile in convincing most of the U.S. population that Vladimir Putin is a Hitlerian monster, and Russia a backward, malevolent, evil, ruthless, genocidal gas station masquerading as a country, bent on destroying America and forcing us all to listen to balalaika music 24 hours a day. Subsequent loathing lasting right up to the present for both Putin and everything Russian – now at warp speed with the Ukraine meatgrinder in full swing – has been meticulously built on the sludgerock foundation of the DNC/Hillary Russiagate propaganda. Even today, slanderous attacks, whole-cloth fabrications about the sinister Putin and revanchist Russian war machine continue to spew out 24/7. Questioning this baseless vitriol is equated with treason. Both sides of the congressional aisle scream for blood – Russian blood – and the prospects for WWIII are real and terrifying!

Not that such mass psychosis is anything new. Manufactured crisis is one product line we haven’t offshored to China. It’s a nefarious web of deceptions at which our own Deep State excels. Which is why the U.S. never runs out of enemies and why it’s always at war. Our Nobel Peace Prize president was actively engaged in military conflict with seven countries. Obama dropped 26,171 bombs on foreign soil, just his final year in office. A “peace time” record?

Assuring the public that we’re not wasting tax dollars, that as global policeman, we’re killing people who really deserve it, that we’re eliminating serious threats to the security of America, that we’re “fighting them over there so we don’t end up fighting them here,” is a lot of work and not always as easy as it looks. Nothing reflecting favorably on the “enemy” can be allowed. America’s vile nemesis must be marginalized, dehumanized, demonized. Their leaders must be portrayed as devils, Hitlers, evil incarnate. The evil country, its citizens, its leadership, its democracy-hating government must be blamed for every mishap, no matter how unrelated. Experts must offer ever more outrageous prognostications about what nefarious plans said enemy is conjuring in order to inflict more horrors on the U.S. and its loyal allies.

With a lot of practice, the U.S. propaganda machine has gotten very good at all of this. For example, the day after Russia started its special military operation to eliminate the growing military threat NATO was creating in Ukraine, we were instructed – and dutifully did our patriotic duty by enthusiastically complying – to hate Russian music, dance, art, literature, sports figures. Even Russian cats and dogs were barred from appearing in pet shows in the West. Western businesses based in Russia packed up and left, losing billions of dollars, rather than be around those despicable, foul, savage Russians. Air space was closed to any aircraft or carrier that had any affiliation with Russia. Offices of Russian media outlets in the West were shut down. It was truly the most viciously thorough campaign of cultural genocide in recent history. And yes, U.S. citizens have in hordes stepped up to the plate and carried their weight. Saying anything even moderately nice about Russia in America – especially Vladimir Putin – risks at minimum a barrage of expletives, a possible beating, even gunshot wounds. Order a White Russian from a bartender at your own risk.

‘Hate’ like ‘love’ is a four-letter word. But apparently the former is a much easier sell. Or perhaps, considering the frustrations and anger which seem to be mounting as chaos and dysfunction in everyday life become more the norm, people were and are uniquely primed for some heavy-duty animus.

It’s a truly disheartening comment on human nature.

One final point.

Like Anthrax spores, hatred is almost impossible to put back in the bottle. It’s contagious and grows exponentially. We hate Russia, we hate North Korea, we hate Assad of Syria, we hate the Ayatollah of Iran, we hate Cuba, we hate Venezuela. We need to hate China much more. Yes, we’re lagging a little in that department. After all … Covid-19, communism, TikTok.

The problem is, hate knows no borders. Inevitably, it comes back home. Now we see the acid-drip is corroding the vital fabric of American society. The Democrats hate Trump. Republicans hate Biden. MSNBC viewers hate Fox viewers. The vaccinated hate the unvaccinated. Of course, all enlightened people are derelict if they don’t hate haters. Haters would be anyone who is a transphobe, homophobe, racist, a racism denier, anti-Semite, an anti-Semitism denier, anyone who questions the positive impact of BLM and mRNA vaccines or the necessity of internet censorship, puberty blockers for children, 5G, 3-D printed meat, or 80+ genders. No reason to talk to any of these people. Just hate them.

By the way, as haters of all that should be hated, we should be proud we live in the most democratic, wealthiest, most powerful, most just and free nation in history! We are exceptional and indispensable, God is on our side, and we are chosen by destiny to rule the entire known universe. Thus, everything we do is good and wonderful. That even includes hating!

Yes, this is how disconnect works. It operates by its own rules, has no time for mind-muddling distractions like facts, logic, reason, objectivity, respectful debate, historical perspective, common sense, common decency, love of truth.

D is for disconnect.

D is for deception.

D is for dystopia.

[This is an excerpt from my book, Electing A Kennedy Congress, a thoroughly misunderstood and mindlessly maligned attempt at restoring our country to a recognizable version of itself, one which aligns with the grossly misleading, totally fabricated image it peddles to its citizens and the world. That would be an America I am proud of!]

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Rachel.

Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.

What I think shows the clear (what I would call malignant) intent, is even though he has Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, he's never contemplated going back to Congress and saying, "Hey, I want you to do X. I want you to do Y. We need to do this in the proper way."

Bruce Fein

[Trump’s] boogeyman is DEI. So he claims that a crash between a helicopter and airplane in Washington, D.C. is a DEI problem. Of course, it's amazing that somebody who has such contempt for meritocracy with his own cabinet appointments suddenly blames, “Oh, well, DEI, it's watering down standards.” Well, he doesn't have any standards himself, so it's kind of ironic there.

Bruce Fein

Impeachment is not a criminal prosecution. Impeachment is what Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention said— it's the civilized substitute for tyrannicide…And if you're impeached, it's because you have undertaken attempts to subvert the Constitution so the people no longer view you as a trustworthy steward of our liberties and the rule of law. That's what it is. You don't go to Siberia, you don't go to the guillotine, that's it. And there have been, of course, many federal judges (probably as many as a dozen) who've been impeached, removed from office. And you know what? They still survive. There's not a graveyard of them…So this idea that impeachment is somehow some enormous volcanic eruption on the landscape is totally misleading and wrong.

Bruce Fein

There are two informal checkpoints I want to run by you. [Trump] is afraid of the stock market collapsing—and it could well collapse because chaos is the thing that really gets investors and big institutional investors scared. And the second thing he's afraid of is a plunge in the polls, including among Trump voters who represent families that have the same necessities for their children and their neighborhood as liberal families.

Ralph Nader

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and his newest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.

Especially when there's not a Democrat in the White House, the leader of the Democratic Party de facto is often the chair of the Democratic National Committee. And we now, of course, have the Democrats in minority in the House and the Senate. Biden's out of there in the White House. And so, really, it falls to the chair of the DNC to ostensibly at least give direction to the Democratic Party. And we've suffered for the last four years under Jamie Harrison as chair of the DNC, who basically did whatever Biden told him to do, and Biden told him to just praise President Biden. And we saw the result, the enabling process from the DNC was just a disaster for the Democratic Party and the country.

Norman Solomon

Literally and figuratively in a sense, there needs to be a tearing down of the walls that have been surrounding the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Activists (thousands of us, really, in recent years) have discovered and rediscovered that the DNC is like a fortress. They have the moat, the drawbridge is locked, and we can't even get inside to have a word in edgewise compared to the lobbyists and those who are running the DNC. This is really just remarkable, how difficult it has been for strong Democratic Party activists, if they're not on the DNC (and even if they are, quite often) to get a word in edgewise for the corporate-oriented so-called leadership of the DNC. That might change now.

Norman Solomon

Alfred Bridi is a U.S. immigration attorney associated with the law firm Scale LLP who specializes in employment- and family-based immigration law. Prior to joining Scale LLP, he practiced law at major international law firms and also worked with leading international organizations on global migration and transparency issues.

These executive orders and these executive actions have really created a tension in terms of enforcement officials trying to understand what these mean; in terms of the judiciary and and legal activists contesting a lot of the foundations and the arguments made; in terms of our legal system and our constitutional rights; and I think more than anything, they have had a signaling effect to ordinary Americans and immigrant populations that, “You're not welcome here, and we are going to come after you.” And I think the difference that we've seen is a broadening of the enforcement net and a removal of any sort of refinement or targeting. We've seen American citizens and military veterans being arrested and detained. We've seen Indigenous people being detained. And it's created a sense of terror and panic across the country that I feel is absolutely deliberate, and in line with the campaign promises of this new administration.

Alfred Bridi

News 2/5/25

1. The New York Times reports President Trump has ousted Rohit Chopra, the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who was “known for his aggressive enforcement and expansion of consumer protection laws.” During his tenure, Chopra cracked down on junk fees, particularly bank overdraft fees, and sought to remove medical debt from individuals’ credit histories. As the Times notes, Chopra “improbably hung on for nearly two weeks [after Trump took office, and]…used that time to impose a $2 million fine on a money transmitter and release reports on auto lending costs, specialty credit reporting companies and rent payment data.” In his letter of resignation, Chopra wrote “With so much power concentrated in the hands of a few, agencies like the C.F.P.B. have never been more critical,” and “I hope that the CFPB will continue to be a pillar of restoring and advancing economic liberty in America.”

2. In more Trump administration staffing news, AP reports the Senate Finance Committee voted 13-14 along party lines Tuesday to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician by trade and member of the committee who expressed grave concern over Kennedy’s stances on vaccines and other health-related matters, said during the hearings “Your past, undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments, concerns me.” Ultimately however, Cassidy voted “aye.” Kennedy’s nomination will now advance to the full Senate, where the GOP holds a comfortable majority thus almost ensuring his confirmation.

3. Speaking of Trump and health, CBS is out with an update on the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio railroad disaster. According to this report, Vice President JD Vance visited the crash site on February 3rd and vowed that the administration would hold Norfolk Southern accountable for “unfilled promises of settlement money and training centers.” That same day, residents of East Palestine filed a lawsuit alleging that Norfolk Southern’s actions resulted in the wrongful death of seven people, including a one-week-old baby.

4. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has successfully negotiated a month-long delay of Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs. According to CNN, the deal reached between the two North American heads of state includes Mexico deploying 10,000 National Guard troops to its northern border to help stem the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., while Trump has reportedly agreed to help end the deluge of American guns moving South. In her regular Monday morning press conference, Sheinbaum said “For humanitarian reasons, we must help the United States address its fentanyl consumption crisis, which is leading to overdose deaths.” Sheinbaum has been roundly praised for her ability to both stand up to and placate Trump. Reuters quoted Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China and member of the opposition Partido Acción Nacional or PAN party, who had to admit “President Sheinbaum played it…Masterfully.”

5. Democracy Now! reports a group of Quaker congregations have filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to the Trump administration’s order “allowing federal agents to raid…schools, hospitals, shelters and places of worship.” This lawsuit alleges that “The very threat of [such raids] deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities,” and that therefore this order infringes upon the Constitutional “guarantee of religious liberty.” The Quakers have historically been among the most progressive Christian sects, having been leaders in the fight to abolish slavery and to oppose war.

6. Reese Gorman of NOTUS reports that so far approximately 24,000 federal employees have accepted Elon Musk’s proposed “buyout,” meaning they will leave their jobs and should receive eight months of severance pay. This purge of the federal workforce has been among the most prominent initiatives of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Less prominently touted however is what the administration plans to do once these employees have been purged. Recent comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Bloomberg however are enlightening. Rubio, commenting on the “potential reorganization” of the Agency for International Development or USAID, indicated that the reduction in the size of the workforce would be paired with greater use of private contractors. Most likely this means farming out government services to Trump lackeys, cronies, and assorted grifters – all on the taxpayers’ dime.

7. Front and center in combatting Musk’s quiet coup is Public Citizen. On Monday, the public interest watchdog announced they are suing the Treasury Department for its “unlawful disclosure of personal & financial information to Elon Musk’s DOGE.” Their legal complaint, filed alongside the Alliance for Retired Americans, the Association of Federal Government Employees and the SEIU, reads, in part, “The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is massive and unprecedented. Millions of people cannot avoid engaging in financial transactions

with the federal government and, therefore, cannot avoid having their sensitive

personal and financial information maintained in government records. Secretary

Bessent’s action granting DOGE-affiliated individuals full, continuous, and ongoing

access to that information for an unspecified period of time means that retirees,

taxpayers, federal employees, companies, and other individuals from all walks of life have no assurance that their information will receive the protection that federal law affords.”

8. Turning to the Middle East, Drop Site News reports “Over 100 journalists…sent a letter to Egyptian authorities on Sunday requesting access to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing.” CNN, NBC, NPR, CBS, ABC, AP, Reuters, BBC, Sky News, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times France 24, Le Monde, El Pais, and others, including Drop Site itself, are signatories on this letter. The letter states “We understand that the situation is fluid regarding the border crossing, but we ask that permission for journalists to cross the Rafah border be at the forefront of the…No international journalists have been able to access Gaza without an Israeli military escort since the war began in October 2023. We request that permission be granted on an expedited basis while Phase 1 of the ceasefire is still in effect.” As Drop Site notes, “Egypt has not allowed journalists to cross Rafah into Gaza since 2013, when Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took power in Egypt in a military coup.” This has meant all journalistic access to Gaza must go through Israel.

9. Our last two stories have to do with the Democrats. On February 1st, Ken Martin was elected the new chair of the Democratic National Committee. Martin previously led the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and the Association of State Democratic Parties, per POLITICO. WPR reports Martin’s victory was decisive at 246.5 out of 428 votes; the second-place finisher, Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, won only 134.5 votes despite endorsements from House and Senate Minority Leaders Jeffries and Schumer, among many other high-profile elected Democrats, per the Hill. Other candidates included Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir, though he entered late and without substantial backing. Martin’s reputation is mixed, with one DNC member telling POLITICO, “he’s a knife-fighter.” Perhaps that is what the party needs to turn things around.

10. Finally, Variety reports former President Biden has signed with the Creative Arts Agency, or CAA, one of the premier talent agencies in Hollywood. CAA also represents Barack and Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, per the BBC. With the White House once again occupied by a creature of showbusiness, the symbiotic relationship between politics, media and entertainment has never been clearer. In the words of George Carlin, “It's a big club, and you ain't in it.”

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

"This moment demands a Democratic Party that provides more than just reactive opposition to an administration bent on rigging our economic and political systems in favor of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals on Earth. It demands leaders who put the party’s grassroots base ahead of the donor class and articulate a real vision that rejects Donald Trump’s corporate rule—starting with renouncing corporate money themselves.

"Unfortunately, Democratic leadership is failing disastrously to meet this urgent mandate. Ahead of tonight’s forum, the DNC is actively working to silence rank-and-file Democratic activists and base voters calling for a ban on dark money in primaries and the rejection of corporate funding. In a last-minute move, they shut the event off from the public and even deliberately shared the wrong address for where grassroots supporters are allowed to gather.

"Voters—and all Americans—deserve better than two corporate-controlled parties. The election of the next DNC Chair will shape the opposition to Trump’s second term, and we are already seeing glaring red flags from party leaders who are unwilling to part with the ways of the past that ushered in four more years of a would-be tyrant.”

In the weeks following Donald Trump’s November election win, Our Revolution announced the collection of more than 10,000 petition signatures from active grassroots Democratic volunteers, donors, and local and state party leaders demanding widespread reform of the Democratic National Committee. The petition, which was first reported by POLITICO Playbook, specifically calls for Democratic Party leaders to:

• Ban dark money in primaries and reject corporate money
• Invest in state parties and uplift grassroots organizing
• Make the DNC budget transparent and hold consultants accountable
• Commit to a progressive platform & small donor democracy

In the days following Donald Trump’s inauguration, Our Revolution surveyed more than 5,000 of its members nationwide to assess their confidence in the Democratic Party and their reactions to Trump’s actions during the first days of his presidency. Topline findings from the reveal that:

• Only 14% of respondents indicated that they are ‘very confident’ that the Democratic Party and its leaders in Congress, state houses, and city halls will work to block the worst of the Trump agenda.
• Following the inauguration, 43% of respondents said they are angry, and another 40% said they’re feeling worried, scared, or sad.
• 98% of respondents believe that the United States has entered an unprecedented political movement with Trump’s re-election.
• 88% told us they support efforts to transform the Democratic Party into a real opposition party and to get the party to reject corporate money and power. The remaining 12% told us not to bother because they’ve already given up on the Democratic Party (and these are likely voters who are active in politics and anti-Republican — and who have stuck with us as we’ve worked for 8 years to elect Democrats and transform the party).
• 41% want Our Revolution to focus on fighting Trump and the Oligarchs, 32% say we should focus on taking back the Democratic Party from the corporate class, and the remaining 27% say our focus should be on electing progressives who will fight for them.

Here are two of many comments we received sharing similar sentiments of despair and disgust with the Democratic Party:

• “The Democratic Party needs to stop playing nice and fight fire with fire. I’m sick and disgusted today. I am ashamed of our country and the fact that there is no real plan to overhaul the Democratic Party.”
• “I am not motivated to give Democrats money because I don't think they know how to fight effectively and I don't trust them to do what is necessary to effect real change.”

The respondents, a subset of Our Revolution’s grassroots network of approximately 8 million supporters in all 50 states, include rank-in-file Democratic Party activists and base voters, volunteers, and grassroots donors.

Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese is available to comment on the DNC Chair race and the future of progressive activism during Trump’s second term. To request an interview, please contact: media@ourrevolution.com

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

When it comes to the DNC Chair election on February 1st, the only choice is Ben Wikler, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin since July 2019. None of the other candidates, except for Ken Martin, the state chair of the Democratic Party in Minnesota, even come close. Why? Because, unlike Martin, Wikler has faced off with the worst of our national demons in Wisconsin—a state that’s long been a laboratory for GOP autocracy, as detailed in Ari Berman’s must-read book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It.

In this week’s bonus show Q&A, shaped by our Democracy Defender-level supporters and higher, we make the case for Wikler and break down the dynamics of a race that could shape not only the future of the Democratic Party but the soul of America.

We also dive into the People’s March, formerly the Women’s March, and announce the Gaslit Nation sign contest for the best protest sign! Join Andrea at the march in New York City at 10 AM on Saturday, January 18th—details to come! To find a People’s March near you, or to help organize one if there isn’t already one in your area, check out this handy guide: https://map.peoplesmarch.com/local

If you didn’t hear your question answered this week, keep an eye out for it soon as the Gaslit Nation Q&A continues! To our Democracy Defender-level folks and higher, submit your questions in a private message for the next Q&A!

Thank you to everyone who supports the show—we couldn’t make Gaslit Nation without you!

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

Show Notes:

• Books:

• What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures By Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the marine biologist behind the Blue New Deal: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645855/what-if-we-get-it-right-by-ayana-elizabeth-johnson/

• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by journalist David Wallace-Wells https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-uninhabitable-earth-life-after-warming-david-wallace-wells/12097261?ean=9780525576716

• The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, two of the architects of the Paris Climate Agreement https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-future-we-choose-the-stubborn-optimist-s-guide-to-the-climate-crisis-christiana-figueres/13156367?aid=1676&ean=9780593080931&listref=caring-for-the-earth-each-other-practicing-sustainable-living

• Reading: 

• Researcher Jenny Cohn wrote a disturbing thread about Sillicon Valley bro-fascists setting their sights on Greenland: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1877052010559844478.html?utm_campaign=topunroll

• Historian Timothy Snyder on why the U.S. needs a Shadow Cabinet, like the U.K.: https://snyder.substack.com/p/shadow-cabinet

• A bombshell report confirming that Russian intelligence paid tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban to target American coalition forces in Afghanistan. What is Trump going to do about this as president? https://theins.ru/en/politics/277723

The Gerrymander Has Been Slayed: Wisconsinites Get Fair Maps for 2024 Election https://campaignlegal.org/update/gerrymander-has-been-slayed-wisconsinites-get-fair-maps-2024-election

As Democrats Reel, Two Front-Runners Emerge in a Leadership Battle The race to lead the Democratic National Committee centers on the favorites, Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, but the party’s infighting over them looks nothing like a broad reckoning with its 2024 defeats. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/05/us/politics/dnc-race-ben-wikler-ken-martin.html

The People’s March Website: https://www.peoplesmarch.com/

Trump’s inauguration coincides with an unprecedented string of high-stakes security events in DC https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-security-a3df8ed878f2c0587f7038d68a0447f6

FTC antitrust case against Meta can move to trial, court rules. The decision marks a victory for the agency and its Democratic chair, Lina Khan, after early legal setbacks. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/11/13/meta-ftc-antitrust/

Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People--And the Fight to Resist It https://bookshop.org/p/books/minority-rule-ari-berman/19994801?ean=9780374600211

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

Every election year many of the U.S. trade unions scramble – or stumble – into action to elect “labor’s friends”. More likely they are involved mostly to try to stop those bent on liquidation of the unions, always the greatest part of the motivation to mobilize voters. Identifying the sworn foes of the union movement is not that difficult today – these forces openly declare their hatred of unions. As best expressed by the pathologic opposition shown toward the unions by most of the Republican Party elected officialdom today.

So far as picking friends, and then hanging the trade union seal of approval on them, the labor movement repeats year after year every imaginable “lesser-evil” decision-making gymnastics.  Decade after decade this bar for support has been lowered by the unions, paralleling the slow but steady capture of the labor officialdom by the Democratic Party apparatus. Merely recognizing the very existence of the unions, or at best making fuzzy promises are all that’s required for Democrats to win labor’s political support. Track records of candidates are rarely – or selectively – kept, and the failure or refusal to deliver on promises by a candidate is almost never grounds for excommunication on labor’s part.

Dangerous Man-made Fog

Outside observers of labor’s political action processes are frequently confused or mystified. But this should come as little surprise, since the bulk of the union activists – and certainly the membership – would likewise be unsure of what exactly is going on. As the unions are systematically assaulted by corporations and governments, frequently shrink as a result, and are blocked by corporate lawlessness from growing and rebuilding, the political and electoral union decision making and implementation becomes more and more clouded and obscured. In a labor movement predominantly “led” by administrators and not authentic labor leaders, the already warped political environment is destined for further distortion under these conditions.

Few Choices Allowed

An assessment of labor’s political action, its methodology, its outcomes, and its challenges must begin with the incredibly limited choices that are permitted in the first place. With virtually all political direction being supplied to the unions today via the Democratic Party and its operatives, all independent thinking or third parties are routinely banned from any consideration of labor’s support.

Even at the lowest electoral levels the Democratic Party machinery seeks out and squashes all political thinking outside the “box” of mainstream Democratic policy and practice. A glance at the documented roster of attacks meted-out to any challengers of the two-party setup is chronicled in detailed fashion at Ballot Access News. It is imperative to recognize that the failure of virtually any independent political alternatives to develop and take root in the labor movement is not just a freak accident, or the result of no base of support for them, it is the result of systematic interference and opposition to it by all levels of the Democratic Party. This lack of alternative political forces for labor has dramatically accelerated the decline of the labor movement.

Occasionally, unions still experiment with support for Republicans – as they are the only other party allowed in the corrupt two-party ”system” embraced by labor. But this phenomenon has been reduced in recent decades as the Republican Party has moved ever rightward. When left-of-center Democrats do emerge within the Democratic Party, the unions are advised by these outside guiding forces to be “realistic” and avoid any left taint. Few other choices exist in this barren political wasteland.

If left-leaning Democrats do manage to build some support among the unions they will still face an all-out assault by the Democratic Party apparatus. Only left elements are to be feared, and always opposed. Pro-business, right-leaning and outright reactionary Democrats are reflexively supported by their Party officialdom. Unelectable but politically “safe” candidates are often supported by this machinery with upstarts and progressives routinely confronted with Democratic Party operatives working to oppose and defund their campaigns. Only Democrats acceptable to the party machinery enjoy full support.

DNC Incorporated

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the leadership group governing and controlling much of the party apparatus, and it maintains an extensive focus on the trade unions. It is a multi-billion dollar corporate-type organism comprising many different sections. The overwhelming majority of DNC and wider Party funding originates with the corporate and wealthy donors. The unions do possess a coveted resource base of hundreds of millions dollars in political funds along with tens of thousands paid staff who can be press-ganged into supporting Democrats at all levels. The DNC resource universe also includes many thousands of functionaries from DNC-controlled consulting companies and non-profits, along with supplementary staff from elected lawmakers and lower level organizations.

This “DNC Incorporated” reality is little known or understood, although the union membership pays a steep price.  These elements systematically influence and interfere in union affairs, play favorites in internal union elections, and sometimes profit handsomely from various consulting contracts with the unions. Staff are exchanged among the unions and the wider DNC operations, leading to diluted union loyalty at minimum. Meddling within the unions by the Democratic Party takes many forms and fringes on outright corruption at times. Jobs and perks for family, friends, and cronies, an endless stream of VIP trips and photo-ops, posh dinners and cocktail parties are all offered to a union “leadership” willing to play politics at the expense of their own members.

Air Force One

As recently as the Clinton Administration, it was a common – but true – cliché among the Washington, D.C., trade union leaders and functionaries that the “price” for union support from a Democratic President was nothing more than a luxury ride on Air Force One for the union leader. Continuing a long tradition going back to the days when travel was done by presidential train, union leaders by the score then gathered family and paid flunkeys to all hop-on and “enjoy the ride”. Photo-ops were of course abundant, where union photographers snapped streams of publicity stills to show the rank-and-file the importance and status of their union leaders riding on the “Presidential special”.

But during the Clinton Administration the overall political standing of labor was steadily reduced by the White House and the DNC apparatus, with this high-profile practice nearly abolished today. This symbolic demotion of labor by the Democrats leaves more room today on Air Force One for large donors and business leaders, reflecting the increasingly taken-for-granted status of the labor movement. Rather than labor leaders jet-setting on Air Force One with the President, current labor bigs are instead relegated to attending contrived meetings with White House staff. Or taking seats at luxurious dinners and receptions where at best they can quickly shake hands with the President and exchange a mere few words.

Gone are the days when labor leaders would participate in serious conferences at the White House with the President and his staff, sometimes from both parties, where serious situations were deliberated, and sometimes even significant demands were made of the President on all manner of trade union issues. The unions have today been reduced to mere props for the DNC operation, and to visually reinforce the subordinated status of labor for all onlookers. Some of today’s labor leaders live for the rare photo-op with a President or Cabinet member, to see it splashed on Facebook or in the occasional union publication. All presumably to prove the important standing of the leader.

O’Brien and His Polls

The recent flap over Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and his refusal to support a presidential endorsement of either Harris or Trump showcased another crisis for organized labor. A social media firestorm was unleashed by Teamsters and outsiders, all weighing-in with opinions on the merits and demerits of the O’Brien decision. But one of the primary points was lost in the momentary bedlam. Few know that union after union repeatedly poll their own membership to ascertain their political opinions. The goal being for the union “leaders” to safely support only those candidates and issues which a majority of their membership already supports. There is no political education associated with this process. There is no role here for authentic labor leadership. Most unions long ago abandoned internal trade union education, including political education, increasingly shrinking away from any discussion of difficult questions like political candidate choices and broad political positions.

This near-total abdication of the responsibility of union leaders to actually “lead” on the political front is one of the most disastrous crises now debilitating the labor movement. Real political debate and decision making are replaced with feelgood campaigns, inane pronouncements, mindless slogans, and polls commissioned by a leadership seeking “which way the wind is blowing” among their membership. O’Brien’s handling of this situation lacked any substantial discussion or facts, and his decision and methods both likely left all sides unhappy. This momentary heartburn for O’Brien of course masks the historically opportunistic basis for much of this union’s political strategy over the decades, a legacy that he is all-too eager to revisit.

Opportunism Replaces Education

This tail-the-members style of political action is all too common in the labor movement. It is on its face an absurd style of operation, given that the responsibility of the union leadership is to actually lead, and not merely trail behind the perceived opinions of the membership. In the case of the recent Teamster kerfuffle it also masks the political opportunism of much of that union’s leadership, who want only to endorse the winner of the presidential election in November. Hoping for favors of some kind from either Harris or Trump, whoever wins, this strategy has been revealed repeatedly as a monumental failure.

The 1980 endorsement by the Teamsters of anti-union bigot Ronald Reagan remains the pinnacle of rank opportunism on labor’s political front. Hoping only to curry favor with Reagan as a means to avoid a federal criminal investigation of the entire leadership of the union, the gifting of the union’s endorsement to Reagan ended in humiliation and debacle. Lesser versions of this political horse-trading by union “leaders” continue today. Ultimately, it is an embarrassment that any union would have to poll its own members to determine the thinking of the membership, and it likewise is dangerous to promote this herd mentality. Adherence to real trade union principles is not easy today as all outside forces act to draw the members into the employer way of thinking. Trade union leadership must confront and counteract this, and certainly must not encourage more of this failed political drift.

The unions have for many decades faced a dire need to once again engage the membership in real trade union education, grappling with controversial subjects a part of that. Labor history revealing to members the heroic foundation of their unions, their militant beginnings in many cases, recognition of the class struggle reality today, and a serious discussion of alternatives to both our political and economic systems are all in order. Recipients of labor’s votes, money, and logistical support must also be held to account, with the unions willing to walk away rather than endorse and fund barely worthwhile candidates. An end must be put to the frequent labor support issued to obviously unfit candidates, usually pro-business Democrats and those who seek labor’s support in return for nothing – or almost nothing. Ultimately, a sound regimen of support for an independent course of action is required so as to break free from the control of “DNC Incorporated”.

More and More Cash

Suffocating the entire political operation of the labor movement today is the question of financial contributions for the legions of mostly Democrats who chase after the unions as if they were ATM machines. These sums routinely now exceed more that one billion dollars in a national electoral cycle, and when the many hidden financial supports offered by the unions are taken in to account the amount is likely more than twice that much. Democrats today obtain the vast majority of these funds from the pockets of the rank-and-file membership – but with all decisions determining its distribution decided by union leaders based almost exclusively on their personal direction.

While political fundraising is certainly a necessary reality, the monies when collected are often secreted away by union leaderships who offer few if any reports to the membership about where the contributions and expenditures have been made. This scandalous situation must be ended, with all participants in union political fundraising provided with a full accounting of how much was raised, from which parts of the unions, and then followed with detailed and verified reports of just exactly which candidates were supported and what other spending was completed. These gigantic political funds are too easily converted to private slush funds in the sole control of union leaders. In such a situation the domination of the Democratic Party over the union officialdom allows for ample opportunities for union monies being applied to unproductive or even counterproductive purposes.

Sobering Reality Today

The once deep wells of progressive and sometimes leftwing political principles, practices, and beliefs among layers of the union leadership and membership have largely dried up, or been deliberately drained. This spreading political desert covering the unions is largely ignored until election time, when Democrats come out of the woodwork looking for money, volunteers, and huge numbers of votes from the embattled union garrisons. The unions frequently deliver all this dutifully, receiving at best an uneven and sporadic “return” for their immense efforts and expense. Vast opportunities exist to mobilize the membership with authentic campaigns of worthwhile political education, but are instead supplanted by hollow, low calorie political sloganeering and mindless cheerleading for Democrats regardless of their quality.

Political Action or Playing Politics?

Legendary founding UE leader James Matles — UE, The Union for Everyone | Members Run This Union — commented in the late 1960’s to a UE Convention delegate who had asked him “What’s wrong with labor’s political action?” Matles calmly observed that when the UE was founded, in its early years, the general labor movement leadership viewed political action as a negotiation with the politicians, with exact commitments being won as the price of the unions support. The political goal was to win tangible gains for union members broadly, as well as for the working class as a whole. He said, “When we conducted our political work back then you could see air between the bellies of the union leaders and the politicians.” But later, as the union movement grew, became wealthy, became infected with reactionary employer principles, and eventually was split by corporate and business union forces, Matles observed that “Today there’s no air anymore. You can’t see through. Their bellies are touching, and they are no longer engaging in political action, they are playing politics. That’s what they are doing today, they are playing politics.” A return to principled left trade union political action is in order, and only such a return can arrest the political decline that has delivered our labor movement to the brink of ruin.

(In February of this year the author examined additional aspects of organized labor’s political action challenges. See: What’s Wrong with Labor’s Political Action? – MLToday )

• First published at MLToday.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Townsend.

Journalists covering the August 2024 Democratic National Convention encountered hostility, threats and efforts to block their coverage both in and outside Chicago’s United Center.

Within the event venue, issues over coverage started early. In the months leading up to the convention, concerns were raised over the number of seats afforded to print reporters by the journalists who represent congressional correspondents and are in charge of press facilities at the national conventions.

In a statement to the DNC shared with Semafor, the Standing Committee of Correspondents said the number of dedicated and accessible workspaces for journalists had been cut by hundreds compared to previous conventions.

At the same time, WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station, reported that the costs to cover the convention — for access, seating, internet speed — were also significantly higher than years prior and in comparison to the Republican National Convention the month before.

According to the outlet, an assigned seat with a table and electrical outlet at the DNC had a $751 price tag at the early-bird rate, and $911 in the days leading up to the convention. At the RNC, a similar setup cost $100.

A DNC spokesperson dismissed accusations that the convention wasn’t properly accommodating members of the press.

“Democrats value a free press, and our convention is a reflection of that,” spokesperson Emily Soong wrote in a statement to Semafor. “We’ve prioritized making sure members of the media have the resources they need to bring the story of our convention out to their communities from both inside and outside of the convention hall.”

But Drop Site editor and reporter Ryan Grim recounted that some delegates and event security were quick to block reporters from documenting evidence the party was not fully unified.

When several delegates unfurled a “Stop Arming Israel” banner as President Joe Biden took the stage on Aug. 19, for instance, others used their signs to block Grim’s camera and that of a Democracy Now reporter; still others attempted to rip the banner away or, at the direction of staff, block it with their signs.

“One delegate followed me through the crowd relentlessly — with frankly impressive determination — putting his ‘USA’ sign in front of my phone as I worked to avoid him,” Grim wrote.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

A quote, wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln, reads:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Well, that may be true but what is also true is that you can fool most of the people (followers of politicians, political parties, religions, celebrities, stars, social media influencers, businesspersons, and so on) most of the time because followers place blind trust in their heroes, heroines, religious leaders, influencers, etc.

This was visible during the quadrennial spectacles called Republican National Convention (July 15 to July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and Democratic National Convention (August 19 to August 22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois).

Of course, there is a difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party: the Republicans are overtly hostile and will screw you unashamedly in broad day light without any kind of lubrication or apology.

The Democrats are, in that respect, a bit less rough. They’ll beg your pardon; would plead with you to understand the criticality of the situation; but will screw you, nonetheless — of course, in a dim light with a bit of lubricant.

Both the conventions took place during the ongoing Israeli slaughter, displacements, starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza since October 12, 2023. Both parties have supported the Israeli carnage. There is a division in the Democratic Party about supporting Israel, but the strong voices are few and many a times become victims of the Israel Lobby. One of the powerful group AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has spent more than $100 million in the 2024 election campaign: $15 million was spent to defeat US House Representatives Jamal Bowman who was critical of Israeli genocide of Gazans and $9 million to oust Cori Bush, another critic of Israeli war.

Danaka Katovich, National Co-Director CodePink, describes how a woman outside the convention center calling out the names of the children killed in Gaza was ignored and laughed at.

“There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.

“Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.”

Things were not too different inside the convention center, either.

The DNC allowed the parents of one of the hostages held by Hamas to speak and highlight their plight but no Palestinian was permitted to talk about the killing of over 41,000 [1] Palestinians (33% of them children and 18.4% women) and about ceasefire. Even a speech which included support for Kamala Harris was disallowed.

The speakers who did talk about Gaza and Palestine knew very well that their speeches were not going to make any difference.

AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez):

“She [Vice President Kamala Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.”

After five and a half years in the US Congress and as an active member of the Democratic Party, progressive AOC [2] knows damn well that no efforts on part of Kamala or Biden administration is needed to secure a ceasefire — the US just has to stop money and arms flow to Israel and that’s it.

On August 21, AOC posted on X:

“Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment. To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.

Bernie Sanders:

“We must end this horrific war in Gaza. Bring home the hostages and demand an immediate ceasefire.”

Two progressive members devoted a total of 31 words to the more than 10 month old continuing tragedy without mentioning the over 41,000 Palestinians killed!

Senator Raphael Warnock (Georgia) talked about children’s (including Gaza’s) safety.

“I need all of my neighbors’ children to be okay — poor inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children in Appalachia.” “I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine. I need American children on both sides of the tracks to be OK. Because we are all God’s children.”

The speakers, including (Barack Obama), touched on various topics, but as Lorraine Ali in Los Angeles Times observed,

“But little was said about Gaza or Israel, and the silence spoke volumes. Let’s talk about everything but that war.”

When hawkish Harris opened her mouth she roared about defending the security of the most powerful and technologically advanced country, Israel, against the broken Palestinians.

“With respect to the war in Gaza, President Biden and I are working around the clock because now is the time to get a hostage deal and cease-fire done.

“Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on Oct. 7.

“Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival. At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again.

“The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that – Israel is secure – the hostages are released – the suffering in Gaza ends – and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity.”

Hamas of the Israeli occupied Gaza is a “terrorist organization” but there is no mention of who caused the loss of “so many innocent lives” or who is making “desperate, hungry people” flee for “safety, over and over again.”
No mention of Israel. This, from one who is the would-be next President of the US.

She said she and Biden are “working around the clock.” The clock must be out of order. The war will only stop when the US decides to halt its support.

Back in July, Netanyahu addressed the US Congress. Many Democrats abstained, Harris included. But then the very next day, she met Netanyahu in private. Her facial expressions didn’t show she was angry in any manner. Now look at Obama’s picture with Netanyahu where Obama’s displeasure is visible. Netanyahu was trying to undermine Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

The statement by Harris after her meeting with Netanyahu was the same diplomatic bullshit. [3]

The conventions are basically a feel good exercise to create excitement and hope among supporters and to denigrate and make fun of the opposition. The Democrats did exactly that; made fun of former president and the current Republican Party presidential candidate, Donald Trump and frightened, rightly so, their followers/die hard supporters with fascism replacing “democracy” if Trump gets reelected.

The Democrats, however, didn’t remind their supporters that they (the Democrats), when in power, do act in a fascist manner overseas with their wars, sanctions, embargoes, blockades, seizing money and gold belonging to countries they don’t like.

On domestic issues the Democrats and Republicans differ on certain issues but both support capitalism and get plenty of money from the corporations. The hands of both parties are drenched with blood of foreigners, including children and women. Even within the US, the Democrats are cruel with many segments of the society. Republicans are openly cruel.

Notes

[1] After every Israeli deadly crime, the usual statement, actually a warning, from its major supporter, the United States, is,

“We are engaged in intense diplomacy pretty much around the clock, with a very simple message: All parties must refrain from escalation.”

That is, Israel’s murderous act should remain unpunished or else we’ll jump in to defend Israel. The above warning was for Iran to refrain from any retaliation against Israel which had assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also ordered killing of Lebanese militia group Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr.

[2] The Democratic leadership was using one of their presidents’ tactic by inviting AOC to speak and thus mainstreaming her but also blunting her voice. President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908 – 1973) said the following about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

“It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

[3] A couple of paragraphs from Harris’ statement;

“I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians.  And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating — the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.  We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.  And I will not be silent.”

Lip service completed, let the one-sided hostilities continue …

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

The Chicago mayor’s office ordered the removal of more than 80 multirack newspaper boxes that dispensed news publications to the downtown area, just prior to the city’s hosting of the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, according to local media.

The racks, installed per a 1996 city ordinance to consolidate and standardize Chicago’s disparate freestanding newspaper distribution boxes, had been used by free alternative and community papers and magazines such as Chicago Reader, South Side Weekly and Newcity to reach their audiences, especially in underserved communities, local media reported.

With the shift to digital formats, the racks were used less frequently, and some had become filled with trash or covered with graffiti.

Brian Hieggelke, the editor and publisher of Newcity, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the city did not inform him in advance of the decision, “in spite of decades of regular communications with the city and their vendor,” outdoor advertising company JCDecaux.

Hieggelke, who also heads the Chicago Newsrack Task Force established to facilitate communication between Chicago media outlets and the city about the racks, said he first received a report of a few newsracks being removed Aug. 7.

Then, on Aug. 16, after learning that more had been removed, he contacted JCDecaux. The firm’s representative replied: “City instructed us 2 weeks ago to permanently dismount all 83 newsracks. This is not a JCD decision. We only follow City’s directives. I was under the impression you were made aware by the City, before they instructed us to start with the dismounts.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s spokesperson was quoted by South Side Weekly Investigations Editor Jim Daley, in an Aug. 16 post on the social platform X, as saying that the decision to remove the racks was made “based on the public health and safety risks, as well as their deteriorating condition and limited use.”

Daley also quoted the spokesperson as saying that the publications were free to use their own individual newsracks. But an account in the Chicago Reader said news boxes cost anywhere between $200 and $250.

Solomon Lieberman, chief executive officer and publisher of the Chicago Reader, said in a post on X and in an email newsletter that the removals had a serious impact on the paper and the Chicago community. “Thousands of copies of the Reader have nowhere to go this week—copies that include advertising purchased months in advance by some of the most important arts-and-cultural organizations in the city,” Lieberman wrote.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.

A couple of weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads — doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise canceling headphones.

It was the Air and Water show — an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about — it was just by happenstance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as a weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous — the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.

As the jets flew over our heads I felt my stomach sour. In two weeks, the Democratic National Convention would come to Chicago and it was a present opportunity to make clear the contradictions that kept me up at night. Once months and months away, the DNC was finally around the corner.

This week, members of the Democratic Party came from all parts of the country to convene in Chicago. They were coronating Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, a woman no one really voted for. Even in the face of this blatant lack of democracy, the party members were elated to choose her. They carried signs with her husband’s name and applause erupted from the tens of thousands of people in the United Center when she declared that the United States would have the “most lethal military” in the world under her leadership. To the people well aware of the millions of people the United States killed in the last twenty years alone, her statement was a threat.

The week was marked by the obvious gaps between the people going into the United Center and the people outside of it.

There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.

Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.

That night was demoralizing, and it’s something I will remember for the rest of my life.

Democrats laugh at the names of dead children. They openly refuse to let a Palestinian speak for two minutes at their four day long event. They order riot cops on people protesting a genocide. They have their parties, fundraisers, and happy hours while bodies pile up. If they really didn’t think the genocide was so bad, they wouldn’t get so mad at us for reminding them. They knew that the people they were rallying behind are cheering on mass slaughter — they’ve just weighed their fun, their careers, and their vanity against the lives of 180,000 Palestinians and decided that nothing could be more important than themselves. I don’t care what they said to me, or my friends, but I hope our faces and our presence made them feel even an ounce of discomfort. In the best case scenario, I hope they went to sleep hearing the echoes of the martyrs’ names. I still foolishly hope they turn a corner at some point.

There’s a lot to be said about the Democratic National Convention. It happened in the city with the largest Palestinian population in the United States. Plenty of our neighbors here have lost dozens and dozens of their immediate and extended families and Kamala Harris took to the stage to promise her ironclad support to their executioners. Riot cops filed into the streets, prepared to use the kettling tactics they used from the Israeli military. All of a sudden, the place I call home felt unrecognizable. The air of the coronation felt heavy — it didn’t feel like home. There were points where I was with thousands of other people, chanting in unison, but still felt so lonely. Luxury SUVs carried important people into important buildings for important events. And between us and the importance, there were police with rifles strapped to their chests.

But there were also good people. Like the girl outside the convention. And the thousand of people that marched with us. And the Shake Shack worker that joined us because he had 15 minutes before his shift started. And the security that had to kick us out to keep their job but told us how much what we were doing meant to them.

In the lead up to the DNC, we spent so much time thinking about the last DNC that happened here in 1968. Protests against the Vietnam war took to the streets in small numbers, demanding an end to the war. They were met with horrible police brutality, and mass arrests with long legal battles in their wake. Our mentors from ‘68 urged us not to be nostalgic for those days. I still admire them for going face to face with the Chicago riot cops, but I’ve also taken their reflections of ‘68 very seriously — they didn’t end the war on Vietnam. Many of them feel like they could have focused more on building a sustainable movement that people could join for the long haul. The 2024 DNC in Chicago presented us a unique opportunity — we had to take this huge moment of mass mobilization and make sure our efforts and organization doesn’t get washed away when all the balloons on the United Center floor are popped, and the important people fly out of O’Hare. When the dust settles and the most powerful people in the world leave our city, how will we keep fighting? I was happy when so many people asked us what was next, because it meant we were thinking long term.

In our own discourses on the left, the week was consumed by the discussion of tactics – what works and what doesn’t. An organizer I know reminded us about our responsibility to be a movement people want to join. There are plenty of people who are sympathetic to our cause but haven’t figured out how to be part of it. There’s millions of people without a movement home. Our cause is already popular, it’s already growing every day. Are we doing what we can to make sure people know where to go? Are we keeping our eyes on the prize or are we getting so wrapped up in nostalgia that we can’t see what we will be capable of a year from now if we move strategically? We are nothing without the people. Our responsibility is to the people —not to our egos, not to our careers, not to the vanity of our organizations, and not to our impulses. As a movement we generally have to be better at unlearning instant gratification and also embracing a diversity of tactics. But that’s something for another day.

It is easy to stand on a police line. It’s easy to yell at politicians. It’s easy to say things and do things by yourself. It’s hard to organize your neighbors and talk to new people about things they don’t immediately understand — my hope comes from the idea that once we get really good at that, the light at the end of the tunnel will be as clear as day.

Chicagoans are loud, principled, and good people and because of that there  are 2.6 million reasons to love this city. For a few days Chicagoans made certain democrats couldn’t walk around our city without seeing and hearing about the people of Gaza. It’s my hope that we see that as a small success, and also my hope that we saw the week of mobilizations as a jumping off point for building the world we want to see.

Lake Michigan is connected to the ocean through narrow waterways along the northern border of the United States, and someone mentioned at a protest that it’s not unfathomable that the waves crashing onto the shores of Gaza were once here in Chicago, and vice versa. Even if we don’t have skies that are absent of fighter jets in my lifetime, every second spent moving us towards that kind of life was worth it. As long as we don’t throw in the towel, we are closer than ever to that reality.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Danaka Katovich.

Shawn Mulcahy, the news editor for the Chicago Reader, was shoved in the stomach with a baton by Chicago police while documenting a protest coinciding with the nearby Democratic National Convention on Aug. 22, 2024.

The Chicago Tribune reported that more than 2,000 people marched to protest U.S. aid to Israel, advancing through Chicago’s West Side and within blocks of the United Center where Vice President Kamala Harris was accepting the Democratic nomination during the final night of the convention.

Mulcahy told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that late in the evening after the march, a small group of 25 to 50 protesters sat in the street to block traffic. He said a large number of press were still around, and that police didn’t seem to know how to handle the journalists.

“There was a rush to arrest someone and they were trying to push people back onto the sidewalk,” Mulcahy said. “I was standing there filming the arrest and they pushed me with a baton into my stomach.” He added that he intends to file a complaint with the city.

That night, officers also threatened to revoke journalists’ press credentials if they refused to comply with the dispersal order. Mulcahy said that the members of the media raised alarm over the order and the department’s chief of patrol and deputy director of news affairs and communications ultimately walked it back.

When reached by email for comment, the Chicago Police Department directed the Tracker to CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling’s news conferences during the DNC, declining to respond to questions about officers’ aggression toward journalists and attempts to revoke press credentials.

During Snelling’s Aug. 21 news conference, he said that the department wants journalists to be able to do their jobs, but highlighted that the press must comply with police orders and step to the side when officers move in to make arrests. “If you don’t do that, it’s obstructing us and it makes it harder for us to take the people into custody that we’re trying to take into custody. And what we don’t want is for you to get caught in the middle of it and injured and hurt,” Snelling said.

At least four journalists were shoved or pulled by officers responding to similar protests on Aug. 20, and at least three were arrested.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.

We end today’s show in conversation with New York City Councilmember Yusef Salaam. He was one of five teenagers from Harlem — four Black and one Latino — wrongfully accused and convicted of raping and nearly killing 28-year-old white investment banker Trisha Meili in 1989. Meili had been jogging in Central Park when she was assaulted, and the accused teens became known as the Central Park Five. They faced a barrage of racism from the public and news media during their trial, including from real estate mogul and future U.S. president Donald Trump. All of the boys were convicted and served at least six years, with one, Korey Wise, having been tried as an adult, spending over a decade in prison. All were later exonerated after DNA evidence corroborated a separate man’s confession to the attack. Redubbed the Exonerated Five, four of the five members addressed the Democratic National Convention last week, slamming Trump, who called for their execution and says he still believes the men are guilty, as hateful and dangerous. “The reality was that we were guilty of the color of our skin,” says Salaam, who successfully ran for city council last year.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Vice-President Kamala Harris speaking at the Democratic National Convention, August 22, 2024, Canadian Broadcasting Company (Screenshot).

The not-so-good ones

The just concluded Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago was by most accounts a success. On Monday, the first night, Joe Biden gave his valedictory address, after which the audience breathed a sigh of relief. Not just because the long, self-indulgent peroration was over, but because Biden was finally out: one geezer down, one more to go. Two days later, state delegates conducted a celebratory roll-call vote, formally designating Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the Democratic Party nominees for president and vice-president.

On Tuesday, there were not-so-good speeches by their Royal Majesties the Obamas and Clintons. Michelle spoke glowingly and interminably about her mother and all mothers. (Like dogs, there are no bad mothers.) But she also delivered the best zinger of the convention. Reminding listeners of Trump’s gaffe at the conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, she said: “Who’s gonna tell him that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’”. Barak’s address, which immediately followed his wife’s, was ponderous and unfocussed. (He should study the cadences and inflections of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.) His only attention-getting line concerned Trump’s peculiar (not to say “weird”) preoccupation with comparing his crowd size to Harris’s. At one point, Obama brought his hands close together to indicate Trump’s comparatively small size. He undercut the punch line by embarrassment at his own vulgarity.

Bill Clinton was avuncular but confusing – no more “Secretary of “Splainin’ Stuff”, as Obama called him in 2012. Hilary was pompous as expected and mangled her metaphors: “As vice president, Kamala sat in the situation room and stood for American values.” Did anybody hold the veep’s chair as she did all that sitting and standing? “Together,” Hilary continued, self-referentially and prayerfully, “we put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling.” She went on in the same vein: “Tonight, we are so close to breaking through, once and for all.” And still more: “I want to tell you what I see through all those cracks. I see freedom.” Why did she need to look through the cracks to see it? Was the glass dirty – didn’t anybody tell her about Windex? But Hilary wasn’t done: Kamala could finally “break through” at which point she’d be “on the other side of that glass ceiling.” Was it the sitting down and quickly standing up – and bumping her head — that finally broke the ceiling? Who repaired he floor above, and can you please get me his number? It’s hard to fine good contractors.

Oprah spoke with earnestness but little substance. She emphasized unity and decried those who would “divide and conquer us.” She spoke in favor of books, abortion rights, and “adult conversations” in place of ridiculous tweets. She wound up being the only person in the five days to mention animal rights, when she said: “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion, we don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another Democratic grandee, gave a six-minute address highlighting Biden and the Democrats’ achievements during the previous four years including the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Bill and legislative and executive actions on behalf of veterans, seniors and students. It was boilerplate, memorable for just one thing: the rapturous ovation Pelosi received on her way to the podium. The diminutive, 84-year-old legislator from the Bay Area was, by all accounts, the person most responsible for giving Joe the boot. No amount of “Thank you Joes” will wash away the stain of that act of political benevolence.

Two other disappointing performances were delivered by the leading Democratic Party progressives, 34-year-old Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 82-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders. The former thanked Biden, blessed Harris, and energetically cut the air with hands and index fingers. She spoke euphemistically, at first, like American politicians do, about the American middle-class. Just as there are no bad mothers, there’s no American working class, only a middle class stifled in its aspiration to become…middle class. (In fact, nearly 70% of the U.S. population is working class; excluding home ownership, they have no other assets than their wages.) AOC then confusingly shifted gears and began speaking about the American working class, but never got beyond generalities. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain was more direct and more internationalist in his short address. He began it by saying: “Good evening to the people that make this world move, the working class!” I half expected him to sing the Internationale.

Bernie was better than AOC, though plodding – he sounds less and less, these days, like Larry David’s impersonation of him. As usual, Sanders spoke in lists, calling for an activist government that increased the minimum wage, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, and increased Social Security payments to the elderly. He also supported legislation to increase union membership, create public financing of elections, and raise taxes on corporations and the billionaire class. One reason the address was so boring, paradoxically, is that these positions are now uncontroversial among Democratic voters and politicians. That they remain aspirational however, reveals the gap between party rhetoric and Democratic legislative priorities.

I might have missed somebody, but so far as I could tell, the only artist or literary figure given time at the convention podium was Amanda Gorman. At the Biden inauguration in 2021, she performed a sentimental and much-lauded hip-hop poem titled “The Hill We Climb.” For the DNC, she read “This Sacred Scene,” which began: “We gather at this hallowed place because we believe in the American Dream.” The United Center? The only deity she could be invoking is Michael Jordan, whose Bulls won six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998. But if Jordan is God, I worry for Harris and Walz; the Bulls finished 9^th in their division in 2023-4.

The better speeches

The best speeches at the convention, in my view, were not given by the A-listers, but the B-listers. Senator Raphael Warnock started his address by saying that Georgia made history on Jan. 5, 2020, by electing him, a Black man, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish man, as U.S. Senators; but that history was tarnished the next day by a Trump-inspired insurrection to overturn the results of the presidential election. He meandered a bit in the middle of his 15-minute speech – there was the inevitable and deflating encomium for Biden — but Warnock regained his groove when he said: “Donald Trump is a plague on the American conscience.” That was a new epithet. Then he launched into a series of claims – would that they were true — that the Democrats were quickly moving forward on reproductive rights, worker’s rights, and voting rights. Then he spoke about the kindness of fathers, in particular his own, now deceased, “a preacher and a junkman who, Monday through Fridays lifted old broken cars and put ‘em on the back of an old rig. But on Sunday morning, the man who lifted broken cars lifted broken people…and told them they were God’s somebody.” He followed up by saying: “I’m convinced we can lift the broken even when we climb…we can heal sick bodies, we can heal the wounds that divide us, we can heal a planet in peril….” Great stuff from a preacher turned senator.

In his brief but rousing address, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro invoked Philadelphia, his state’s biggest city and site of the first, Continental Congress (1774-81), to tell a story of continued American progress in the advancement of freedom and justice. All that was thwarted, he said, by Donald Trump in his single term in office and would be again if he was elected once more. Trump and the Republicans, Shapiro said, wrap themselves up in the rhetoric of freedom, but undermine it at every turn. “It’s not freedom to tell our children what books to read” he said, with Obama’s former cadence and a Black English inflection. “And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies.” Pausing briefly for cheers from the audience, he tightened his lips and shook his head, adding “No, it’s not.”

Then, mixing the rhetoric of the Baptist preacher–Shapiro is Jewish – and the union leader, he continued, pointing at the camera: “And hear me on this, it’s sure as hell not freedom to say: ‘You get to vote, but he picks the winner.” “Real freedom” he continued, is “when a child can walk to and from school and get home safely to her mama.” Shapiro then expertly deployed what rhetoricians call anaphora. He repeated the phrase “real freedom is” followed by a series of positive liberties: the freedom to “join a union,” marry “who you love”, start a family “on your own terms,” “breath clean air, drink pure water…and live a life of purpose in which [you] are respected for who [you are].” Shapiro understood that an effective speaker doesn’t pause after applause, but speaks over it, building up to a crescendo. Though he treated anti-Israeli protesters on Pennsylvania campuses shamefully, he sure gives a good speech.

And finally, there was Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech. On the plus side, it was short and well-delivered. She began by discussing her mother Shaymala, an Indian immigrant and later, cancer researcher. Harris said little about her father, the prominent, Jamaica-born Marxist economist Donald J. Harris, except that he and her mother created a home environment of love and support. After saying that she proudly accepted her party’s nomination for president, she went on to describe the fundamental characteristics of a good president, including common sense and the ability to listen, and said that she possessed them, while Donald Trump lacked them.

From there, like the prosecutor she was, Harris proceeded to build the case for her presidency block by block. In the courtrooms of Oakland, she stood up against predators who abused women and children. As California Attorney General, she “took on” the banks that were illegally foreclosing on poor tenants and homeowners, and supported laws protecting consumers. She however omitted from her story the fact that as prosecutor and AG, she defended manifestly wrongful convictions, supported the forensic work of lab technicians convicted of corruption, upheld the death penalty, opposed a bill requiring state investigations of police shootings, and challenged a law mandating correct use of police body cameras.

Harris spent the middle of her address attacking Trump – there’s no need to recite the litany here – and then moved to close the argument in favor of her own election. To be sure, the case is for me open and shut. But there were several passages in her speech, that should temper everyone’s enthusiasm for her candidacy. The first was her strong support for the “bipartisan border security law” proposed by Biden and backed by leading Republicans until it was nixed by Trump – it might rob him of his signature issue. She said she would bring it back to Congress and when passed, sign it into law. The bill is a sop to the far right; it would among other things, set arbitrary caps on asylum claims in contravention of existing U.S. and international law.

The second was her unconditional support for Israel’s security, regardless of its leadership or policies. She spoke about Gaza in the passive voice, as if the genocide were a natural disaster: “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past ten months is devastating. Too many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for shelter again and again, the scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” But her answer to the travesty is simply to follow the same path to peace that has been blocked again and again by Israeli president Netanyahu and his war cabinet. She did not propose simply following U.S. law – the Leahy Amendment – that denies U.S. weapons and supplies to any regime that violates human rights with impunity. She did not support the International Criminal Court in its pursuit of arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders.

The third utterance that made me cringe – leaving aside the bromides about American exceptionalism — was the following: “We must be steadfast in advancing our values and our security abroad….As Commander-in-Chef, I will ensure that America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” That the U.S. has the most lethal military in the world is beyond question. But that’s the problem, not the solution to global violence. The genocide of Native Americans, the wars against Korea and Vietnam, and the military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and a dozen other nations have killed millions. The wars currently wars fought in Ukraine and Gaza have the stamp of U.S. incompetence, indifference and profiteering all over them.

Paeans to America’s “military might” are by now reflexive. All candidates repeat them to appear strong and attract votes. But that reflexivity is, to repeat the formulation above, the very problem that a good president must tackle. By repeating the oath to lethality and war so prominently in a speech seen by 30 million Americans – way more than Trump’s acceptance speech, but who’s counting – Harris risks making her promise self-fulfilling. Is she already, even before her possible (now likely) election, sowing the seeds of her own political demise, just as Lyndon Johnson did in 1968 with Vietnam and Biden did in 2024 with Gaza?

The post Make America “Lethal” Again: a Review of Some Speeches at the DNC appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen F. Eisenman.

The Democratic National Convention wrapped up in Chicago on Thursday with Vice President Kamala Harris formally accepting the presidential nomination, capping a week of political showmanship and celebration for many party members. “One of the things that struck me most was the level of choreographed mass spectacle of this convention that would be really worthy of Leni Riefenstahl,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. He says Democrats and Republicans presented “the two faces of American capitalism” at their respective conventions this summer, with the GOP home to “white supremacist capitalism” while Democrats promote a “multiracial neoliberal capitalism.” He adds that despite the constant chants of “U.S.A.” throughout the week, “the reality is that the United States has never been lower in its prestige and never more discredited around the world than it is today.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday after a four-day convention in Chicago where her campaign refused to allow a Palestinian American to take the stage to address Israel’s war on Gaza. We hear Georgia state Representative Ruwa Romman, who was among the list of speakers offered by the Uncommitted National Movement that the Harris campaign rejected, reading the speech she would have given on the convention floor had the DNC and the Harris campaign allowed her onstage.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of As I Lay Dying.

“When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.”

– William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Usually, when I get sick, I wake up that way, as if legions of infectious bugs had secretly invaded my defenses at night. Not this time. This time I fell apart in the afternoon. All at once. While watching Wolf Blitzer. It hit me like an ambush. Suddenly, everything hurt: joints, neck, tongue, back, toenails, head. Even my eyeballs. Especially them.

My throat was raw, my lungs had filled with green gunk, and my ears were clogged so thick with oozing wax that I couldn’t hear myself scream at the screen, the way I normally do this time of day. The light of August grew dim, as my eyes crusted over. I had COVID for the second time. The FLiRT variant, which was supposed to be mild, flirtatious even, had knocked me on my ass.

I spent the next four days in bed, wheezing, hacking, and feeling like Aqualung on a bender. I was judiciously locked in a bedroom so as not to spread my contagion among the household. Food, pills and water were slipped into my cell twice a day. Other than the nightly monotony of the Democratic National Convention, my only distraction was a battered copy of As I Lay Dying that I hadn’t read in 45 years. Though a fan of Faulkner, I hadn’t much cared for this fractured southern gothic back in my 20s, when I presumed myself immune to such intimations of mortality. But now on the edge of the grim abyss, it called my name.

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.”

I remembered that a professor of mine had considered this slim novel Faulkner’s version of Joyce’s Ulysses, only shorter and not as dirty, though there’s plenty of dirt if you know where to look. So I dove in looking for the dirty parts and soon found myself caked in Mississippi mud, which was a relief given that my skin felt aflame.

Faulkner cribbed the title from a passage in the Odyssey when Odysseus entered the Underworld. I guess everyone should visit Hell at least once before they take up permanent residence, even if resembles a convention center in Chicago. Faulkner cribbed a lot, but broke it up and put it back together in ways most nobody recognized. Kind of like ChatGPT but in reverse.

As Odysseus is doing field recordings with some of the luminaries of Hades, who should show up but the rapist of Troy, Agamemnon himself, a new arrival to the Underworld, who was shivved shortly after coming home to Mycenea from his Middle East war. Agamemnon warns Odysseus against the evils of women, saying his own wife struck the fatal blow, as he lay dying from her lover’s sword, and then she even refused to close his eyes: “So true is it that there is nothing more dread or more shameless than a woman who puts into her heart such deeds, even as she too devised a monstrous thing, contriving death for her wedded husband. Verily I thought that I should come home welcome to my children and to my slaves; but she, with her heart set on utter wickedness, has shed shame on herself and on women yet to be, even upon her that doeth uprightly.” Which reads like a manifesto of the New Masculinity movement led by the likes of JD Vance, Andrew Tate and Matthew Walsh. Semper Fi, dudes.

Agamemnon didn’t mention what exactly set Clytemenstra off. What she’d been brooding about for more than ten years. Odysseus knew. He was there. He might even have been complicit. But he doesn’t say either. He doesn’t mention that Agamemnon had slit the throat of his own daughter to summon the winds that would blow him to Troy, where he could loot their gold and rape their women. Sometimes stories are told like that, leaving off the key parts, that you have to fill in for yourselves, if you can. That’s politics, even in the afterlife.

Of course, Faulkner doesn’t tell this story straight. He might not even tell it right. A lot of folks don’t seem to get it and I’m not sure I do, because my mind is befogged by Covid. But it seems to be about the dynamics of the American family under capitalism, a story that starts out as a tragic thing and becomes a comic thing, even though a lot of bad things happen to good people and good things to bad people along the way.

“It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.”

Of course, if Faulkner had told this story straight what he called his “tour de force” would have been purged off the shelves in schools and libraries from Tallahassee to Tulsa. He understood that America holds itself in too high regard to talk straight about the things that matter most: the harm you suffer and the harm you cause, the deaths that afflict you and the deaths you inflict. This is even truer in politics than it is in literature.

Faulkner has 15 people tell how Addie Bundren died and her family tried for 9 days to find a place to bury her. Some of them might not tell it true, which can often be the truest way to tell a story, especially in America. One of the people ain’t even alive when she starts her telling, but since most of the story is about being dead or getting there, she speaks with more authority than many of the others, especially her husband Anse who can barely speak at all, intelligibly, anyhow, which is often the case with husbands.

“A man ain’t so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.”

As with the DNC, it’s sometimes hard to tell who to believe the most or disbelieve the least. The most rational storyteller in As I Lay Dying will prove to be insane. Or at least deemed as such by his own father, brother and sister and thrown into an asylum. There’s probably a difference. I don’t know whether he runs into Hannibal Lechter there or not. Typically, the reticent Faulkner doesn’t say.

“It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”

Over the interminable sleepless nights, the speeches in Chicago and the run-on sentences of the novel seemed to blend together and it became increasingly difficult to tease out one from the other and which one was written by Faulkner or Jon Meachem, which is why I finally flicked the mute button on the DNC convention and watched it with the sound off, for the spectacle alone.

“How often have Ι lain beneath rain on a strange roof thinking of home.”

It’s July in Mississippi and it’s hot. Not as hot as it is now. But it’s getting there or starting to. Faulkner wrote this book in six weeks on an overturned wheelbarrow in the middle of the night at the power station on the campus of the University of Mississippi, where he worked shoveling coal into the furnace. So he helped, damn him.

There’s no air conditioning, as Addie sits by the window during her last night on earth, watching her firstborn son Cash build a coffin. Her coffin. Addie’s dying. We don’t know from what. Having so many children or being married to Anse or the unforgiving heat. She may be old for her age, but she’s still dying young, which was then and is now the American way of death, by which I mean premature. So premature in Addie’s case that she hasn’t performed her post-menopausal duty of caring for the grandchildren, because there ain’t any. Not yet anyway, though one may be coming, wanted or not.

“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”

Addie doesn’t speak until she’s dead. And then what she says doesn’t make much sense at the time she’s saying it but does later when some, but not all, of the blanks have been filled in. But what she says is that she doesn’t want to be buried here on Anse’s farm, in this patch of bad earth that like as not killed her, in spirit if not in body. In this book, as in history, the dead make more sense than the living. Addie wants to be buried with her kinfolk, even though we know she was abused by them, thirty miles away in Jefferson, which those of us in the know understand is actually Oxford.

“I learned that words were no good; that words don’t even fit what they’re trying to say at it.”

This is a story about poor people who become poorer when things they can’t control make them do things they can’t afford, like bury a wife and mother. It’s 30 miles to Jefferson but the Bundrens take 9 days to get there. They spend much of that time going back and forth over the same ground, reversing the progress they’d made the day before, a kind of incrementalism most Americans are familiar with in the time of neoliberalism. This morbid odyssey leads to all sorts of misery and mayhem: two drowned mules, a busted leg set in cement, a burned barn, a stolen horse, a lost fish who transforms into a corpse, a botched abortion and a question of paternity.

“It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.”

Everything the Bundrens own is mortgaged, even the tools they use to pay back the banks and loan sharks. For them and most of the rest of us the promise of America is a promissory note. The family is so destitute that two of Addie’s sons, Darl and Jewel, take off to work on a neighbor’s farm while Cash saws and planes the boards for their mother’s coffin. They return with $3 between them for two day’s hard labor, which was considered an honest wage 100 years ago and slowly inflated to $7.50 an hour and remains so today.

“Those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can’t.”

The problem is that Addie died while they toiled and their wages can’t get them to Jefferson. Not after the heavens opened and a thousand-year flood that happens once a decade now came down to swell the rivers and wash away the bridges. It’s easy to die, but hard to be buried in an economic system where the only cash you have is a son who’s good with tools.

“Life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die.”

Jewell will nearly get stabbed outside Jefferson, after he called a white man he mistook for a black man a “son of a bitch.” Jewell said this after he had begun to “turn black” himself, charred by the barn fire his brother Darl had set. Cash was also turning black, after his father had insisted on setting his broken leg–fractured while trying took take the corpse-laden wagon across a flooded ford in the raging river–in concrete because he couldn’t afford a doctor. The makeshift cast cut off the flow of blood to his leg and foot. Nearly everybody in this book begins to turn black eventually. Just like Kamala in Donald Trump’s imagination.

“Once I waked with a black void rushing under me.”

I’m not sure how old Addie’s daughter Daisy Dell is. But she’s old enough to fool around or be fooled around with. So she’s probably at least 14. And she does so with predictable consequences that are just as predictable in at least 27 states today. Daisy Dell is pregnant and wants an abortion and can’t get one. This isn’t obvious in the beginning but becomes clearer as the funeral cortege makes its circuitous way to Jefferson.

“Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t.”

There’s another son named Vardaman, just a boy of five or six. Vardaman sees events metaphorically. He sees the meaning of things that others miss, because the roughness of the world has worn away that kind of insight. I begin to see the novel and the convention through Vardaman’s eyes. Vardaman doesn’t think his mother died. There was no reason for her to die. She was too young to die. So he drills holes into the coffin to let whatever’s in there breathe. Then everybody else begins to breathe the air of decay.

“Because a fellow can see every now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don’t like to admit it to them until they have beards.”

Vardaman thinks his mother is a fish and Jewell’s mother is a horse, even though they have the same mother, as far as we know, but not the same father, which we don’t know at the beginning but find out near the end. Like many American kids, Jewell’s father turns out to be the local preacher, Reverend Whitfield. Praise the lord.

“If there is a God what the hell is He for?”

Events get a little hazy in my mind now.

People take different turns sitting on the coffin. First, there was Cash with his broken leg, set in concrete and turning black. Then Miss Hillary, dressed in white, waving her arms like Bill’s pants were on fire. Again. Then the buzzards landed. Up in the rafters near the MSNBC booth. Nancy Pelosi didn’t sit on the coffin, even though she drew up some of the plans for it. They say Joe don’t cotton to her anymore. And a cat, but Vardaman chased it away, thinking it might eat the fish, which was his mother. Every party needs a cat and cat lady, I reckon. Then Obama sat on it for a while and preened. Obama thinks his mother is Ronald Reagan. Or Nancy. I can’t remember which. Then Michelle chased him off, saying his yacht was waiting on the Gold Coast of Lake Michigan, and he was late. Given her convention speech, AOC must think her mother is Hillary Clinton. Nobody inside seemed to mind the smell. Or even notice it. Not the smell of the casket or the smell outside, which nearly everyone else was gagging from.

“It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.”

Kamala has a daddy who she doesn’t mention for reasons most everybody knows but can’t say. But her daddy is tonight Joe Biden, though it used to be Willie Brown. And her momma is Nancy Pelosi. And Biden and Pelosi fight. So they can’t be together in the same room. Kamala isn’t Daisy Dell. But she might have been once, no one’s quite sure. FoxNews is trying to find out. Now she’s nobody’s mother, which makes her suspect for many. An unproductive grifter, I guess, who won’t have any function at all in her post-menopausal years, which are fast approaching, if they haven’t yet arrived. Watch those nuclear codes.

“She has had a hard life, but so does every woman.”

Daisy Dell’s lover is Lafe (or Laugh). Lafe gives Daisy $10 to abort the fetus he has planted in her. He tells her she can get abortion pills at the pharmacy. Two months later pills. The first druggist she finds threatens to call the police. The next one swindles her. He gives her a glass of turpentine water and a box of talcum powder pills and then takes her down into the cellar and does something unspeakable to her, which JD Vance might call an “inconvenience.”

“I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he’s durn nigh hopeless.”

When the shattered Daisy finally emerges from the cellar, she encounters her father Anse, who swipes her $10 and buys himself a shiny white pair of dentures, because Medicare didn’t cover dental. Still don’t. And with those teeth, Anse got him a new wife, too. A new Mrs. Bundren or is it Harris? Cause a family without a wife, just ain’t a family. Is it JD?

“Why do you laugh? Is it because you hate the sound of laughing?”

That’s pretty much the end, though something is missing from this story. Something that’s there because it’s not. If you’ve read Faulkner you might know what it is. There are no Native Americans in As I Lay Dying, not even a mention of them in passing, I suspect because the culture in his mind has already been killed off and died out and even their ghosts, the ghosts of Sam Fathers and Ikkemotubbe, who in The Sound and the Fury Faulkner described as “a dispossessed American king,” have begun to fade. Their absence seems to pervade and haunt the story as the odyssey of the Bundrens and the casket and the body of Addie wander across the rivers and fields and woods of the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Death is in the air, even if no one wants to talk about it. The way another expanding absence, unmentioned by general agreement, envelops the United Center in Chicago, where anyone impolite enough to point it out is deemed crazy and hauled away to god knows where like brother Darl.

“The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now.”

We don’t know until the end, and even then it’s just a hint, which is, of course, the strongest kind of revelation, that Darl had been in the war and didn’t come back from France the same. Maybe that’s why he saw things clearer than the others and had to be locked away. Because whatever was in the casket that the Bundrens were trying to keep a lid on was more than just the decaying corpse of Addie Bundren, rotting in the July heat like the fish Vardaman is sure she’s been transformed into. It’s a burden of history, a burden of those lost in war, a burden of an economy that works for the owners and the confidence artists but works almost everybody else to an early grave, even if some of them can afford a scrap of earth to be planted in.

“Any old fool should be able to dig a hole.”

The question for America is: When do you stop digging? When have you dug yourself in so deep that you can’t dig yourself out?

The post As I Lay Coughing: Watching the DNC With Covid and Faulkner appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Freelance photojournalist Sinna Nasseri was arrested by Chicago Police Department officers Aug. 20, 2024, while on assignment for German news outlet Zeit covering a pro-Palestinian protest planned to coincide with the nearby Democratic National Convention.

A small gathering of protesters, unaffiliated with and more militant than other groups that had organized larger demonstrations earlier in the week, converged around 7 p.m. outside the Israeli Consulate in Chicago’s West Loop section. The demonstrators and police, who far outnumbered them, clashed repeatedly. The protesters were later ordered to leave the area and police began arresting them, Block Club Chicago reported.

Other journalists besides Nasseri were among the dozens detained, according to the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. CBS News reported that Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said three journalists were arrested for not complying with officers’ orders when police began moving in to arrest protesters who had attacked police.

Independent photojournalist Josh Pacheco, one of those arrested, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the scene was chaotic, with officers issuing conflicting, often inaudible commands to the crowd, and pushing people onto the sidewalk, which was already crowded with police bicycles. Pacheco said that members of the press were caught between protesters and police as officers tried to keep demonstrators out of the roadway and intersections.

An attorney for photojournalist Olga Fedorova confirmed on Aug. 21 that she and “at least two other credentialed photo journalists who were covering the protest last night were swept up in the mass arrest and detained for many hours at the Area 3 Chicago Police headquarters.” The third photojournalist is widely reported to have been Nasseri.

The DNC’s Public Safety Joint Information Center confirmed that Nasseri had been cited for disorderly conduct — breach of peace. It did not respond to an additional question about why the journalist was arrested.

Nasseri did not respond to a request for comment from the Tracker, but did post on Instagram a series of photos the next day, including from the protest, with the caption “Swallowed my memory card.”

Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, told the Tracker that in advance of the DNC, he had offered the Chicago Police Department a training on interacting with the press similar to one he gave the Milwaukee Police Department before the Republican National Convention in July.

“They told me that they had been providing First Amendment training and they didn’t need anything from NPPA,” Osterreicher said. “Given the events of last night, I would have to say that that alleged training was an abysmal failure.”

The three journalists were charged “for simply doing their jobs as reporters,” Baron told the Tracker. “We are disappointed that the City of Chicago chose to sweep the First Amendment under the rug with its heavy-handed tactics against working journalists.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Freelance photojournalist Olga Fedorova was arrested by Chicago Police Department officers Aug. 20, 2024, while documenting a pro-Palestinian protest planned to coincide with the nearby Democratic National Convention. Law enforcement also confiscated her press credentials and cracked her camera lens.

A small gathering of protesters, unaffiliated with and more militant than other groups that had organized larger demonstrations earlier in the week, converged around 7 p.m. outside the Israeli Consulate in Chicago’s West Loop section. The demonstrators and police, who far outnumbered them, clashed repeatedly. The protesters were later ordered to leave the area and police began arresting them, Block Club Chicago reported.

Other journalists besides Fedorova were among the dozens detained, according to the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. CBS News reported that Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said three journalists were arrested for not complying with officers’ orders when police began moving in to arrest protesters who had attacked police.

Independent photojournalist Josh Pacheco, one of those arrested, told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that the scene was chaotic, with officers issuing conflicting, often inaudible commands to the crowd, and pushing people onto the sidewalk, which was already crowded with police bicycles. Pacheco said that members of the press were caught between protesters and police as officers tried to keep demonstrators out of the roadway and intersections.

Amid the chaos, Fedorova was arrested. Journalists Talia (Jane) Ben-Ora and Sean Beckner-Carmitchel both reported on social media that at the time of her arrest Fedorova was wearing Chicago–issued press credentials, which the police confiscated, and that her camera lens was cracked by the police.

Fedorova’s attorney Steven Baron confirmed to the Tracker that Fedorova was “swept up in the mass arrest and detained for many hours at the Area 3 Chicago Police headquarters.” She was released the following morning and her press credentials were returned to her later in the day.

Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, told the Tracker that Chicago police returned Fedorova’s credentials after NPPA and the journalists’ attorneys notified them “that such seizures were improper.”

Osterreicher also said that in advance of the DNC, he had offered the Chicago Police Department a training on interacting with the press similar to one he gave the Milwaukee Police Department before the Republican National Convention in July.

“They told me that they had been providing First Amendment training and they didn’t need anything from NPPA,” Osterreicher said. “Given the events of last night, I would have to say that that alleged training was an abysmal failure.”

The DNC’s Public Safety Joint Information Center confirmed that Fedorova had been cited for disorderly conduct — failure to obey police. It did not respond to an additional question about why she was arrested.

“Olga and the others were charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct for simply doing their jobs as reporters,” Baron told the Tracker. “We are disappointed that the City of Chicago chose to sweep the First Amendment under the rug with its heavy-handed tactics against working journalists.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

As “uncommitted” delegates continue their sit-in just outside the Democratic National Convention in protest of the party’s refusal to meet demands to platform a Palestinian American speaker on the main stage, we hear from two uncommitted delegates who have made a concerted effort to bring Israel’s war on Gaza to the forefront and to push the Harris campaign on its policy in the Middle East. Asma Mohammed, a campaign manager for Vote Uncommitted Minnesota and a delegate from Minnesota, says there is widespread disappointment and betrayal among delegates who feel their voices in support of Palestinian rights are being ignored. “This level of silencing, this level of exclusion [does] not belong in our Democratic Party,” adds Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement and an uncommitted delegate from Michigan.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Delegates from the Uncommitted National Movement and their allies launched a sit-in protest Wednesday night outside the convention hall in Chicago after the DNC refused to honor their request to let a Palestinian American speak onstage, despite allowing family members of an Israeli American hostage to address the convention. We hear voices from the sit-in with uncommitted delegates and their allies. “Today I watched my party say, 'Our tent can fit anti-choice Republicans,' but it can’t fit an elected official like me?” said Georgia state Representative Ruwa Romman, referring to convention addresses given by anti-Trump Republicans. Romman was among the list of speakers offered by the uncommitted movement that the DNC refused to allow on onstage. “We can’t take no for an answer here,” Minneapolis City Councilmember Jeremiah Ellison, an uncommitted delegate from Minnesota, tells Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.

In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.

In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.

Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.

To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.
‘
The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?

This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.

Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?

The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.

Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.

But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

President Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?

A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.

While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.

Under the slick climate plan Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.

The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.

President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, Trump and their cronies are doing.

The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

We play highlights from the second night of the Democratic National Convention, which ended with keynote speeches by Michelle and Barack Obama. The former first lady and president promoted Vice President Kamala Harris as a transformative leader while criticizing Donald Trump. “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those 'Black jobs'?” Michelle Obama said.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Israeli military has ordered new forced evacuations in parts of central Gaza, signaling the expansion of ground operations and the latest displacement of Palestinians, many of whom have already been displaced multiple times over the course of Israel’s war on the territory. At least 50 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, pushing the official death toll past 40,200. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken ended his ninth visit to the Middle East since October without securing any breakthrough for a ceasefire deal. In Chicago, where Democrats are gathered for the DNC, Gaza has been mentioned only in passing from the main stage of the convention. The party’s official platform adopted this week does not call for an arms embargo on Israel and reasserts unwavering U.S. support for Israel. “There’s been an almost competition between Democrats and Republicans on 'how much can we show Israel that we support them and that we have their back?'” says human rights lawyer Zaha Hassan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and previously the senior legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team during Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership. “Why should Israel ever compromise its positions if they know that by holding out, they’ll get more goodies from the U.S.?”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

You can access photos and videos of the disruption here. (please credit CODEPINK)

During the disruption, activists highlighted the intrinsicconnection between feminist values and the anti-war movement, drawing attention to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The activists condemned the bipartisan support for Israel’s actions, which they argue are fundamentally opposed to feminist principles.

"Palestine is a feminist issue. All feminists should support an arms embargo on Gaza," said co-founder CODEPINK Medea Benjamin. "Our brothers and sisters in Palestine are not 'collateral damage'—they are victims of a war machine that is inherently anti-feminist and destructive. No one should be allowed to claim feminism while supporting genocide.” she continued.

CODEPINK emphasized the severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where over 183 women give birth without painkillers daily, and the majority of the 40,000 Palestinians killed by Israel are women and children. "Israel is starving children in Gaza," declared CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans.

CODEPINK and allied groups remain committed to exposing what they see as the hypocrisy of Western feminism that turns a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinian women and children. They vow to hold those responsible for the ongoing genocide in Gaza accountable.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

During President Biden’s speech on the first night of the DNC, protesters briefly unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel,” before it was wrested away by convention staff. We speak to three members of the group Delegates Against Genocide who organized and carried out the action: Esam Boraey, a human rights activist and delegate from Connecticut; Florida DNC member Nadia Ahmad; and progressive Jewish activist Liano Sharon, an elected delegate from Michigan. “We were there specifically to confront President Joe Biden,” says Ahmad, explaining why the protesters chose to disrupt Biden’s speech. “He’s the one who can stop this genocide by picking up the phone and making a phone call, and he has chosen not to do that.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Democracy Now! is in Chicago for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, where protesters have actions planned throughout the week. The demonstrations kicked off on Sunday, on the eve of the convention, with the March for Bodies Outside Unjust Laws, which was organized by a coalition of several different activist groups to demand action on reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights and an end to the war on Gaza. We hear from protesters on the ground who say they will withhold their votes in the presidential election until the Democratic Party commits to reversing the Biden administration’s policy of “warmongering.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The rally comes just an hour after Sunrise volunteers confronted JD Vance over his flip-flop on climate change following donations from oil and gas lobbyists and CEOs. The activists at the DNC urged Harris to put forward a vision that could confront the false-populism of Vance and the far-right.

“I’m from Oregon, where every summer now, wildfires fill our air with smoke and burn down peoples’ homes. Every year I see it getting worse. I want a future in the place I love and call home.” said Adah Crandall, 18. “I’m here because young people need politicians to boldly confront the climate crisis. If Kamala Harris wants to be taken seriously by Gen Z, she needs to show us she’s serious about protecting our futures. That means campaigning on investing in green schools and housing, protecting our air and water from polluters, and rapidly building an affordable and renewable energy system.”

The past few days have seen promising youth polling for Harris, suggesting she could turn the page on Biden’s struggles with young voters. In an Axios poll, Harris turned Biden’s 6 point lead with voters under 34 to a 20 point lead.

“VP Harris has the opportunity to put forward a bold climate plan that mobilizes young voters and faces the scale of the climate crisis,” said Sunrise Movement Communications Director Stevie O’Hanlon. “Polls show that climate is where voters trust Harris most over Trump. Making climate core to her campaign is not only the right thing to do for the planet, but it's a good political strategy.”

The protest comes after Sunrise released a memo on Thursday outlining the kind of plan they say young people want to see from Harris to tackle climate change and cost of living. Sunrise has pledged to run a large youth voter engagement program aimed at driving record youth turnout in this election.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The Democratic National Committee is moving to confirm President Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee with a “virtual roll call” as early as next week, despite serious doubts from many Democratic lawmakers and voters about his viability following a disastrous debate performance in late June. “Joe Biden could be nominated for president next week, even though the convention is almost a month away,” says The Nation’s John Nichols.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Democrats discuss whether President Joe Biden should stand down as the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate following his disastrous debate performance, we speak with James Zogby, senior member of the Democratic National Committee, about his call for an open and transparent nomination process to select new candidates leading up to the Democratic National Convention next month, where the final nominee would be voted on. “I want to see a unified, energized party with a lot of excitement because they were part of a historic process of change,” says Zogby, who is president of the Arab American Institute.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As Democrats discuss whether President Joe Biden should stand down as the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate following his disastrous debate performance, we speak with James Zogby, senior member of the Democratic National Committee, about his call for an open and transparent nomination process to select new candidates leading up to the Democratic National Convention next month, where the final nominee would be voted on. “I want to see a unified, energized party with a lot of excitement because they were part of a historic process of change,” says Zogby, who is president of the Arab American Institute.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A projected illustration of president Joe Biden with the text reading “Genocide Joe” in Washington D.C., on Dec. 31, 2023.

In 2020, I ran to be a Florida delegate to the Democratic National Committee after helping co-found the Miami-Dade Democratic Progressive Caucus in early 2017. I had just wrapped up a stint in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and in spite of the tension created by the primary, volunteers and former staffers decided to continue to engage with the structures of the Democratic Party in order to democratize the party and push it in a more progressive direction. 

My fellow progressive delegates and I were able to reform party rules in Florida, including ending something called the “weighted vote”: two positions from each Florida county had been able to vote in elections with a vote share proportional to the number of Democrats in that county, allowing a small number of operatives and consultants to have outsized control of the party. We were finally able to change that and move to a one-person, one-vote system.

Three years later, that project has become untenable for me. I can no longer morally engage with that kind of tinkering in the service of reform. I am submitting my resignation in large part because of the Biden administration’s inexcusable support of Israeli war crimes and the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza — and the DNC’s role in protecting President Joe Biden from a democratic process that could check that complicity.

More than 23,000 people have been killed in retaliation against Hamas’s attack on October 7, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. An estimated 57,000 have been injured, and thousands more are missing and presumed dead. At least 9,600 of those killed are children. The Biden administration gives occasional lip service to the need for limiting civilian casualties while continuing to greenlight billions in military support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. (I’ve been outspoken in my criticism of this assault and on Tuesday was caught up in the Twitter purge of critics of Israel. My account has since been restored.)

As this mass killing continues unabated and the Biden administration circumvents congressional authority to greenlight more weapons sales to Israel, and the Democratic Party is actively kicking off his primary opponents from the ballot in several states, I’ve decided the proper thing to do is submit my resignation. I will not be part of a structure of power that seems committed to support war crimes and undermine voters’ choices. 

The destruction in Gaza is so widespread that it already qualifies as one of this century’s most destructive wars, according to the Washington Post. The bombardment has flattened buildings and civilian infrastructure and has included attacks against hospitals that are supposed to be off-limits under laws governing warfare but are nevertheless targeted by Israeli forces claiming that they serve as Hamas operation centers. These claims have been proven to be unsubstantiated, as was the case of Al-Shifa Hospital, which was raided last month. A subsequent investigation also conducted by the Washington Post found that evidence did not support Israeli claims that the hospital was a Hamas command center.

The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. The United Nations says that more than 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and that severe water shortages are creating a deadly risk for children, with the looming threat of large-scale disease outbreaks. Unlawful weapons like incendiary white phosphorus have been used indiscriminately against civilians, according to Amnesty International, which constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

One of the things I found most concerning is that Biden is willing to trade human rights for more war funding — telling Republicans in ongoing talks over funding for Ukraine and Israel that the White House is willing to gut asylum protections and aid in mass deportations in exchange for those funds.

Biden and Democrats are looking to resurrect, and in many cases expand, the worst policies of the Trump administration. Immigrant families who have been here for years, even decades, could be rounded up and deported — calling this “expedited removal” rather than mass deportation. Also on the table is a beefed-up version of Title 42, the Trump-era emergency authority enacted under the pretense of pandemic-related health concerns that speed deportations at the southern border. The “Safe Third Country” restrictions being proposed by Democrats are Trump’s asylum ban creeping up under some centrist think-tank rebranding. 

These extreme, permanent changes to the immigration system will severely harm immigrants in our country and completely demolish what little credibility this administration has when claiming to be a bulwark against Trump-era policies. To do so in service of sending more money to a country committing war crimes is completely indefensible.

I was an undocumented person. I came here with my parents on tourist visas from Argentina and overstayed them hoping for a better life. I’ve dedicated a good portion of my life to help other immigrants navigate an unforgiving and broken process meant to keep them in the shadows while they labor away with no prospects for a proper retirement or social benefits. I can’t rationalize an effort to fund wars that create more destabilization and refugees while also destroying the asylum system that would provide some relief to those refugees. 

Modern asylum laws were created after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed to the public with the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the liberation of concentration camps by Allied forces. They stemmed from the deep shame felt after World War II, knowing more could have been done to help desperate people fleeing desperate conditions. 

Throughout most of the war, the United States had a poor track record offering asylum. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s government turned away thousands of Jewish refugees, fearing that they were Nazi spies and also motivated by ever-present antisemitism. In one of the most horrific instances of our country turning its back on desperate people, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 mostly Jewish passengers were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe where more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

The context is different, but the same is true today. The Biden administration threatens to turn back progress by negotiating with bad-faith actors and betraying their core supporters, all while throwing truly vulnerable people under the bus. 

Sending military funding to Israel as it engages in the mass killing of Palestinians is increasingly unpopular in the United States. Polling released on December 5 from Data for Progress shows over 70 percent of Democrats support a ceasefire in Gaza. Hell, 61 percent of all voters support the call for a ceasefire. Instead of listening to public pressure and the polls, the administration is moving in the opposite direction of a ceasefire and is instead planning for a wider war.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. has historically thrown Palestinians under the bus, but past presidents have at times stepped in to curtail violence. Ronald Reagan, who I am not a fan of, famously called Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during the 1982 Lebanon War and told him that the symbol of that war was becoming a “picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.” When Reagan, infamous for supporting Central American death squads, is more critical of Israeli war crimes than Biden, we are in serious trouble.

For those of you who, like me, find the actions of the current administration unacceptable and would support an alternative candidate in the 2024 Democratic primary, your options are being limited. The Florida Democratic Party has joined several other states in barring any other candidate aside from Biden from appearing in this year’s primary ballot despite challengers like Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson polling between 5 and 10 percent each. Democrats should be given the option to vote for whichever candidate they want to support.

My time trying to navigate the hypocrisy and groupthink of party politics has come to an end. My only hope is that people continue speaking out, challenging the current status quo, and pressuring this administration and politicians in both parties to stop this senseless and intolerable bloodshed before more people die and this spirals into a broader and more destructive conflict.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Thomas Kennedy.

As protests for a ceasefire in Gaza continue around the United States, the Jewish-led peace organization IfNotNow helped organize Wednesday’s protest at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The protesters held hands to block the entrance to the building and were met with pepper spray and police use of force. “Let’s be clear that police escalated the protest,” says Eva Borgwardt, national spokesperson for IfNowNow. “Our Jewish values and our safety as Jews is extremely, extremely contingent on calling for a ceasefire now,” Bogwardt, who is Jewish, continues. She also comments on Democratic Party leaders’ resistance to and suppression of public calls to rein in Israel’s lethal assault on Gaza, as well as the role of the powerful lobbying group AIPAC in policing public dissent.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As protests for a ceasefire in Gaza continue around the United States, the Jewish-led peace organization IfNotNow helped organize Wednesday’s protest at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The protesters held hands to block the entrance to the building and were met with pepper spray and police use of force. “Let’s be clear that police escalated the protest,” says Eva Borgwardt, national spokesperson for IfNowNow. “Our Jewish values and our safety as Jews is extremely, extremely contingent on calling for a ceasefire now,” Bogwardt, who is Jewish, continues. She also comments on Democratic Party leaders’ resistance to and suppression of public calls to rein in Israel’s lethal assault on Gaza, as well as the role of the powerful lobbying group AIPAC in policing public dissent.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As protests for a ceasefire in Gaza continue around the United States, the Jewish-led peace organization IfNotNow helped organize Wednesday’s protest at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The protesters held hands to block the entrance to the building and were met with pepper spray and police use of force. “Let’s be clear that police escalated the protest,” says Eva Borgwardt, national spokesperson for IfNowNow. “Our Jewish values and our safety as Jews is extremely, extremely contingent on calling for a ceasefire now,” Bogwardt, who is Jewish, continues. She also comments on Democratic Party leaders’ resistance to and suppression of public calls to rein in Israel’s lethal assault on Gaza, as well as the role of the powerful lobbying group AIPAC in policing public dissent.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Three-hundred thirty delegates to the Democratic National Convention who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids sent a letter to the senator urging him to introduce a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza. 

The letter, sent on Wednesday, urges Sanders to introduce a Senate companion bill to a ceasefire resolution introduced last month in the House of Representatives. The Sanders convention delegates also called on him to support an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the occupation of Palestinian land, U.S. military funding for war crimes against Palestinians, and the expansion of Israeli settlements. 

“Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’”

“We’ve progressed beyond the stage of seeking mere condemnations or symbolic gestures,” the delegates wrote. “We concur with your assertion that these ‘unspeakable crimes’ must cease and that ‘the bombs and missiles from both sides’ should be halted. But Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’” 

The House resolution was introduced by by Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; André Carson, D-Ind.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. The House resolution now has 18 co-sponsors. So far, at least 31 members of Congress, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have come out in favor of a ceasefire — although Durbin and others conditioned their calls on the release of Israeli prisoners in Gaza. 

The letter comes three weeks after hundreds of Sanders presidential campaign alumni sent a letter urging the senator to back a ceasefire. Since that letter’s release, Sanders has all but supported a ceasefire: calling for a humanitarian pause; to “stop the bombing”; and saying Congress, the Biden administration, and the world “must take action.”

“We Need Him Now, More Than Ever”

Sanders’s delegates delivered the letter to the Vermont senator one day after more than 115 former staffers for President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama — including former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers — applauded Biden for his “staunch support of Israel.” The former top administration officials lauded Biden’s proposed $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel. 

It also follows a decision by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D. N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to join Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, at Tuesday’s March for Israel in Washington, D.C., where the quartet proclaimed, “We stand with Israel.” 

Hours later, Israel invaded Al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, where thousands of displaced and injured civilians were trapped, including dozens of premature babies. 

Wednesday is the fifth consecutive day that the Gaza Ministry of Health has been unable to update its death toll, owing to a lack of fuel and power that has totaled the health care system, making tallying the dead and communications nearly impossible. The last time the ministry updated the death toll, on Friday, Israel had killed 11,078 people.

“As a Jewish person of conscience watching Israeli genocide in real time, I say, not in my name, not with my tax dollars, shall Israel bomb and deprive a trapped population, half of them children, of water, food, medicine and fuel,” said Marcy Winograd, a 2020 Sanders delegate from California’s 24th congressional district, and a co-founding member of the Los Angeles chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. “As a Jewish member of Congress, Senator Sanders’ voice would be particularly persuasive in demanding an end to Israel’s violations of international law that shock the world to leave us feeling unmoored from our own humanity.”

The latest letter adds to a growing opposition among Democrats against unconditional U.S. support for Israel. Over a dozen former Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., campaign staffers, 411 current congressional staffers, 400-plus current Biden administration employees, 500-plus former Biden campaign alumni, 133 Obama staffers and appointees, and 260 former presidential campaign staffers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., issued statements demanding support for a ceasefire. More have since signed on.

“From coastal cities to rural valleys like mine, millions of young people turned their attention to politics for the first time in 2016 and 2020 because we shared Bernie’s vision for peace and justice,” said Taran Samarth, a student organizer and 2020 Sanders delegate from Pennsylvania. “We need him now, more than ever, to champion those values once more and call for a ceasefire in the face of the Biden administration’s unconditional support for the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

President Joe Biden made his reelection campaign official Tuesday morning as he evoked the threat to foundational and hard-won rights and freedoms posed by the increasingly fascist Republican Party.

"Every generation has a moment where they have had to stand up for democracy. To stand up for their fundamental freedoms," Biden declared in an early morning post to social media. "I believe this is ours."

While Biden had long said he would seek another term, he states in his campaign's kickoff video that the key to his run will be warding off any possible victory from the increasingly anti-democratic GOP, including his predecessor Donald Trump, the GOP's leading contender, or other hopefuls like Nikki Haley, who launched her campaign in February, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to throw his hat in the ring later this year.

Biden accused "MAGA extremists" around the country for their persistent assault against "bedrock freedoms" and liberal democracy while they also threaten cuts on Social Security, eviscerate reproductive choice and abortion care, ban books, attack the LGBTQI+ community, and actively work to make voting for Americans.

"When I ran for President four years ago, I said we were in the battle for the soul of America," Biden says in the launch video. "And we still are."

"If President Biden is serious about defeating the fascists and right-wing nominee in 2024, he must run on a progressive platform and use the final year of this term to rack up more wins for our generation."

With the Republicans hungry to retake both Congress and the White House, Biden warns that now "is not time to be complacent" and that "this is our moment" to stand up to defend the nation and the values it claims to value.

Not wholly unchallenged on the Democratic side, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have launched presidential campaigns to offer an alternative to the incumbent. On the Republican side, Trump's popularity—despite a recent criminal indictment and his role in triggering the January 6. insurrection effort on the U.S. government in 2021—remains the overall favorite to win the GOP nomination.

While the Democratic National Committee will clear a path for Biden, progressives disappointed in the president's failures or shortcomings, including repeated failures to live up to his commitments on climate, say Biden cannot afford to ignore them if he hopes to beat Trump for a second time.

"If he wants to win," said the youth-led Sunrise Movement on Tuesday, "he must energize the young voters who have been carrying the Democratic Party since 2018. He can't take our generation for granted."

In a statement, Sunrise's executive director Varshini Prakash said: "Let's be clear—President Biden ran and won in 2020 by mobilizing our generation on the promise of bold, Green New Deal-style climate plans, and it's how Democrats won again in 2022 after passing the Inflation Reduction Act."

"If President Biden is serious about defeating the fascists and right-wing nominee in 2024, he must run on a progressive platform and use the final year of this term to rack up more wins for our generation," Prakash added. "The steps backward on policy that the administration has taken—especially on Willow and drilling projects—make our job of getting young people out to vote all the more difficult, and this is a fight we can't afford to lose."

According to Sean Eldridge, president and founder of the advocacy group Stand Up America, said Biden helped "save American democracy by defeating Donald Trump in 2020, and he did it again by opposing MAGA extremists in last year’s midterm elections."

It's very possible Biden could face off against Trump in the general election again, said Eldridge.

"The future of our democracy will once again be on the ballot in 2024," he said. "As the Republican field is beginning to take shape, voters should be alarmed by the election deniers, January 6 enablers, and other anti-democratic politicians throwing their hats into the ring. Our community of nearly two million members is ready to mobilize in 2024 to support democracy defenders up and down the ballot."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jon Queally.

Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer said Friday that progressives won't stop working to stem the flow of untraceable cash into national primary contests after the DNC Resolutions Committee blocked a vote on her proposed dark money ban for the second time.

Whitmer, a DNC member, told Common Dreams that "time and time again, we've watched 'dark money' used to silence the voices our party most needs to hear."

"Our party and our country need strong Democratic candidates willing to speak truth to power, but when their messages can be drowned out in a flood of untraceable expenditures, many candidates are questioning why they should even run," Whitmer said. "Restoring faith in our democracy has never been more urgent, and that all-important work should start in our own primary elections."

Whitmer sponsored the proposed dark money ban alongside fellow DNC member James Zogby, who previously served as chair of the resolutions panel. If approved, the resolution would have prohibited dark money donations in Democratic primary contests and established guidelines for investigating any violations of the ban.

On Thursday, members of the DNC Resolutions Committee—who likely faced pressure from DNC leadership—stayed quiet when the proposed ban was put up for consideration, so the measure did not receive a vote. Had the committee approved the proposal, which was backed by dozens of DNC members, it would have gone to the full DNC for a vote this weekend. (The DNC doesn't publicize membership lists for its standing committees.)

"Although we were disappointed that the Resolutions Committee once again chose not to move our resolution forward, we will keep fighting to make our primaries a fair and level playing field for all candidates," Whitmer told Common Dreams.

Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, have repeatedly railed against the scourge of dark money, decried its corrupting influence, and pledged to rein it in—only to balk at pressure for substantive action.

The party's platform, adopted in 2020, states that "we will bring an end to 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors to any group that advocates for or against candidates."

Yet as the DNC leadership, headed by Chair Jaime Harrison, refuses to act on its rhetoric—and as congressional Republicans block broader legislative efforts to curtail dark money—Democratic incumbents continue to benefit from untraceable donations, which are frequently used to undercut progressive challengers.

Last year, the newly formed dark money group Opportunity for All Action Fund spent around $600,000 to bolster Reps. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.), Dina Titus (D-Nev.), and Danny Davis (D–Ill.).

All three went on to defeat their progressive primary opponents and win reelection. That pattern played out across the country, though some candidates—including Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who was aggressively targeted by AIPAC's super PAC—were able to overcome torrents of opposition spending and prevail in November.

"In races around the nation, we've seen these underhanded tactics used to silence debate on critical issues, with competing views buried under an avalanche of dark money-funded messaging."

According to an August 2022 study by the Wesleyan Media Project, nearly 70% of pro-Democratic Senate ads up to that point in last year's election cycle were funded by groups that don't disclose any of their donors.

"Letting our primaries devolve into auctions, rather than elections, has done more than simply create an unequal and unfair playing field," Whitmer said during the DNC Resolutions Committee's last gathering in September. "In races around the nation, we've seen these underhanded tactics used to silence debate on critical issues, with competing views buried under an avalanche of dark money-funded messaging."

At this weekend's DNC meeting in Philadelphia, members are expected to approve a presidential primary calendar that would bump South Carolina up to the first-in-the-nation primary slot—a plan that has drawn criticism from some progressives.

But the issue of dark money is likely to be brushed aside once again.

While Democrats in Congress continue to push legislation to curb dark money across the board in federal elections, progress will be virtually impossible with a closely divided Senate and a Republican-controlled House, leaving internal party rule changes one of the only viable paths toward genuine campaign finance reform in the near future.

Larry Cohen, a DNC member and the board chair of Our Revolution, wrote in an email Friday that the DNC and state-level Democratic parties "have extensive rules relating to the nominating process, which provide many opportunities to block dark and dirty money."

"What happens inside the Democratic Party and inside party caucuses of elected Democrats is frequently ignored by progressives, who are generally more comfortable protesting and working solely outside the party. Of course, protest is essential, and new party-building is fine," Cohen wrote. "But for those of us who believe we must fight in every possible way to advance progressive issues and win real power, we ignore party reform at our peril, even as we demand broader electoral reforms, such as fusion and ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, and more."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

For the second time in less than five months, the Democratic National Committee's resolutions panel refused Thursday to allow a vote on a proposed ban on dark money in the party's primaries, despite substantial support for the change among DNC members and prominent progressive lawmakers.

Judith Whitmer, the chair of the Nevada Democratic Party and lead sponsor of the dark money resolution, wrote on Twitter that "these funds are being used to exclude, not empower."

"They're being used to silence the voices our party most needs to hear," Whitmer added. "The DNC did not pass my dark money resolution, but my voice was heard. Our elections are not for sale."

According to DNC member R.L. Miller, the founder of Climate Hawks Vote, "not a single person" on the Resolutions Committee "dares move to even put it for a vote, just like summer 2022."

During that meeting, which took place in September, the panel also declined to let the proposed dark money ban advance to a vote, as Common Dreams reported at the time.

Recounting the September meeting in an op-ed for The Nation, longtime DNC member James Zogby—who helped craft the dark money proposal—wrote that after Whitmer delivered a "powerful" statement to the resolutions panel in support of the ban, the panel's chair "asked if any member of the committee wanted to put our resolution up for a vote."

"There was dead silence in the room," Zogby wrote, suggesting that members were likely pressured by DNC leadership to stonewall the dark money proposal. "With not one of the two dozen committee members in attendance willing to call for a vote, the resolution died."

The DNC's proceedings are notoriously anti-democratic and untransparent—and they are likely to become even more so under bylaw changes that the body quietly enacted during its September gathering.

As The Intercept's Akela Lacy reported following last year's meeting, "The national committee approved language requiring that it must ratify any bylaw amendments that the convention, a broader body, wants to adopt."

"The amendment removes the authority over DNC decisions from the national convention, which includes thousands of members, and places it instead with the smaller national committee of just under 500," Lacy noted. "According to three people present, several DNC members were frustrated with the change."

"If we don't get the dark money—what I call 'the dirty money'—out of Democratic primaries, it becomes increasingly impossible to elect the challengers, the insurgents, the progressives in those primaries."

The DNC doesn't publicize the membership lists of its standing committees, though 2020 reporting from Sludge identified at least three corporate lobbyists who were serving on the resolutions panel at that time.

As of the September 2022 meeting, Patrice Taylor and Rich Fitzgerald were the co-chairs of the DNC Resolutions Committee.

The committee's obstruction of the proposed dark money ban comes in the wake of the most expensive U.S. midterm cycle on record. According to OpenSecrets, super PACs spent an astounding $1.35 billion during the 2022 midterm election cycle.

An outgrowth of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, super PACs are legally required to disclose their donors—but many of them are effectively dark money groups because of how difficult it is to trace the sources of their funding.

During last year's Democratic primaries, progressive candidates across the country faced barrages of opposition spending from super PACs, including one bankrolled by Republican billionaires.

The torrent of super PAC cash provided the impetus for progressives' push to ban dark money in Democratic primaries, an effort that garnered the support of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who caucuses with Senate Democrats—and other members of Congress.

Ahead of this week's winter DNC gathering in Philadelphia, Sanders wrote in a letter that "the Democratic Party must not allow oligarchs and their super PACs, often aligned with Republicans, to buy Democratic Party primaries."

"Virtually all Democrats talk about the need for campaign finance reform," Sanders added. "Talk is easy. Now it's time to walk the walk. Let's stand up for democracy."

\u201cVirtually all Democrats talk about the need for campaign finance reform. Talk is easy. Now it\u2019s time to walk the walk. I wrote a letter to the @DNC today on why we must stand up for democracy and end super PAC spending in primaries.\u201d

— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1675194781

Larry Cohen, a DNC member and board chair of the progressive group Our Revolution, lamented in an organizing call earlier this week that the DNC is "a shitshow."

"There's no other way to describe it," Cohen said. "If we don't get the dark money—what I call 'the dirty money'—out of Democratic primaries, it becomes increasingly impossible to elect the challengers, the insurgents, the progressives in those primaries."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The post Biden Wielding DNC to Guard Against Progressive Challenge appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

Ahead of the Democratic National Committee's annual Winter Meeting in Philadelphia, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called on the party to end super PAC spending in primary races, saying the Democrats should take the event as an opportunity to show their commitment to protecting democracy.

Twelve years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Vermont Independent senator wrote, the last election cycle illustrated how the "disastrous" decision is "undermining American democracy," as super PACs spent roughly $1.3 billion on campaigning—including more than $460 million spent by Democratic groups.

Millions of dollars were spent by billionaires "against progressive candidates in competitive primaries," Sanders wrote, with super PACs funding "outrageous and dishonest attack ads."

"When we talk about billionaires buying elections, this is exactly what we are talking about."

Notably, a super PAC created by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent millions of dollars in competitive races in North Carolina, Texas, and Pennsylvania last year, running attack ads against progressives who are critical of the United States' support for Israel's violent anti-Palestinian policies. One ad accused Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) of being disloyal to the Democratic Party.

"When we talk about billionaires buying elections, this is exactly what we are talking about," wrote Sanders, who caucuses with Senate Democrats.

The 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed corporations and special interest groups to create super PACs, which can accept unlimited donations and spend unlimited money on campaigns. The ruling has been condemned for years by Democratic lawmakers including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who earlier this month introduced legislation to overturn Citizens United.

The party could make clear that it opposes the corporate takeover of campaigning by banning super PAC spending in its primaries, said Sanders, noting that the issue was not permitted to come up for a vote at last year's DNC meeting when he proposed it there.

"Virtually all Democrats talk about the need for campaign finance reform," wrote Sanders. "Talk is easy. Now it's time to walk the walk. Let's stand up for democracy."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

When the Democratic National Committee convenes its winter meeting on Thursday in Philadelphia, a key agenda item will be rubber-stamping Joe Biden’s manipulation of next year’s presidential primaries. There’ll be speeches galore, including one by Biden as a prelude to his expected announcement that he’ll seek a second term. The gathering will exude confidence, at least in public. But if Biden were truly confident that Democratic voters want him to be the 2024 nominee, he wouldn’t have intervened in the DNC’s scheduling of early primaries.

New polling underscores why Biden is so eager to bump New Hampshire from the first-in-the-nation spot that it has held for more than 100 years. In the state, “two-thirds of likely Democratic primary voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election,” the UNH Survey Center found. “Biden is statistically tied with several 2020 rivals, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, all of whom are more personally popular than Biden among likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.”

Dismal as Biden’s showing was in the new poll, it was a step up from his actual vote total in New Hampshire’s 2020 primary, when he came in fifth with 8 percent of the vote. No wonder Biden doesn’t want the state to go first and potentially set primary dominoes falling against him.

Keen to reduce the chances of a major primary challenge next year, Biden sent a letter to the DNC in early December insisting on a new schedule -- demoting New Hampshire to a second spot, alongside Nevada, while giving the leadoff slot to South Carolina. Democratic Party energy and funds will be squandered in that deep-red state, which is about as likely to give its electoral votes to the 2024 Democratic ticket as Ron DeSantis is likely to donate the money in his campaign coffers to the Movement for Black Lives.

But South Carolina, the state with the lowest rate of unionization in the country, offers the singular virtue of having rescued Biden’s presidential hopes with its 2020 primary. As the Associated Press explained last week, Biden is “seeking to reward South Carolina, where nearly 27 percent of the population is Black, after a decisive win there revived his 2020 presidential campaign following losses it suffered in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.”

The president’s rationalization for putting South Carolina first is diversity. Yet the neighboring purple state of Georgia, which has an activist Democratic base, is more racially diverse -- and it’s a crucial swing state, where the party’s general-election prospects would benefit from being the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.

Biden’s intervention has created a long-term political mess for Democrats in New Hampshire, where he’s now less popular than ever due to undermining the state’s first-primary status. Even New Hampshire’s normally compliant Democratic senators and representatives in Congress have been denouncing the move. Biden’s maneuver has boosted the chances that the Democratic ticket will lose the state’s four electoral votes this time around.

But Biden having his way with the Democratic National Committee is a slam dunk because he supplies the ball, hires the referees, owns the nets and controls the concession stands. While cowed DNC members dribble at his behest, substantial concerns will echo outside the range of officials’ whistles.

As a Don’t Run Joe full-page ad in The Hill newspaper pointed out last week (full disclosure: I helped write it), “There are ample indications that having Joe Biden at the top of ballots across the country in autumn 2024 would bring enormous political vulnerabilities for the ticket and for down-ballot races.”

But so far, like the Democrats in Congress, members of the DNC have indicated much more concern about avoiding the ire of the Biden White House than avoiding the probable grim outcome of a Biden ’24 campaign. By the time the DNC adjourns on Saturday, news reports will be filled with on-the-record statements from members lauding Biden’s leadership with next year’s elections on the horizon. Conformity prevails.

But warning signs are profuse. Among the latest are results of a YouGov poll released days ago: “Just 34 percent of Americans describe Biden as honest and trustworthy -- a new low for his presidency. That's an 8-point drop from when this question was last asked in December 2022, prior to the public revelation that classified documents had been found in Biden's possession.”

This is the electoral horse that Democrats are supposed to be riding into battle against the extremist Republican Party next year. The national Democratic Party is locked into operating at the whim of a president now believed to be “honest and trustworthy” by only one-third of U.S. adults.

How all this will play out at the DNC meeting is hardly a mystery. Yet many members surely know that Biden is likely to be a weak candidate if he goes ahead with proclaimed plans to run for re-election. The hope is that the GOP will defeat itself as an extremist party in disarray. But it would be irresponsible to gamble on such a scenario by rolling dice loaded with Biden.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Norman Solomon.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday voiced support for a renewed progressive push at the Democratic National Committee to ban dark money donations in the party's primaries, an effort that comes months after the DNC Resolutions Committee refused to allow a vote on the proposal.

"Billionaires and their super PACs must not be able to buy Democratic Party primaries," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on social media. "If Democrats really believe in democracy and campaign finance reform, we must ban super PACs in primaries. I stand with progressive reformers advocating for this change."

James Zogby, a longtime DNC member who helped craft the resolution, welcomed Sanders' continued support, writing that "Democrats mustn't let billionaires buy campaigns and our politics with deceitful ads."

"We introduced a resolution to ban dark money at the last DNC meeting," Zogby tweeted Thursday. "They wouldn't let it be discussed or come to a vote. We're bringing it back again."

The 2022 midterms were the most expensive on record, with billionaire-backed super PACs pumping torrents of cash into congressional races across the country.

During last year's Democratic primaries, a number of progressive candidates—including Summer Lee in Pennsylvania, who won her race, and Nida Allam in North Carolina, who lost—faced massive opposition spending from super PACs, including at least one bankrolled by Republican billionaires.

Super PACs, entities that are allowed to spend unlimited sums advocating for or against political candidates, are an outgrowth of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which unleashed an avalanche of corporate cash into the U.S. political system.

Though they are legally required to disclose their donors, some super PACs "are effectively dark money outlets when the bulk of their funding cannot be traced back to the original donor," OpenSecrets explains.

"While Citizens United may allow for unlimited corporate money in general elections, that Supreme Court ruling does not govern Democratic Party rules."

Appalled by the growing influence of super PACs on Democratic races, progressive DNC members led by Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer proposed a resolution late last year that would have prohibited dark money funding "during any and all Democratic primary elections" and set up "procedures for the investigation of 'dark money' use by candidate committees as well as possible disciplinary action."

But during a September meeting, the DNC Resolutions Committee didn't allow the measure to come up for a vote even though it had the support of dozens of DNC members, spotlighting the committee's increasingly undemocratic procedures and emboldening progressives who vowed to keep fighting for a full floor vote on the dark money ban.

"It was absolutely stunning," Zogby said in an interview after the meeting. "The resolution was never even considered. I know how that works. I was chair of the resolutions committee for 10 years. I was a member of the resolutions committee for 20 years. It means that staff whipped the members and said, 'Don't you dare.'"

"I went up to folks afterwards who I've known," Zogby added. "I mean, you know, they've served on the committee with me. And I said, 'Why? Why did this happen?' They wouldn't look me in the eye."

In a column for In These Times on Thursday, Our Revolution board chair and DNC member Larry Cohen wrote that "while Citizens United may allow for unlimited corporate money in general elections, that Supreme Court ruling does not govern Democratic Party rules."

However, Cohen added, "it is likely that in February, for the second time, the resolutions committee (which determines which proposals move forward) will refuse to report out the dark money ban—despite the significant support it has received from DNC members in about 20 states."

"Increasingly, both the DNC and political leadership in the Biden White House appear interested in preventing party discussion and debate," Cohen wrote. "The good news is that the number of progressives at the DNC is growing, slowly but surely, and grassroots activists increasingly understand that without change within the Democratic Party, we won't win the advances in healthcare, childcare, workers' rights, and climate change that are desperately needed."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Progressive criticism of President Joe Biden's move to make South Carolina the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary was given a boost Wednesday when More Perfect Union launched a petition imploring the Democratic National Committee to pick a diverse swing state instead.

"If we really want to pick a diverse primary electorate, look to South Carolina's neighbor to the north—an actual battleground state."

Biden's proposal to raise South Carolina to the first spot on the party's presidential primary calendar was approved by the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee last Friday but is still months away from receiving a green light from the entire panel. If Biden's plan is rubber-stamped by the full DNC, voters in New Hampshire—currently home to the nation's first primary contest following the Iowa caucuses—would be second in line, casting ballots on the same day as their counterparts in Nevada.

In its petition, More Perfect Union applauded other changes sought by Biden, including his proposed elevation of Nevada, Georgia, and Michigan—three general election battleground states that were among the 10 closest races in his 2020 victory over then-President Donald Trump.

The biggest flaw in the president's plan is that he "chose South Carolina to go first and ahead of all those battleground states," said the progressive media outlet. "Biden's proposal to elevate South Carolina to the front gives it incredible power to shape the race."

Doing so would be problematic, More Perfect Union contended, because:

South Carolina is not a battleground state: Donald Trump carried it by double digits in 2020. It is way more ideologically and culturally conservative than the Democratic Party and the rest of the nation. It's also one of the fiercest anti-union, anti-labor states in the country. In fact, South Carolina is already first in the nation with the terrible distinction of being the lowest-density union state in America.

If Democrats are serious about winning the working-class vote, South Carolina isn't the state to get it done.

While Biden has portrayed his preferred reshuffling of the Democratic Party's presidential primary calendar as an attempt to foreground voters of color, the progressive advocacy group RootsAction recently characterized the president's move as "an inappropriate, self-serving intervention dressed up in noble rhetoric."

Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign manager Jeff Weaver, meanwhile, warned Thursday in The Nation that "the schedule put forward by the White House empirically and dramatically diminishes the influence of Latinos on the Democratic presidential nominating process."

"In doing so, this proposed gerrymander will give Republicans more fodder for convincing Latino voters that the Democratic Party is not a home for them," Weaver argued. "Given the erosion of Democratic Party support among the fastest-growing segment of the American population, that's a problem."

Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign manager and current adviser Faiz Shakir—the founder of More Perfect Union and a DNC delegate—has vowed to reject Biden's effort to promote South Carolina, which he sees as a transparent attempt by the White House to reward Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) for his influential endorsement in the last presidential contest.

While Shakir agrees that Iowa should no longer go first, he argued in a New York Times opinion piece published Monday that pushing South Carolina, a GOP stronghold, to the front of the line "would be comical if it weren't tragic."

"We all know why South Carolina got the nod," wrote Shakir. "President Biden, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and many of his top supporters were buoyed by their campaign's comeback in February 2020 when the state delivered Mr. Biden his first victory of the season—and a big one at that."

"The media attention from that victory, and the consolidation of the Democratic field that it yielded, helped catapult him to winning a majority of the following Super Tuesday states," Shakir continued. "And when Covid spread through the nation shortly after, the rest of the primary contests were effectively quarantined, and Mr. Biden iced his victory. None of that story is a reason to put South Carolina first, however."

Soon after the piece was published, DNC Chair Jamie Harrison appeared to baselessly accuse Shakir of disrespecting Black voters. In an ensuing interview with Politico, Shakir said that "it's a very insulting approach to suggest that somehow we don't care about Black voters because we think South Carolina shouldn't go first."

In his essay, Shakir wrote that "if we really want to pick a diverse primary electorate, look to South Carolina's neighbor to the north—an actual battleground state."

More Perfect Union's petition also advocates for prioritizing racially diverse swing states: "As one of the strongest voting blocks in the Democratic coalition, it is essential Black voters get their say early and often throughout the nominating process. Yet Georgia has significantly more Black voters than South Carolina. So do Florida and North Carolina, two more battleground states. In fact, 14 states have larger Black populations than South Carolina."

"Our first priority must be to select states early in the process that help produce the strongest Democratic nominee consistent with our working-class values and agenda," says the petition. "South Carolina isn't even trending in any way toward the Democratic Party."

"Just two years ago, Jaime Harrison—now the chair of the Democratic National Committee—spent the eye-popping sum of $130 million to try to defeat [Republican] Sen. Lindsey Graham. After out-raising and outspending Mr. Graham, Mr. Harrison still lost the 2020 Senate race decisively," the petition adds. "Let's not compel all other Democratic campaigns to waste more money that could be better spent building coalitions in states Democrats need to win."

Adolph Reed Jr., professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an organizer with the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute's Medicare for All campaign in South Carolina, told Common Dreams that the notion that the South Carolina primary serves as corporate Democrats' so-called "firewall" has "only worked that way because Democratic elites have interpreted it that way when it's been in their interest to do so and because the news media have colluded with them in that view."

"It's just as important to note that South Carolina is a state no Democrat is going to win in November," said Reed, "and that Black voters in South Carolina are not identical to Black voters in Michigan, Illinois, or New York, that there's no such thing as 'the Black vote,' and that South Carolina Black voters' inclinations are shaped significantly by political dynamics within the state as are those of those voters in other states."

Shakir, for his part, called it a "special honor" to go first. "The state chosen for the task is rewarded in myriad ways. Iowa's economy has benefited greatly over the years from the high level of campaign spending and travel. Aware of the process' economic power, many of our Democratic campaigns employed union-friendly hotels, restaurants, and vendors when we were active in Iowa. Good luck finding that in South Carolina."

As RootsAction's Don't Run Joe campaign—an effort to dissuade the incumbent from seeking reelection in 2024—noted last week in a statement:

Biden received a mere 8% of the vote in the 2020 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, finishing fifth. Now he wants to dislodge New Hampshire from its long-standing first-in-the-nation primary role. On the other hand, Biden was the big winner of the South Carolina primary in 2020. Now he wants that state to go first.

Biden's decision to intrude into the Democratic National Committee's painstaking process for setting the 2024 presidential primary schedule appears to be a sign of anxiety in the White House about potential obstacles to his winning renomination. The president has indicated repeatedly that he plans to run again, so how ethical would it be for the DNC to allow a contestant to determine key rules of the game before the race begins?

South Carolina is a state that Biden obviously sees as vital to a renomination bid, but—unlike all other states under consideration for early primaries—it is not a battleground state. Everyone knows that the Democratic ticket will not win the deep-red state of South Carolina in 2024. Georgia, on the other hand, is one of the most important battleground states, and is more racially diverse than South Carolina. If Biden's proposal to supplant the New Hampshire primary as first-in-the-nation were truly about diversity and not about improving his own prospects for renomination, he would be promoting a state other than South Carolina to be first.

The group called on Biden to stop trying "to manipulate the Democratic primary schedule for his own narrow political purposes."

That message is echoed in More Perfect Union's petition, which tells Biden and the DNC: "Don't make South Carolina the first state to vote in the 2024 Democratic primary. Make diverse, battleground states that Democrats need to win in the general election, like Georgia, Nevada, and Michigan, first instead."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

A Democratic National Committee panel on Thursday refused to allow a vote on a resolution aimed at banning dark money from the party's primary process, a decision that sparked outrage from progressive DNC members and others who backed the proposal.

Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, a DNC member who faced an onslaught of dark money during her recent campaigns for a U.S. House seat, told Common Dreams that "it's really a sad state of affairs" for the DNC Resolutions Committee to "not even bring this to the floor so that the members of the DNC can weigh in."

"Dark money taints the will of the people of these communities because dark money is doing the bidding of the elites."

"This should be judged through the lens of right and wrong," said Turner. "It is wrong to allow dark money to enter any primary in any state, in any race. What it does is it suffocates the will of the people in those districts. Let's take my district, for example: Do you think the dark money that came in after me cares that Cleveland is the poorest city of its size in the nation? Do they care that 50% of the children who live in Cleveland live in poverty? No, they don't give a damn."

"Dark money taints the will of the people of these communities because dark money is doing the bidding of the elites and the oligarchs who don't give a damn about the conditions people are living in," she added. "The Democratic Party, by not allowing this resolution to come to the floor, is complicit in the railroading of democracy itself."

Led by Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer, the resolution would have prohibited dark money funding "during any and all Democratic primary elections" and established "procedures for the investigation of 'dark money' use by candidate committees as well as possible disciplinary action."

Dark money refers to spending whose source isn't disclosed and is often untraceable.

Supporters of the ban cited the torrent of dark money that poured into Democratic primary races across the country this year in an effort to defeat progressive candidates and bolster powerful incumbents—a strategy that, in a number of high-profile cases, succeeded.

During her argument in favor of a vote on the proposed ban, which was backed by dozens of DNC members and progressive members of Congress, Whitmer said dark money has allowed "our elections to devolve into auctions."

Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Our Revolution, said the DNC panel's decision to block a vote on Whitmer's resolution is "abhorrent and anti-democratic."

"Democrats can't be the party of democracy in one breath and then let an astronomical sum of money from Republican megadonors and corporate interests flood Democratic primaries," Geevarghese added.

The proposed dark money ban's path forward is uncertain. Our Revolution said in an email to supporters Thursday that two of its board members, Larry Cohen and Jane Kleeb, are planning to "lead a coalition of 33 progressive DNC members to get this resolution to the full floor" despite the party panel's obstruction.

"The 33 of us are not going to stand down just because the resolution committee pulled a fast one," Turner told Common Dreams.

The Democratic Party's 2020 platform includes an explicit rebuke of dark money, which has surged in the years following the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

The platform states that Democrats "will bring an end to 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors to any group that advocates for or against candidates, and bar 501(c)(4) organizations from spending money on elections."

"Dark money should have no role in deciding elections."

"Democrats will ban corporate PACs from donating to candidates and bar lobbyists from donating, fundraising, or bundling for anyone they lobby," the document adds.

Shortly before refusing to allow a vote on the proposed dark money ban, the resolutions committee approved a separate, toothless measure that "condemns the use of 'dark money' that runs contrary to the values and principles of donors."

James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute and a longtime DNC member, tweeted Thursday that he is "furious" about Thursday's outcome and "all Dems should be too."

"The last time party leaders did this was on my February 2003 resolution to oppose the Iraq War," Zogby added. "Wrong then, wrong now!"

In recent months, prominent progressive lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have called on the Democratic leadership to support a dark money ban to prevent anonymous donors from manipulating the primary process and stacking the deck against candidates who rely on grassroots support.

"It is well beyond time for the Democratic Party to practice what we preach and ban super PAC spending from our primaries," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in May after progressive Summer Lee narrowly overcame millions in opposition spending. "Dark money should have no role in deciding elections."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

At the tail-end of a primary season that has seen torrents of dark money pour into districts across the U.S. to smear and defeat progressive candidates, the Democratic National Committee is facing mounting pressure to prohibit such spending in future elections, with supporters arguing such a ban would help jumpstart the process of cleaning up the nation's corrupt political process.

With the DNC scheduled to convene in Maryland later this week for its summer meeting, a group of more than 30 committee members spearheaded by Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer will demand approval of a resolution barring "the use of 'dark money' funding during any and all Democratic primary elections."

"If Democrats really believe in democracy and campaign finance reform, we must ban super PACs in primaries."

In an interview with The Nation last week, Whitmer warned that the "avalanche" of dark money is growing so large that voters are losing "their right to choose their own candidates."

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has called Whitmer's resolution "courageous" and declared that "any DNC member who truly believes in our slogan 'people over politics' should vote" in favor.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation's editor and publisher, argued in a column for the Washington Post on Tuesday that "passage of Whitmer's resolution shouldn't be controversial."

"No one can doubt that action is imperative," vanden Heuvel wrote. "According to the nonpartisan research group OpenSecrets, dark money topped $1 billion in the 2020 presidential race. This year, the Wesleyan Media Project reported, nearly 60% of all ads in Democratic House primaries have been purchased by sources that did not disclose, or only partially disclosed, their donors."

"Democrats in both the House and the Senate voted overwhelmingly for H.R. 1, the sweeping voting-rights bill introduced in 2021, which included strong campaign finance elements," vanden Heuvel added. "President Biden campaigned for its passage. That bill was ultimately defeated but, now, the Democratic National Committee can take action to clean its own house. It should not fail this test."

Several high-profile progressive lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—recently endorsed the idea of a dark money ban in Democratic primaries after watching progressive candidates lose congressional races that were inundated by super PAC cash, which is often difficult to trace due to the country's tattered campaign finance laws.

"It is now time to speak with one voice to end its influence in Democratic primaries—where record sums of money from millionaires and billionaires have infiltrated our primaries, and super PACs have drowned out the grassroots campaigns of working-class, progressive candidates," Jayapal, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote in a June letter to the DNC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“Instead of Democratic primaries being an honest and free exchange of ideas with individual and small-dollar donor contributors dominant, corporate super PACs have flooded these races with millions in misleading mailers, digital ads, and television commercials," the letter continued. "Candidates who have worked hard to build grassroots support in their communities are being overwhelmed by a torrent of outside spending."

In a number of races this primary cycle, a super PAC formed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and bankrolled by Republican billionaires intervened on the side of corporate Democrats running against progressives such as Pennsylvania's Summer Lee—who ultimately won her race despite the opposition spending—and Jessica Cisneros, who lost by the thinnest of margins to right-wing incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas).

Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), widely considered the most progressive Jewish member of the House, also lost his primary to fellow Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in a newly drawn district after facing millions in opposition spending from the United Democracy Project, AIPAC's super PAC.

Sanders, who campaigned for Levin and vocally condemned super PAC influence on the race, tweeted Tuesday that "billionaires and their super PACs must not be able to buy Democratic Party primaries."

"If Democrats really believe in democracy and campaign finance reform, we must ban super PACs in primaries," the Vermont senator added. "I stand with progressive reformers advocating for this change."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The Republican National Committee is investing considerable money and energy in expanding its voter base by building up its presence in largely Black, Latino, and Native American communities, according to new reporting by The American Prospect which led progressives on Wednesday to warn that Democrats have largely abandoned such boots-on-the-ground efforts.

As Alexander Sammon wrote at the outlet, the Republican Party has opened at least 21 community centers in places including Robeson County, North Carolina—a former Democratic stronghold which former Republican President Donald Trump won in 2016—and the College Park section of Atlanta.

Sammon visited Republicans' Native American Community Center in Robeson County, where the median household income is less than $35,000 per year and where the party is "aggressively pursuing" the votes of Lumbee Tribe members.

"There's been a lot of dismissal of this initiative from Democrats, and scant reporting, but I'll tell you it's real, it's working, and Democrats don't have an answer to it."

The party is hoping its outreach efforts in the community—including free pizza nights, Easter egg hunts, movie nights, and cookouts at the center—help it to win North Carolina's 7th Congressional District as well as a U.S. Senate seat.

While enjoying free meals and what one political science professor called "a shared sense of community," visitors to the center also see "stickers and flyers for GOP candidates, leaflets barking out the permanent collection of Republican messaging: 'voter fraud,' supporting the troops, pro-policing... a framed portrait of RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, with a quote proclaiming her commitment to the Native American community and its place in the Republican Party."

As Sammon reported, the Republican Party appears to be modeling its approach on "the sustained organizing model of the Bernie Sanders campaign," which spent months organizing in predominantly immigrant, working-class communities in Nevada before shocking the Democratic establishment by winning the state's primary in February 2020.

The GOP has used the same approach to engage with voters whose interests it has no intention of serving, Chuck Rocha, who led Sanders' Latino outreach program in 2020, told The American Prospect (TAP).

"It's really smart politics," Rocha told the outlet. "Because they have unlimited money and support... they can go in and put these community centers up with the facade that they care about the community. What they're really trying to do is spend a bunch of money just to get three or four more percent of the Black or brown vote."

The party is also taking advantage of the fact that Democrats are spending less time and money on winning votes in places like Robeson County than they did several decades ago.

"I just feel like they've given up on the Democratic voters of Robeson County," Rev. Tyrone Watson, president of the Robeson NAACP, told TAP. "You don't see that effort that you used to see. They're turning Robeson County over to the Republican Party."

The Republicans also appear to be taking advantage of Democrats' shrinking support from Latino voters—with President Joe Biden's support decreasing by 8% compared to Hillary Clinton's in 2016—and Black Americans, whose support fell by 3%.

While the Democratic Party has also invested in grassroots organizing in minority communities with a $25 million voter protection and outreach initiative and a $5 million voter registration program, according to Sammon, the Democratic National Committee's focus is largely on "ad buys" supporting those efforts.

Sammon reported that "multiple Democratic aides" he spoke to dismissed the RNC community centers as "a shambolic nonentity" and "a 'nothingburger.'"

"There's been a lot of dismissal of this initiative from Democrats, and scant reporting, but I'll tell you it's real, it's working, and Democrats don't have an answer to it," tweeted Sammon.

Progressives must "demand" that the DNC invest in local organizing, said Melissa Byrne, a former organizer for Sanders.

The GOP's strategy is "like a simulacrum of democracy for the party that is dead-set against democracy," said Aaron Huertas of the progressive voter data firm Catalist. "Very easy to imagine a good faith, Democratic/progressive version of this kind of programming."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

The Republican National Committee is investing considerable money and energy in expanding its voter base by building up its presence in largely Black, Latino, and Native American communities, according to new reporting by The American Prospect which led progressives on Wednesday to warn that Democrats have largely abandoned such boots-on-the-ground efforts.

As Alexander Sammon wrote at the outlet, the Republican Party has opened at least 21 community centers in places including Robeson County, North Carolina—a former Democratic stronghold which former Republican President Donald Trump won in 2016—and the College Park section of Atlanta.

Sammon visited Republicans' Native American Community Center in Robeson County, where the median household income is less than $35,000 per year and where the party is "aggressively pursuing" the votes of Lumbee Tribe members.

"There's been a lot of dismissal of this initiative from Democrats, and scant reporting, but I'll tell you it's real, it's working, and Democrats don't have an answer to it."

The party is hoping its outreach efforts in the community—including free pizza nights, Easter egg hunts, movie nights, and cookouts at the center—help it to win North Carolina's 7th Congressional District as well as a U.S. Senate seat.

While enjoying free meals and what one political science professor called "a shared sense of community," visitors to the center also see "stickers and flyers for GOP candidates, leaflets barking out the permanent collection of Republican messaging: 'voter fraud,' supporting the troops, pro-policing... a framed portrait of RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, with a quote proclaiming her commitment to the Native American community and its place in the Republican Party."

As Sammon reported, the Republican Party appears to be modeling its approach on "the sustained organizing model of the Bernie Sanders campaign," which spent months organizing in predominantly immigrant, working-class communities in Nevada before shocking the Democratic establishment by winning the state's primary in February 2020.

The GOP has used the same approach to engage with voters whose interests it has no intention of serving, Chuck Rocha, who led Sanders' Latino outreach program in 2020, told The American Prospect (TAP).

"It's really smart politics," Rocha told the outlet. "Because they have unlimited money and support... they can go in and put these community centers up with the facade that they care about the community. What they're really trying to do is spend a bunch of money just to get three or four more percent of the Black or brown vote."

The party is also taking advantage of the fact that Democrats are spending less time and money on winning votes in places like Robeson County than they did several decades ago.

"I just feel like they've given up on the Democratic voters of Robeson County," Rev. Tyrone Watson, president of the Robeson NAACP, told TAP. "You don't see that effort that you used to see. They're turning Robeson County over to the Republican Party."

The Republicans also appear to be taking advantage of Democrats' shrinking support from Latino voters—with President Joe Biden's support decreasing by 8% compared to Hillary Clinton's in 2016—and Black Americans, whose support fell by 3%.

While the Democratic Party has also invested in grassroots organizing in minority communities with a $25 million voter protection and outreach initiative and a $5 million voter registration program, according to Sammon, the Democratic National Committee's focus is largely on "ad buys" supporting those efforts.

Sammon reported that "multiple Democratic aides" he spoke to dismissed the RNC community centers as "a shambolic nonentity" and "a 'nothingburger.'"

"There's been a lot of dismissal of this initiative from Democrats, and scant reporting, but I'll tell you it's real, it's working, and Democrats don't have an answer to it," tweeted Sammon.

Progressives must "demand" that the DNC invest in local organizing, said Melissa Byrne, a former organizer for Sanders.

The GOP's strategy is "like a simulacrum of democracy for the party that is dead-set against democracy," said Aaron Huertas of the progressive voter data firm Catalist. "Very easy to imagine a good faith, Democratic/progressive version of this kind of programming."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

This is a developing news story... Check back for possible updates...

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday urged the Democratic National Committee to ban super PAC money from the party's primary process as special interest groups and billionaires pour money into elections in the hopes of defeating progressive candidates, including Summer Lee in Pennsylvania and Nida Allam in North Carolina.

"The Democratic leadership has, appropriately, condemned Republican 'dark money' super PACs which spend huge amounts of money to elect their right-wing candidates," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a letter to DNC Chair Jamie Harrison. "I am concerned, however, that I have not heard any criticism from Democratic leaders about the many millions of dollars in dark money being spent by super PACs that are now attempting to buy Democratic primaries."

"The goal of this billionaire-funded effort is to crush the candidacies of a number of progressive women of color who are running for Congress," the Vermont senator continued. "I am writing to you today to demand that the Democratic National Committee make it clear that super PAC money is not welcome in Democratic primaries. I believe the party should make a public statement about our values and simultaneously consider actions that punish candidates who refuse to adhere to this principle."

Sanders' letter was sent the day of Pennsylvania's Democratic primary elections, which will feature Lee's run against corporate lawyer Steve Irwin for a U.S. House seat in the state's 12th Congressional District and Lt. Gov. John Fetterman's contest against Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) for a spot in the U.S. Senate.

Both contests have attracted national attention and torrents of super PAC cash. The Intercept's Akela Lacy reported Monday that in "less than a month, the United Democracy Project—the political action committee for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—poured more than $1 million into ads in Pennsylvania's 12th District."

"The bulk of the messaging attacked Lee, though just over $100,000 went to materials supporting Irwin," Lacy noted. "In total, United Democracy Project has spent more than $2.3 million on the race so far."

In the Senate primary, meanwhile, some of the top financiers in the U.S.—including Bain Capital billionaire Joshua Bekenstein and Lone Pine Capital billionaire Stephen Mandel—have dumped money into Lamb's super PAC.

"The billionaire class is playing an outsized role in propping up Conor Lamb's sagging electoral chances," The American Prospect's Alexander Sammon wrote last month.

Sanders argued in his letter Tuesday that Democratic candidates should have to "compete with each other based on their ideas and grassroots support, not on the kind of billionaire super PAC money they can attract."

"A super PAC is a super PAC, whether it is funded by Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires. Dark money is dark money, whether it is funded by Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires," Sanders wrote. "There is no question but that the continuation of super PAC money in Democratic primaries will demoralize the Democratic base and alienate potential Democratic voters from the political process."

"Let us try to create a Democratic Party which is truly democratic," the senator added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

I am not trying to gloat here, but it seems worth setting the stage a little, before I share a little perspective.  In 2016, as the polls and many other people were predicting that Trump would lose badly to anyone the Democrats put forward, because so many people would want to repudiate his blatant racism, xenophobia and obviously corrupt nature, I made the call that he’d win.  Not exactly an accurate call, since he did lose the popular vote by 3 million, but he did win the electoral college, and thus, the office. In 2020 my prediction was that he’d again lose the popular vote, by a bigger margin than in 2016, but not by a landslide, and that he’d ultimately win the electoral college again. My prediction of the margin of Trump’s loss of the popular vote was accurate, but we don’t know yet about the outcome of the election. I also predicted in 2020 that Sanders-backed candidates would do well. This prediction was also borne out, and, as I expected, there was no “blue wave” of Democratic Party victories, aside from the explicitly socialist-leaning candidates.

There are reasons why I was mostly right in my predictions, both times, and the pollsters were mostly wrong, both times. It is not random, and I am not lucky. I have a superior analysis to the pollsters, evidently. I made my judgment calls based on a combination of factors — massive consumption of a wide variety of news sources from throughout the US and the world, across the political spectrum is one of my sources. Other sources include closely following the political trajectories of people who comment on my YouTube videos, and actively walking the streets in every neighborhood in the city of Portland, Oregon and the surrounding suburbs, postering.  In 2016, I traveled extensively throughout the US as a touring performer, another important way to take the pulse of a country.  In 2020, as a pandemic-inspired broadcaster, I’ve conducted over a hundred interviews, mostly with people in different parts of the US, about what’s going on here.  And altogether, these sources proved to be more accurate than those that most of the pundits have relied on, in both 2016 and 2020.

Now that I’ve hopefully established my credentials as a (non)pundit, despite my chronic lack of exposure on network TV, I’m going to intentionally skip over any further explanation of methodology. That is just to say, my predictions do take into account the fact that Republican skullduggery has ensured that millions of US citizens have been deprived of their voting rights in the past ten years or so. They do take into account, as well, that Bloomberg’s billions didn’t seem to help the DNC candidates much at all in buying their way back into the Congress.  But these are only two of innumerable factors that went into the results of this election, or these many elections, since we’re talking about lots of local electoral struggles that played into the whole picture as well.

Lots of other pundits are currently berating themselves once again and very publicly agonizing over where they went wrong, and what is really going on with the voters, what they want, where each party is heading politically, demographically, etc. Most of these pundits will come to the wrong conclusions and go on to make all the wrong predictions again.  There’s a whole lot that I and others are saying, and can say, about why the following conclusion is an accurate one, and how I reached it — how so many of us reached it, long, long ago:

If you really look at the results of these elections with a clear eye, and you understand how I make my political predictions, and why they are more or less accurate, you will conclude that what the people want is socialism. If they can’t get something that feels like real socialism, they’ll settle for fake socialism, also known as National Socialism, also known as fascism.  What they hate the most is the capitalist elite.  So many people are so desperate and feel so legitimately so abandoned by the Democratic Party and any connection it used to have to the working class, that they would rather vote for anyone who appears to be critical of the establishment, regardless of how vile that person may be in every other possible way.

There is no question in my mind that all else being equal, if the DNC had not sabotaged his campaigns, Bernie Sanders would have won in 2016 and in 2020 by a landslide. Of course, all else is not equal, and if it weren’t the DNC sabotaging him, it would have been the media, or any number of other elements of the established elites.

So what we end up with, if we are lucky here, is literally that which brought us Donald Trump.  What we end up with is the man who ran on the achievements of the presidency for which he served as Vice President, during which time the stock market boomed, and my rent doubled, as did the cost of living for a hundred million other Americans. That’s the time period he keeps bragging about. That’s what he’s promising. If we don’t get Trump again, that’s what we get — the neoliberal, empire-loving, $700-billion-a-year-isn’t-a-big-enough-military-budget, God Bless Our Troops, “my family is slightly less nepotistic than his” Joe Biden.

What can only follow is catastrophe. Nothing good can come out of this, at least not without a popular movement coming out of the grassroots of this society that makes the past few months of rebellion in the streets look like a house concert. But if you have any expectations of the so-called political leadership from either party doing anything useful without such pressure, you have your head in the sand.

For those of you here in Portland or elsewhere in Oregon, I’ll just state my agreement with what so many local radicals I follow on Twitter have been saying for the past few days:

Most of the good initiatives that were on the ballot won. This is because people had a chance to read the description of what they were about, which made sense to them, so they voted for them.  Thus, we have now more or less decriminalized hard drugs, set into motion free public daycare for all, as well as the framework for a police oversight body with the power to fire cops.  Unfortunately, while voters can read about the initiatives and vote according to their consciences after doing so, it’s much harder for the average voter to differentiate between two candidates who are both Democrats and both posture as really cool progressives on every possible issue. It takes a lot of research work to find out who these people are, if you’re not already a local news junky, or even if you are. The mayor, Ted Wheeler, got a lot of national media attention.  In the liberal press he was generally praised as a fellow liberal who was standing up to the feds, and also who banned tear gas. The truth, that he was and is a wealthy friend of the landlord lobby and a supporter of the city’s massive police budget, was never mentioned in the national press. If people read the Portland Mercury or other local publications, they might have known better, but Wheeler squeaked in with a victory over his far more progressive main challenger, and the same kind of thing happened in the City Council race for Chloe Eudaly’s seat, now lost to a candidate preferred by the police union and the landlord lobby.  A little knowledge can be a terrible thing, and here we are.

What comes next in this complex social and political and economic saga in this country we call the United States? I don’t have a clue. I only made my election predictions the day before the elections. What’s going to happen next week or next month would seem like a real fool’s errand to try to predict. All I know, based on my analysis of the history of this country, is that any positive change that might come will come out of movements that take to the streets and shut down business as usual, until broad demands for transformative changes are clearly and transparently and completely met.

What I can say beyond any shadow of any doubt, what I know to my bones, what every analysis of history and society that I can make tells me, is that now is not a time for moderation. Now is a time for demanding the impossible, and then some.

This article was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2020 at 2:12pm and is filed under Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Joe Biden, Lesser Evilism, Opinion.

Now that the dust has settled from the political earthquake of the Super Tuesday primary races, one thing has become clear: Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has become the new frontrunner of the Democratic Party, was an impulse buy — one that voters may come to regret deeply.

Just a week ago, reality matched expectations. The first few Democratic primary races of the season played out just as polls said they would: with a crowded field of candidates splitting votes several ways and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drawing pluralities of support in Iowa (where he essentially tied with former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg), New Hampshire and Nevada. Even in South Carolina Sanders appeared to be closing in on Biden until Rep. Jim Clyburn stepped in with an endorsement. Biden’s luck instantly changed, and the stunning speed with which the center-right faction of the party consolidated itself around him between the South Carolina victory and Super Tuesday races was breathtaking.

There was no time to poll voters about a dramatically narrowed field after Buttigieg suspended his campaign just three races after officially winning the Iowa caucuses to align behind the old guard of the party. Following Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who had not long ago been leading all candidates in her home state of Minnesota — ahead even of Sanders and Biden — also pulled out of the race and joined the obedient ranks of Biden backers. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who had ended his campaign months ago, waited until the day before the most concentrated set of primary races to show his allegiance to Biden. The timing couldn’t have been more obvious.

Other Democratic Party figures chimed in, including former House Speaker Harry Reid, who wrote an op-ed calling Biden “the Democrat best equipped to oust Trump and stabilize America.” In his opinion piece, Reid effectively said what most Biden backers are communicating: While we are in favor of policies that Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren back, we choose Biden over the progressive candidates because we think he can beat Trump better than anyone else can.

Others in the corporate media openly expressed relief and fawned over Biden. CNN senior analyst John Avlon explained the day before Super Tuesday that Biden was a “known quantity,” “known for his decency and empathy,” and was therefore the opposite of Trump. It didn’t seem to matter to Avlon that Biden’s numerous policy decisions over his long career have been far more right wing and Trump-like than Sanders’ — just so long as his personality is affable.

While Reid can be forgiven for papering over Biden’s record (Reid is a political figure, after all) Avlon, who is a journalist, failed to raise even a single aspect of Biden’s deeply controversial and right-leaning past — a legacy that is expertly documented in Branko Marcetic’s political biography “Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.” Marcetic explaines how “Biden cast a decade’s worth of votes that turned into political boomerangs,” including on issues of abortion where his Catholic beliefs pushed against the Democratic Party’s stance. Much has also been written about Biden’s attacks on Anita Hill, his authorship of the 1994 crime bill, his support for the Iraq war and so much more. Additionally, Marcetic reminds us of how “little sympathy” Biden had for the economic woes when he was vice president under Obama:

As he told one gathering in September 2010, he wanted to “remind our base constituency to stop whining.” If they “didn’t get everything they wanted, it’s time to just buck up here,” not “yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything we stand for.”

This is the Biden that corporate media outlets are loathe to remind us of as he takes on Sanders’ progressive economic agenda in the remaining primary races. Jake Novak, writing for CNBC.com, went as far as giving Biden’s campaign helpful advice on how best to crush Sanders: “What does he need to do now to make sure he defeats Senator Bernie Sanders and closes the deal this time?”

Has anyone writing in the corporate media yet given Sanders similar advice? There is no pretense about which side the corporate media is on.

With former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg dropping out of the race on Wednesday and promising his financial support to Biden, the image of the dead guy in the 1989 film, “Weekend at Bernie’s,” being artificially made to look alive by his employees comes to mind. Biden’s once-lifeless operation has been resurrected, zombie-like, by a hastily built edifice of power, influence and money to resemble a successful presidential campaign.

Given his lack of a real progressive agenda, the only justification for Biden as the Democratic nominee is the near-unanimous corporate media insistence that he is best poised to beat Trump and Sanders is not. Except that it’s just not true. In a rare instance of The New York Times publishing a clear-eyed view of the election, Steve Phillips, author of “Brown Is the New White,” explained how Sanders had a path to victory. According to Phillips, “Almost all of the current polling data shows Mr. Sanders winning the national popular vote.” Even others like USA Today columnist Jason Sattler, who openly admitted Sanders was not his favorite candidate, pointed out that the Vermont senator, “has generally beaten Trump in head-to-head polls for five years now.” A recent study claiming to prove that Sanders was unelectable, gleefully cited by the pro-Biden crowd to buttress their choice, was thoroughly debunked by Jacobin Magazine’s Seth Ackerman.

But with Biden’s South Carolina win and the centrist candidates’ unexpected endorsements ahead of Super Tuesday, the barrage of anti-Sanders messaging finally paid off, fueling a perfect storm among undecided Super Tuesday voters. The Washington Post explained on Wednesday that “Biden’s victories in Virginia and North Carolina and his competitive showing in Texas were aided by voters who made up their minds within the last few days, according to preliminary exit polls … Biden won about 6 in 10 of the late deciders in Virginia and North Carolina.” In other words, voters who chose Biden were not loyal to his candidacy. Instead, their choice was a spur-of-the-moment decision, an impulse buy. In contrast, “Sanders did better in both states among voters who decided earlier than in the last few days.”

On the day before Super Tuesday, I was invited to join a panel on MSNBC’s “All in With Chris Hayes” alongside actor-director Rob Reiner, who has supported Biden’s candidacy for months. During our conversation, Reiner kept insisting that Biden could beat Trump and therefore was the best choice for nominee. As the program wrapped up, we continued our conversation off-camera, and I said to him that even Hillary Clinton in 2016 had been a far stronger candidate than Biden. Reiner readily agreed but explained, “Now that we’ve had four years of Trump, people will be more likely to choose Biden over him.” In other words, our standards for president are so low thanks to Trump that even a weak candidate like Biden meets it. If that is true, then why would Sanders not meet (or surpass) the same standard?

The answer to that question is that Democratic Party elites and corporate media would rather have a weak neo-liberal capitalist than a strong democratic socialist as president, even at the risk of four more years of Trump. After all, with Biden as the nominee, Wall Street wins no matter the outcome of the race. In a testament to the post-Super Tuesday relief of the moneyed class, stock prices shot up, especially in the health insurance industry.

While Biden may indeed be a “nice guy,” he is quite possibly the worst candidate to challenge Trump. His debate performances have ranged from lack luster to confused, to utterly unprepared. Remember when Kamala Harris took on Biden last June just as Warren recently took on Bloomberg?

Trump’s favorite label for Biden is, sadly, well deserved — Googling “Creepy Joe” brings up far too many photos and videos of the vice president putting himself disgustingly close to women, smelling their hair, putting his hands on their shoulders from behind and more. He is the butt of jokes on late night shows and the focus of right-wing media scorn. Republicans are lining up attack lines against Biden’s role in the Ukraine scandal, and Trump is eager to reflect the humiliation of his impeachment trial back on Biden. Add to that Biden’s 30 years of regressive and right-leaning policy decisions, and what remains is a ready-made punching bag for the sadistic and relentless Trump juggernaut.

Corporate media and Democratic Party propaganda convinced enough voters on Super Tuesday to choose Biden at the last minute. But if Biden does end up as the nominee it is likely that his weaknesses will become more apparent with each passing day and voters may experience “buyer’s remorse.” In just a few weeks and months as the primary races continue, it will be too late to return the damaged goods.

Donald Trump had the perfect opponent in the 2016 election. Running as a populist billionaire taking on the Washington elite, he couldn’t have asked for a better rival in Hillary Clinton, who carried heavy political baggage and who, for many, personified the so-called establishment. While Trump’s populist shtick was easy to pick apart, Clinton was the wrong person to promote the message she was trying to get across to voters.

By nominating a candidate whose place in the Democratic Party establishment was undeniable and who lacked credibility on issues like money in politics, the Democrats simply let Trump run as the anti-establishment candidate. Not only that, but the Clinton camp even tried courting establishment Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for their own party’s candidate.

Here was a man who had openly bragged about bribing politicians, yet Democrats couldn’t go after Trump on the issue because their own candidate was one of the politicians to whom he’d donated in the past. The Clinton camp raised (and spent) far more money than Trump, but whether this actually helped or hurt her is unclear, as it also gave credence to the perception that she was the candidate favored by big donors Meanwhile, Trump positioned himself as the self-financing candidate who couldn’t be bought.

As the Trump campaign’s onetime CEO, Steve Bannon, put it shortly after the election, “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump’s message. From her email server, to her lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, to her FBI problems, she represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough of.”

This time around, Trump should have zero credibility running as a “populist.” The president has presided over the most corrupt administration in modern history, plagued by investigations and numerous indictments that have led to convictions of some of his closest associates. Trump has nominated Supreme Court justices who defend money in politics, and his major legislative achievement has been to give billionaires and corporate elites major tax cuts.

Under Trump, corporate America has thrived while real-income growth has declined for most working- and middle-class people. Inequality has continued to reach historic levels, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg have seen their wealth surge. In 2020, Trump is no longer even pretending to self-finance his campaign. With his recent predatory budget proposal he has made it clear that he is getting ready to gut programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, during his second term.

It should be easy for Democrats to expose Trump as the corrupt charlatan that he is. In an age when a majority of voters rate political corruption as America’s biggest crisis and nearly 8 in 10 Americans agree that there should be “limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations” can spend on political campaigns, how hard can it be to defeat a hugely unpopular president who makes Richard Nixon look half decent? The surest way for Democrats to lose to Trump again would be to follow the same strategy as 2016 and nominate a candidate who embodies the establishment, carries a ton of political baggage and lacks credibility on issues like corruption.

By the looks of it, Democrats might just pull it off. After Super Tuesday, it appears that Trump will have another perfect foil for his message in 2020. Former Vice President Joe Biden has regained his place as the Democratic frontrunner after a successful showing on Tuesday, thanks in large part to party elites, and some of his former rivals, quickly consolidating around his campaign the day before. Though the race is far from over, Biden is now well-positioned to win the nomination. By selecting Biden, Democrats will effectively let Trump and his deeply corrupt administration off the hook yet again.

Biden is a lot like Clinton, but worse in almost every measurable way. On issue after issue, Biden has consistently been to the right of Clinton throughout his fifty-year political career. He has a record of advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare; he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill that led to an explosion in mass incarceration; he played a critical role in passing the 2005 bankruptcy bill that stripped bankruptcy protection from some of the most vulnerable people. Biden also supported and championed the Iraq War.

This list goes on and on. Beyond his extremely problematic record, which will make it hard for Democrats to go after Trump about, say, cutting Social Security (which Biden himself supported not too long ago), Biden has his own personal scandals that will make it very difficult for him to cast Trump as corrupt.

While his son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine may not qualify as corruption, it was doubtless unethical and sleazy for Biden’s son to take a high-paying consultant gig with a foreign firm while his father was vice president (and Biden’s refusal to acknowledge this conflict only makes it worse). The behavior of Biden’s family will haunt him in the general election. As Ryan Grim wrote in The Intercept last October, Biden’s son and brother have been “trading on their family name for decades, cashing in on the implication — and sometimes the explicit argument — that giving money to a member of Joe Biden’s family wins the favor of Joe Biden.” Predictably, a majority of voters believe it was inappropriate for Biden’s son to take a job with the Ukrainian firm, and Trump will exploit this and use it to defend his own family’s nepotism and corruption.

In the lead-up to the general election, Biden, who has recently struggled to string coherent sentences together, would provide the slick demagogue Donald Trump with all the ammunition he needs. We were given a little preview of what to expect in President Trump’s Super Tuesday commentary: “The Democrat establishment came together and crushed Bernie Sanders, AGAIN!” he gloated on Twitter, once again positioning himself as the anti-establishment populist.

On Monday, the Democratic establishment proved that it still has far more control over the party than the Republican establishment did over their own party in 2016. No one stands to benefit more from an establishment triumph than Donald Trump. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has the credibility to call out Trump on his corruption and neoliberal economic policies, is still in the race, but his chances are looking much slimmer than they were just a week ago.

Democrats have a choice: They can follow the same strategy that ended up costing them all three branches of government in recent years, or they can go another way. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

In its zeal to unseat President Donald Trump without sacrificing one iota of its waning power and influence, the Democratic National Committee is now for a “moderate” savior for the party’s nomination. It appears to matter little to DNC operatives whether this late entry is a Democrat, a Republican, or simply a political opportunist whose loyalties or agendas, whatever they are, must be accepted

Enter Michael Bloomberg. After five years of resistance to the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the DNC uncritically embraces in Bloomberg a billionaire who once praised President George W. Bush and deployed his vast resources to help keep the Senate under Republican control. This, despite the fact that in Sanders, the Democratic Party can claim an independent who delivers a progressive and innovative policy platform, a huge wave of multi-generational popular support and even caucuses with the Democrats.

In stark contrast, former New York City mayor Bloomberg calls himself an environmentalist while investing in fracking, championing it politically (as he did at this week’s Democratic presidential debate), and donating to a notorious green-washing environmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, in an ongoing but doomed effort to make fracking safe. As just these kinds of research attempts served as the basis for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 proposed “safe energy policy,” which relied on discredited technology that sought to trap methane, I covered this unsuccessful agenda to manipulate science for Truthdig in 2016.

Nonetheless, Bloomberg remains committed to it. He even spent nearly $6 million to reelect a Senate Republican who sponsored a bill to prohibit any future president from banning fracking.

“Michael Bloomberg is often sold to people as a climate hero. Headlines that tout him as a green visionary adorn the pages of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He skips across the globe as the UN’s special envoy for climate action,” Derek Seidman wrote in Eyes on the Ties. “Bloomberg’s framing of fracking as the practical, common-sense option is a big obstacle to more far-reaching measures needed to curb carbon emissions now.”

At this week’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, Bloomberg reiterated his support for fracking, dismissing the Sanders-backed Green New Deal. Bloomberg also opposes plans to transition to renewables within the time frame dictated by reports issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bloomberg Money Played Pivotal Role in Keeping the Senate Red

Bloomberg’s support for both fossil fuels and Republicans may be connected. Consider this useful research provided by Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy:

Over the last decade, Bloomberg helped Republicans take and maintain control of the U.S. Senate, which, in the Trump era and under Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) leadership, has confirmed scores of right-wing judges, blocked liberal legislation passed by the House, and shielded the president from any repercussions after seeking foreign election assistance, tampering with witnesses and defying congressional subpoenas.

For several decades up to and through 2018, Bloomberg, whose own party affiliation has changed repeatedly, “donated over $900,000 directly to Republican candidates’ campaigns, national GOP party committees and federal PACs of state Republican Party committees,” Kotch reported. Bloomberg added millions more through his two super PACs, one of which spent over $10 million “supporting Republican federal candidates from 2012-16.”

The Toomey Campaign

In what The Philadelphia Inquirer called a “pivotal” 2016 campaign that “many thought could decide control of the Senate,” Bloomberg “poured millions of dollars into the contest — to help Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey” gain reelection. Bloomberg’s $5.9 million donation, used to buy television ads in key Philadelphia suburbs, portrayed the pro-fracking Republican as a moderate centrist, helping him win by a narrow margin over Democrat Katie McGinty, an environmental policy expert.

A Bloomberg spokesperson now claims the billionaire’s support for Toomey was based on the latter’s stance on gun control, even though Toomey’s challenger McGinty “supported far stronger gun measures, including bans on assault-style weapons.”

Raising further questions as to Bloomberg’s actual agenda in pushing Toomey, McGinty campaign adviser Mike Mikus noted that with the Senate secured by Republicans, no gun bills “would see any light as long as [McConnell] controlled the chamber. The Senate was up for grabs, and [Bloomberg] clearly sided with Mitch McConnell.”

Does Bloomberg Support Pat Toomey’s Pro-Fracking Resolution?

Whatever his purported motive in helping Toomey, Bloomberg spent considerable funds to reelect a fracking apologist who represented the environmentally devastated swing state of Pennsylvania, the second most important natural gas state after Texas. Fracking may represent a boon to investor-donors like Bloomberg and their vested politicians, but the practice poses a clear health hazard to Pennsylvania communities as well as climate hazards to the global community. A recent review of scientific literature found close correlations between “health impacts including cancer, infant mortality, depression, pneumonia, asthma, skin-related hospitalizations and other general health symptoms” and “living near unconventional oil and gas development [in] Pennsylvania.”

In November 2019, Toomey introduced federal legislation to unilaterally prevent future presidents from introducing a moratorium on fracking. The Pike County Courier reported that the measure squarely aims “at several Democratic presidential candidates” by thwarting their potential moves with regard to introducing fracking regulations.

Bloomberg’s intervention — supporting a pro-fracking senator and keeping the Senate under Republican-control — unleashed other serious consequences. One related outcome of that Senate race is that in preserving GOP control, the Senate was able to see through Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. In Justice Kavanaugh, the nation’s top court gained an anti-choice ideologue who had faced credible charges of sexual predation.

The Kavanaugh Travesty

The problematic aspect of Bloomberg’s personal history vis-s-vis allegations of his own sexist remarks and actions was discussed at Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate. After being energetically challenged on the debate stage by Democratic rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Bloomberg explained that he had needed to sign non-disclosure agreements with several women in his professional milieu who he claimed were offended because “they did not like a joke I told.”

Aside from his highly suspect personal conduct, Bloomberg’s use of his financial resources also did women no favors. His hefty donations helped to preserve the Republican majority, giving Republicans judicial oversight over the 2018 Supreme Court nomination process — and of course, the attempted impeachment of Trump.

Both political conflicts would have played out differently under a judicial committee helmed by Democrats. In the Kavanaugh case, despite testimony that alleged he had assaulted a fellow student, Republican senators awarded the judge a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court. To add insult to injury, one of Bloomberg’s PACs also gave $486,000 to Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Collins, to whom Bloomberg also made direct personal donations, most recently cast a key vote to acquit Trump on all impeachment charges. In 2018, she was widely criticized for her role in the Kavanaugh nomination, in which she also held a determining vote. Over the course of the hearings, Collins repeatedly hinted to advocates that she might vote against Kavanaugh.

Then, “during a nearly 50-minute speech on the Senate floor,” as the Cut’s Lisa Ryan reported,” Collins betrayed the interests of the women and sexual-assault survivors she professed to support.” Ryan asked, “How can one claim to be pro-choice and then allow herself to be played by a decidedly anti-choice nominee, whose record shows exactly how he will vote on abortion?”

Collins concealed her allegiances by professing one thing and doing another. As both parties have to different extents lost the trust of voters because of that kind of behavior, the last thing we can afford at this juncture is to jettison rare candidates of integrity for Bloomberg, “a figure without connections or the same value system as the party he seeks to represent, with racial and sexist skeletons in his closet, and a penchant for subverting democracy and showing contempt toward the rule of law,” as David Dayen wrote in the Prospect.

The exploitation of people, earthly resources and money cannot be ignored or dismissed. Bloomberg now poses a new danger by using his largesse to act, in turns, as either a kingmaker or candidate, thus threatening the nomination process and the will of American voters. Sanders, currently the clear Democratic front-runner, is the sole candidate who has pledged to rely only on donations from citizens rather than from the billionaires who fund nearly all the other candidates.

Through the campaign this year, Sanders has helped Americans to grasp what has been apparent but long denied: Billionaires like Bloomberg have been controlling the country, decimating the middle class, putting health care out of reach and destroying the environment for profit. Democrats can’t afford to anoint a candidate who uses his money and influence to rob them of their futures.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded that the Democratic National Committee be held accountable after documents published by Yahoo News late Thursday detailed the DNC’s involvement with the mobile app at the center of the Iowa caucus disaster.

“If this reporting is correct, then there needs to be accountability at the DNC,” the New York Democrat tweeted. “Even if the DNC’s access to the tool was ‘solely for security testing’ as they claim, ProPublica found major hackable vulnerabilities almost immediately—which means they didn’t do their job.”

Yahoo obtained a copy of the contract between Shadow, Inc.—a secretive for-profit tech firm owned by the Democratic digital non-profit ACRONYM—and the Iowa Democratic Party, which was signed on Oct. 14, 2019.

“Consultant agrees to work with the DNC Services Corporation/Democratic National Committee (‘DNC’) on an on-going basis as Consultant [Shadow] develops the software,” the contract states. The app was designed for the stated goal of getting caucus results to the public more quickly.

Under the terms of the contract, Shadow agreed to “provide DNC continual access to review the Consultant’s system configurations, security and system logs, system designs, data flow designs, security controls (preventative and detective), and operational plans for how the Consultant will use and run the Software for informational dissemination, pre-registration, tabulation, and reporting throughout the caucus process.”

Read the copy of the contract published by Yahoo:

Yahoo also obtained an email showing that DNC CEO Seema Nanda and DNC deputy chief technology officer Kat Atwater were involved in drafting language in the contract that gave the national Democratic party access to the app.

“They were intimately involved in this process,” an anonymous source who worked on the Iowa caucus told Yahoo, referring to the DNC’s role.

In the wake of the Iowa caucus fiasco, which delayed the reporting of results for days and raised widespread doubts about the credibility of the process, DNC chairman Tom Perez has faced calls to step down. On Wednesday, Troy Price resigned as head of the Iowa Democratic Party.

The anonymous Iowa source told Yahoo that Perez’s behavior in the aftermath of the Iowa debacle has been “extremely frustrating” because he has shifted blame onto the Iowa Democratic Party—while neglecting to mention the DNC’s involvement with the app.

In a statement to Yahoo, DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa said the party “requested access to the tool solely for the purpose of doing security testing” and denied that it helped develop the app.

“The DNC drafted broad language to make sure whatever vendor [the Iowa Democratic Party] ultimately hired was required to work with the DNC’s cyber-security consultant,” said Hinojosa. “We did not build the application, nor did we provide ‘oversight’ of its development—that’s the vendor’s responsibility. We only provided security assistance.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who is backing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic presidential primary, tweeted Thursday night that “candidate preferences aside, the integrity of our primaries [is] incredibly serious.”

“We cannot afford to be pointing fingers—we need to pinpoint solutions,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “If the DNC was responsible for security and there were security failures, we need to address that.”

There were indeed problems with the app, but in the week since the Iowa debacle, multiple sources reveal that the app — and what Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price called a coding issue — is only one piece of the chaotic puzzle.

According to The New York Times, the caucus “crumbled under the weight of technology flops, lapses in planning, failed oversight by party officials, poor training, and a breakdown in communication between paid party leaders and volunteers out in the field, who had devoted themselves for months to the nation’s first nominating contest.”

On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the phone number for reporting the results of the Iowa caucuses was posted on the internet message board 4chan, with instructions to “clog the lines.” After initially declining to comment, the Iowa Demcratic Party confirmed to Bloomberg that it had “experienced an unusually high volume of inbound phone calls to its caucus hotline,” many of them from “supporters of President Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party.”

Even without the 4chan calls, communication broke down frequently. According to the Times, “most precinct caucuses ran smoothly across the state. But when some precinct leaders tried to report the results, the app sometimes froze. Calls to the state party hotline sometimes languished on hold for five hours.”

There also were inconsistencies in reporting across the voting precincts:

In the Times review of the data, at least 10 percent of precincts appeared to have improperly allocated their delegates, based on reported vote totals. In some cases, precincts awarded more delegates than they had to give; in others, they awarded fewer. More than two dozen precincts appeared to give delegates to candidates who did not qualify as viable under the caucus rules.

Staffers were in an information blackout. Some, the Times reports, were
“[waiting] in a room with no windows, no food, no water and no information. They took turns trying to call state party officials in search of information.”

Price failed to assuage concerns, saying on a Monday night conference call that the delay was due to having to collect and report three different sets of data. Jeff Weaver, a Bernie Sanders adviser, was unconvinced. “You always had to calculate these numbers; all we’re asking is that you report them for the first time.”

The Iowa debacle has not been conducive to Democratic Party unity, either between campaigns or between state parties and the national party. On Sunday, The Washington Post described the situation as on “the brink of open war.” The Iowa situation brought up difficult memories of the 2016 campaign for Bernie Sanders supporters, who believe the Democratic National Committee may be prejudiced against them. “They can shout unity all they want,” Nina Turner, a national co-chair of the Sanders campaign told the Post, “but the actions show otherwise.”

Relations also are strained between Price and DNC Chair Tom Perez, who, according to the Post, are “privately deflecting blame onto each other.”

Read the full Times story here.

Then, leaving a space between, we moved to the right side to enumerate all the “Determined Responses” aggrieved citizens could take to satisfy their demands. Again, the space was insufficient to list all the options which ranged from letter-writing, boycotts and voting to civil disobedience, mass movements and revolution. I then posed the question “What’s preventing the determining conditions from eventuating in a successful determined response? After a lengthy and sometimes contentious debate that went on for two periods, we (mostly) agreed to fill in the remaining empty space with the words “Class Consciousness.” To summarize and paraphrase political theorist On Class Consciousness and the 2020 Presidential Election: class consciousness is when the objective, general and rational interests of a class becomes its recognized goals.

Further, and with a special bearing on our current situation in the United States, class consciousness growing recognition that the capitalist framework will never allow the collectivity to realize its needs, that the existing economic and political system must be transformed at its roots. Finally, and equally germane today, is the realization that the people themselves, not a Knight in Shining Armor, can bring about this change through their own actions. Put another way, ordinary people learn that a history of carefully cultivated class unconsciousness is what permits the predatory class and its enablers to rule. (Note: Throughout the courses, my students benefited from studying Ollman’s work on the stages and stumbling blocks to achieving class consciousness).

What about today? We know there are no magic elixirs for arriving at class consciousness — an extraordinary mass achievement by any measure — but certain experiences can enhance understanding and on rare occasions provide a quantum leap. I might be letting my heart overrule my intellect but I sense that a confluence of favorable factors is emerging that offers a pivotal point in terms of increasing class consciousness.

For example, some folks have wondered aloud if the brazen perfidy in Iowa and those likely to follow (like Bloomberg buying his way into the debate) will bring Sanders supporters into the streets but In all likelihood they’ll remain seated until the convention in Milwaukee. At that point, if Sanders is denied the nomination, much depends on whether he abides by his signed DNC pledge to support any nominee and resumes his sheepdog role from 2016 or he denounces and bolts the DP to lead a new movement. That would be revolutionary and many of us would get behind it. How many would do so is impossible to predict and really depends on as yet unknown events.

While the radical option can’t be ruled out, there’s nothing in Sanders’ background to suggest that he’d take this step. He’s been has been totally consistent in his convictions as a loyal Democrat in all but his self-designated title as an Independent. As such, any “Et tu Bernie” taunting would be unfair and inaccurate. Further, I would never deny that Sanders has played in incalculably valuable role in contributions in broadening the national political dialogue and energizing people, including previous non voters. For younger Americans with and greatly diminished futures, Sanders has given traction to socialism (albeit an abstraction) to the point where fully half now embrace it over capitalism.

So what might happen? It might be fruitful to engage in some blue-sky thinking and hypothesize that the DNC’s machinations are beaten back, Sanders wins the nomination and the general election. The day following his acceptance speech, the powerful predator class/deep state forces aligned against him will insure that his “political revolution” is still born. In the adroit words of left political scientist William Grover, he’ll be simultaneously confronted by a “capitol strike” and a “capital strike.” After issuing a few of his promised executive orders, Sanders will face intransigent political reality. At that critical juncture his opponents might find reason to grant some severely circumscribed, modest New Deal-type reforms. This would be contingent upon his agreeing not to alter the nation’s imperialist foreign policy. Again, there’s little in Sanders’ history to indicate he would try to close the 1,000 U.S. military bases and begin bringing home the 450,000 troops enforcing the empire.

Further, Sanders has said “I am not only going to be commander-in-chief, I am going to be organizer-in-chief.” This sounds promising but as political analyst James Dennis Hoff notes, in practice this “…will send those potential activists right into the Democratic Party where social movement go to die.” While capitulating, Sanders will (sincerely) claim fealty to his principles, utter some democratic socialist rhetoric, and encourage folks to vote in more Democrats in the 2022 bye-election. Here, we can sketch two possible scenarios with some possible overlap.

The first, my ultimate political fantasy, is that a few weeks after the inauguration, President Sanders undergoes a Saul-to-Paul conversion and schedules two hours on prime time television. He combines his new role as Political-Educator-in-Chief with a consummate, unparalleled teachable moment to carefully explain what he’s up against and why the people’s democratic will is not being carried out and won’t be under our existing political structures. After the speech he commits his vast organizational apparatus to the causes, including fund-raising lists, social media expertise and specialized discussion and e-mail lists.

Assuming he’s not yanked off the air (remember, it’s a fantasy) President Sanders goes on to say that it’s not only about some “billionaires” but about the capitalism system itself. The fact that this admission resembles a heartfelt mea culpa only serves to heighten the urgent need for the people themselves to assume responsibility for their future. Just prior to his speech, he offers his vast organizational apparatus to creating a new movement and political party. This includes fund-raising lists, state by state contacts, social media expertise and links to thousands of progressive discussion groups. What happens next is unknowable but the continuum ranges from the most dire to the potentially transformative.

The second and slightly less fanciful scenario occurs is that if Sanders capitulates, even his most loyal followers realize the flock is now being (unintentionally) herded toward the metaphorical abattoir. The “us” in “not me, us” takes on a radical, self-emancipatory meaning and this, in turn, ignites the aforementioned street action — sustained, obstructive, non-violent civil disobedience.In this case, the role assumed by his national organization remains unclear. Most importantly, “the people united,” not the White House occupant or the Democratic Party, are credited with forcing adoption of an interim program that will mark the first stage of actual political and economic democracy, in a word, socialism.

Finally, imagine that if instead of squandering so much time and energy over the years on reforming the Democratic Party, those efforts had been expended on political education and organizing a serious mass movement. The developing situation in 2020 may provide a chance to make amends with whatever means are available and all the creativity we can muster. The onus is on us if we don’t take advantage of this opportunity.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Saturday, February 8th, 2020 at 8:29pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/class/" rel="category tag">Classism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/democrats/" rel="category tag">Democrats</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/elections/" rel="category tag">Elections</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/opinion/" rel="category tag">Opinion</a>.


The undemocratic and incompetently run Iowa caucuses remind me of a vampire — hard, if not impossible, to kill. While the process is unrepresentative and undemocratic, national political reporters and Iowa businesspeople will never let it die.

The first contest in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination ended in confusion. The messy result cast a shadow of mistrust over the nominating contests that will follow.

Chance didn’t bring us to this point. Pack journalism combined with the booster attitudes and greed of Iowa entrepreneurs is responsible. Because of them, the questions raised by the Iowa caucus failures extend far beyond the boundaries of that small Midwestern state.

Among the questions: Can we trust the vote counters in the many state contests ahead? Will fake posts on the internet, combined with the Iowa failure, add to the suspicion and mistrust now endemic to American politics? And, will each contest offer President Donald Trump a chance to portray as a fake every result not to his liking?

These developments could not have occurred to anyone when I first covered the Iowa caucuses in 1976. The caucuses had captured media attention four years before when Sen. George McGovern’s second-place finish there helped propel him to the Democratic presidential nomination. Four years later, the little-known Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter, having observed McGovern’s accomplishment, concentrated on winning the Iowa caucuses, succeeded, and won the nomination and the presidency.

That campaign cemented the unhealthy relationship between the national political reporting corps, who fell in love with Iowa, and the Iowa businesspeople, enamored with the reporters’ expense accounts and the publicity they gave the state.

In 1976, while working for the Los Angeles Times, I found a colorful change of scene in Iowa, and the flat geography made for easy travel — except when it snowed. Like other national reporters, I ate and drank well on the company’s tab and bunked at the best hotels. Iowans were friendly to us journalists. We were putting their state on the map and money in their pockets. It was, I observed, one of the few places in the country where people actually seemed to like to talk to reporters.

By 2008, I had retired from the Times and was covering the caucuses for Truthdig. No longer part of the mainstream journalism pack, I viewed the caucuses as an outsider, which permitted me to see the events for what they were.

“The caucuses are a travesty of the American political system,” I wrote in a 2007 column several days before the election. “They are … undemocratic, unfair, unrepresentative and overly complicated.” A few days later, with the caucuses fast approaching, I urged the media “to try to shed light on the process instead of helping Iowa keep this promotional device alive. Unmask the wizard, journalists, and set America free from the shackles of the Iowa caucuses.”

Of course, no one listened. The lure of the state’s rural geography, small towns, and eager-to-please Iowans was too irresistible to the press corps. So was the possibility of good assignments and promotions that often followed completion of an Iowa assignment the bosses liked.

So the media followed its usual pattern, trailing candidates from school auditoriums to coffee shops, interviewing prospective voters (whose answers seemed increasingly canned) and following the polls as if they were the Daily Racing Form.

Apparently, only a few of the most tech-minded paid attention to the most boring — and most important part — of an election, how the votes were counted.

Even more complications were added this year to the incomprehensible process I chronicled in 2008. A barely tested app was handed out to caucus chairs, purportedly to speed reporting of each caucus result. It proved difficult to download for the incompletely trained volunteers who run the caucuses. The app’s reporting capabilities were problematical. Days passed with no final results.

This has thrown the press into unknown territory. The scenario of a winner being crowned in Iowa, then heading into New Hampshire and other contests, has been shattered. Utter media confusion reigned Monday night through Wednesday.

More important than the inconvenience Iowa caused the press, however, is what the state means to public perception of the many U.S. primary elections, not to mention the big one in November, when the nation selects a president.

I live and vote in the most populous county in the nation, Los Angeles, which has more than 10 million residents. The county has long been afflicted with slow vote counts due to its size and to snafus by the vote tallying equipment installed by one of the few companies that do such work.

For this election, the county has created its own voting system, with voters given two options: voting by mail or going to a polling place and marking computer screens or hand-marking paper ballots. And, instead of using familiar local polling places, people who vote in person must travel to centralized voting centers.

The Los Angeles registrar-recorder, Dean Logan, and his staff have been working hard to make the new system work. But Libby Denkmann, who has been tracking the system, reported on LAist that “the county must meet a stack of requirements before primary election voters get their hands on the machines Feb. 22.”

I have watched enough elections and used computers long enough to know that, more likely than not, something will go wrong. The same is true for the other primary elections coming up around the country.

So let’s drive a stake into the heart of the Iowa caucuses. Let them die.

But reporters and their editors should not forget the real lesson of Iowa. The story of the 2020 election may end up being found in the back offices of voting officials and among the techies who create their voting systems. Reporting on them is tedious and complex. But it is the kind of journalism that is more important and necessary than chasing candidates around Iowa.

Democracy is at stake. More elections such as the one in Iowa will further erode the faith many Americans have in democratic institutions. If nobody believes election results, democracy, which is under assault every day, will whither and die.

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com.

Academic historians reject anything smacking of inevitably. Instead they emphasize the contingency of events as manifested through the inherent agency of human beings and the countless decisions they make. On the merits, such scholars are basically correct. That said, there was something – if not inevitable – highly probable, almost (forgive me) deterministic about the two cataclysmic world wars of the 20th century. Both, in retrospect, were driven, in large part, by collective – particularly Western – nations’ adherence to a series of geopolitical philosophies.

The first war – which killed perhaps nine million soldiers in the sodden trench lines (among other long forgotten places) of Europe – began, in part, due to the continental, and especially maritime, competition between Imperial Great Britain, and a new, rising, and highly populous, land power, Imperial Germany. Both had pretensions to global leadership; Britain’s old and long-standing, Germany’s recent and aspirational – tinged with a sense of long-denied deservedness. Political and military leaders on both sides – along with other European (and the Japanese) nations – then pledged philosophical fealty to the theories of an American Navy man, Alfred Thayer Mahan. To simplify, Mahan’s core postulation – published from a series of lectures as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History – was that geopolitical power in the next (20th) century would be inherently maritime. The countries that maintained large, modern navies, held strategic coaling stations, and expanded their coastal, formal empires, would dominate trade, develop the strongest economies, and, hence, were apt to global paramountcy. Conversely, traditional land power – mass armies prepared to march across vast land masses – would become increasingly irrelevant.

Mahan’s inherently flawed, or at least exaggerated, conclusions – and his own clear institutional (U.S. Navy) bias – aside, key players in two of the major powers of Europe seemed to buy the philosophy hook-line-and-sinker. So, when Wilhelmine Germany took the strategic decision to rapidly expand its own colonial fiefdoms (before the last patches of brown-people-inhabited land were swallowed up) and, thereby necessarily embarked on a crash naval buildup to challenge the British Empire’s maritime supremacy, the stage was set for a massive war. And, with most major European rivals – hopelessly hypnotized by nationalism – locked in a wildly byzantine, bipolar alliance system, all that was needed to turn the conflict global was a spark: enter the assassin Gavrilo Princip, a pistol, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and it was game on.

The Second World War – which caused between 50-60 million deaths – was, of course, an outgrowth of the first. It’s causes were multifaceted and complicated. Nonetheless, particularly in its European theater, it, too, was driven by a geopolitical theorist and his hypotheses. This time the culprit was a Briton, Halford John Mackinder. In contrast with Mahan, Mackinder postulated a land-based, continental power theory. As such, he argued that the “pivot” of global preeminence lay in the control of Eurasia – the “World Island” – specifically Central Asia and Eastern Europe. These resource rich lands held veritable buried treasure for the hegemon, and, since they lay on historical trade routes, were strategically positioned.

Should an emergent, ambitious, and increasingly populated, power – say, Nazi Germany – need additional territory (what Hitler called “Lebensraum“) for its race, and resources (especially oil) for its budding war machine, then it needed to seize the strategic “heartland” of the World Island. In practice, that mean the Nazis theoretically should, and did, shift their gaze (and planned invasion) from their outmoded Mahanian rival across the English Channel, eastward to the Ukraine, Caucasus (with its ample oil reserves), and Central Asia. Seeing as all three regions were then – and to lesser extent, still – dominated by Russia, the then Soviet Union, the unprecedentedly bloody existential war on Europe’s Eastern Front appears ever more certain and explainable.

Germany lost both those wars: the first badly, the second, disastrously. Then, in a sense, the proceeding 45-year Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union – the only two big winners in the Second World War – may be seen as an extension or sequel to Mackinder-driven rivalry. The problem is that after the end of – at least the first – Cold War, Western, especially American, strategists severely miscalculated. In their misguided triumphalism, US geopolitical theorists both provoked a weak (but not forever so) Russia by expanding the NATO alliance far eastward, but posited premature (and naive) theories that assumed global finance, free (American-skewed) trade, and digital dominance were all that mattered in a “Post” Cold War world.

No one better defined this magical thinking more than the still – after having been wrong about just about every US foreign policy decision of the last two decades – prominent New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman. In article after article, and books with such catchy titles as The World is Flat, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argued, essentially, that old realist geopolitics were dead, and all that really mattered for US hegemony was the proliferation of McDonald’s franchises worldwide.

Friedman was wrong; he always is (Exhibit A: the 2003 Iraq War). Today, with a surprisingly – at least with his prominent base – popular president, Donald J. Trump, impeached in the House and just acquitted by the Senate for alleged crimes misleadingly summed up as “Ukraine-gate,” a look at the real issues at hand in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, demonstrate that, for better or (probably) worse, the ghost of Mackinder still haunts the scene. For today, I’d argue, the proxy battle over Ukraine between the U.S. and its allied-coup-empowered government – which includes some neo-nazi political and military elements – and Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east, reflects a return to the battle for Eurasian resource and geographic predominance.

Neither Russia nor the United States is wholly innocent in fueling and escalating the ongoing Ukrainian Civil War. The difference is, that in post-Russiagate farce, chronically (especially among mainstream Democrat) alleged Russia-threat-obsessed America, reports of Moscow’s ostensible guilt literally saturate the media space. The reporting from Washington? Not so much. The truth is that a generation of prominent “liberal” American, born-again Russia-hawks – Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the whole DNC apparatus, and the MSNBC corporate media crowd – wielded State Department, NGO, and economic pressure to help catalyze a pro-Western coup in Ukraine during and after 2014. Their opportunism seemed, to them, simple, and relatively cost-free, at the time, but has turned implacably messy in the ensuing years.

In the process, the Democrats haven’t done themselves any political favors, further sullying what’s left of their reputation by – in some cases – colluding with Ukrainians to undermine key Trump officials; and consorting with nefarious far-right nationalist local bigots (who may have conspired to kill protesters in the Maidan “massacre,” as a means to instigate further Western support for the coup). What’s more, while much of the conspiratorial Trump-team spin on direct, or illegal, Biden family criminality has proven false, neither Joe nor son Hunter, are exactly “clean.” The Democratic establishment, Biden specifically, may, according to an excellent recent Guardian editorial, have a serious “corruption problem” – no least of which involves explaining exactly why a then sitting vice president’s son, who had no serious diplomatic or energy sector experience, was paid $50,000 a month to serve on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

Fear not, the “Never-Trump” Republicans, and establishment Democrats seemingly intent on drumming up a new – presumably politically profitable – Cold War have already explanation. They’ve dug up the long ago discredited, but still publicly palatable, justification that the US must be prepared to fight Russia “over there,” before it has no choice but to battle them “over here” (though its long been unclear where “here” is, or how, exactly, that fantasy comes to pass). First, there’s the distance factor: though several thousands of miles away from the East Coast of North America, Ukraine is in Russia’s near-abroad. After all, it was long – across many different generational political/imperial structures – part of the Soviet Union or other Russian empires. A large subsection of the populace, especially in the East, speaks, and considers itself, in part, culturally, Russian.

Furthermore, the Russian threat, in 2020, is highly exaggerated. Putin is not Stalin. The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union; and, hell, even the Soviet (non-nuclear) military threat and geopolitical ambitions were embellished throughout Cold War “Classic.” A simple comparative “tale-of-the-tape” illustrates as much. Economically and demographically, Russia is demonstrably an empirically declining power – its economy, in fact, about the size of Spain’s.

Nor is the defense of an imposed, pro-Western, Ukrainian proxy state a vital American national security interest worth bleeding, or risking nuclear war, over. As MIT’s Barry Posen has argued, “Vital interests affect the safety, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and power position of the United States,” and, “If, in the worst case, all Ukraine were to ‘fall’ to Russia, it would have little impact on the security of the United States.” Furthermore, as retired US Army colonel, and president of the restraint-based Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich, has advised, the best policy, if discomfiting, is to “tacitly acknowledge[e] the existence of a Russian sphere of influence.” After all, Washington would expect, actually demand, the same acquiescence of Moscow in Mexico, Canada, or, for that matter, the entire Americas.

Unfortunately, no such restrained prudence is likely, so long as the bipartisan American national security state continues to subscribe to some vague version of the Mackinder theory. Quietly, except among wonky regional experts and investigative reporters on the scene, the US has, before, but especially since the “opportunity” of the 9/11 attacks, entered full-tilt into a competition with Russia and China for physical, economic, and resource dominance from Central Asia to the borderlands of Eastern Europe. That’s why, as a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in 2016-17, all us officers focused almost exclusively on planning fictitious, but highly realistic, combat missions in the Caucasus region. It also partly explains why the US military, after 18+ years, remains ensconced in potentially $3 trillion resource-rich Afghanistan, which, not coincidentally, is America’s one serious physical foothold in land-locked Central Asia.

Anecdotally, but instructively, I remember well my four brief stops at the once ubiquitous US Air Force way-station into Afghanistan – Manas Airbase – in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Off-base “liberty” – even for permanent party airmen – was rare, in part, because the Russian military had a mirror base just across the city. What’s more, the previous, earlier stopover spot for Afghanistan – Uzbekistan – kicked out the US military in 2005, in part, due to Russian political and economic pressure to do so.

Central Asia and East Europe are also contested spaces regarding the control of competing – Western vs. Russian vs. Chinese – oil and natural gas pipeline routes and trade corridors. Remember, that China’s massive “One Belt – One Road” infrastructure investment program is mostly self-serving, if sometimes mutually beneficial. The plan means to link Chinese manufacturing to the vast consumerist European market mainly through transportation, pipeline, diplomatic, and military connections running through where? You guessed it: Central Asia, the Caucasus, and on through Eastern Europe.

Like it or not, America isn’t poised to win this battle, and its feeble efforts to do so in these remarkably distant locales smacks of global hegemonic ambitions and foolhardy, mostly risk, nearly no reward, behavior. Russia has a solid army in close proximity, a hefty nuclear arsenal, as well as physical and historical connections to the Eurasian Heartland; China has an even better, more balanced, military, enough nukes, and boasts a far more powerful, spendthrift-capable, economy. As for the US, though still militarily and (for now) economically powerful, it lacks proximity, faces difficult logistical / expeditionary challenges, and has lost much legitimacy and squandered oodles of good will with the regional countries being vied for. Odds are, that while war may not be inevitable, Washington’s weak hand and probable failure, nearly is.

Let us table, for the purposes of this article, questions regarding any environmental effects of the great powers’ quest for, extraction, and use of many of these regional resources. My central points are two-fold: first, that Ukraine – which represents an early stage in Washington’s rededication to chauvinist, Mackinder geostrategy – as a proxy state for war with Russia is not an advisable or vital interest; second, that Uncle Sam’s larger quest to compete with the big two (Eur)Asian powers is likely to fail and symptomatic of imperial confusion and desperation. As the U.S. enters an increasingly bipolar phase of world affairs, powerful national security leaders fear its diminishing power. Washington’s is, like it or not, an empire in decline; and, as we know from history, such entities behave badly on the downslope of hegemony. Call me cynical, but I’m apt to believe that the United States, as perhaps the most powerful imperial body of all time, is apt, and set, to act poorest of all.

The proxy fight in Ukraine, battle for Central Asia in general – to say nothing of related American aggression and provocations in Iran and the Persian Gulf – could be the World War III catalyst that the Evangelical militarist nuts, Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, unwilling to wait on Jesus Christ’s eschatological timeline, have long waited for. These characters seemingly possess the heretical temerity to believe man – white American men, to be exact – can and should incite or stimulate Armageddon and the Rapture.

If they’re proved “right” or have their way – and the Mikes just might – then nuclear cataclysm will have defied the Vegas odds and beat the house on the expected human extinction timeline. Only contra to the bloody prophecy set forth in the New Testament book of Revelations, it won’t be Jesus wielding his vengeful sword on the back of a white horse, but – tragic and absurdly – the perfect Antichrist stooge, pressing the red button, who does the apocalyptic deed…

After watching Iowa devolve into chaos like a car crash in slow motion, I regret to inform you that California will be stolen from Bernie Sanders.

It’s happening now, and anyone with a vague understanding of what took place in 2016 should know how the grand theft will go down. But the good news is there’s still a chance to have a legitimate vote in the land of sunshine and broken dreams, which is why the Democratic National Committee probably doesn’t want you to read this column. So if DNC Chair Tom Perez comes around and dumps hot tea in your lap in the next few minutes, you’ll know why. (He has a lot of free time.)

California is one of the biggest prizes, with 495 delegates up for grabs. And it’s even more important this year because its primaries have been moved up to Super Tuesday, March 3. Right now, Bernie Sanders, aka  “Old Man Rational,” has jumped to the top of the California polls. So if you were the ruling elite of California and you wanted to rig your primary against people like Bernie Sanders, what would you do (Short of breaking the legs of anyone who gives change to a homeless man)?

Well, I guess one thing would be to make it really hard for a person to vote if he isn’t a full-on bread-and-butter Joe Biden-loving Democrat who owns a T-shirt featuring Barack Obama riding on a dinosaur. Candidates like Bernie attract a lot of voters who are outside the two corrupt Wall Street parties, i.e. independents. And independents are no small group. In fact

So if you’re an independent in California, when you registered to vote, some of you probably checked the box that said “American Independent Party.” There’s only one problem: The American Independent Party is a borderline neo-Nazi group. It’s the name of a party that opposes gay marriage, hates immigrants and apparently hates women, because the last line of its manifesto (of course it has a manifesto) actually states, “In consequence whereof, we call upon all men who value their God-given liberty to join us in pursuit of these political convictions!” (Emphasis added … but you could feel it.)

Can I also add that I strongly believe one can’t just follow racist, sexist crap with the antiquated phrase “in consequence whereof” and think that makes it OK? Rarely do you hear a story like, “The other day someone said to me, ‘In consequence whereof, I consider you a bucket of dicks.” And I responded, ‘Why thank you, my good man. Henceforth and forsooth, go screw yourself.’”

So, do you think a lot of independents in California accidentally sign up for the bigotry party? Yes they do. “A Los Angeles Times investigation has found that a majority of [the American Independent Party’s] members have registered with the party in error. Nearly three out of four people did not realize they had joined the party. …”

Therefore, Californians should be forewarned that if they want to vote for someone outside the centrists — say, Bernie Sanders — they need to change their party affiliation to either Democrat or No Party Preference. But it gets even worse.

In order to stop the “No Party Preference” people from voting, the state (read: the corporate Democratic machine) does not give them a ballot with the presidential choices on it … which is RIDICULOUS! Do they honestly think millions of people skipped work to stand in line at a polling place playing Pokemon on their phones for three hours in order to vote for the City Council’s assistant treasurer?! No! They showed up to tell Joe Biden to check into a retirement home. And there is indeed a way they can vote in the presidential primary, but it’s complicated.

To sum up — millions of California independents are accidentally signed up for a racist, homophobic party. Millions more are handed a ballot without presidential candidates. In consequence whereof — millions of people will not get to cast a vote in the primary. But, as investigative journalist Greg Palast has revealed, it gets even worse! He wrote, “… if an NPP voter asks the poll worker, ‘How do I get to vote in the Democratic party primary?’ the poll workers are instructed to say that, ‘NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots.’”

The poll workers are not lying … kinda. NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots, but they can get Democratic crossover ballots, which do include the presidential race. So as Palast explains, “…if you don’t say the magic words, ‘I want a Democratic crossover ballot,’ you are automatically given a ballot without the presidential race.”

You have to say the goddamn golden phrase to get to vote?! Poll workers are nearly instructed to lie to Independents unless the voter has the passcode. It is bananas that it’s this hard to obtain the correct ballot in California! (I’ve had an easier time procuring meth in a Mormon household.)

Because of these intentional hurdles designed to stop Independents from voting, millions of Californians will be handed something called a “provisional ballot.”

Let’s see, how do I explain a provisional ballot? You know when a little toddler has a ball and they go to throw it, and they cock their arm back and then the ball rolls out of their hand behind them, and they end up throwing nothing but air? But they think they threw the ball, so you can see them watching for where the ball is going to land? That’s a provisional ballot. It’s a lot of buildup, but you didn’t do shit. Because no one will ever count it.

In truth, a certain percentage of provisional ballots are indeed counted, but by the time they are, it’s too late. The results have been reported, and the provisional ballots are really just an afterthought. For this reason, Palast calls them “placebo ballots” — they’re designed to make you think you voted. So don’t accept a provisional ballot. Demand your right to vote in the presidential primary. Demand a crossover ballot.

Election integrity activists in California also recommend people vote early, which can be done right now, in person, at your county Department of Elections. That way you’ll have plenty of time to deal with what they call in the election integrity biz — fuckery.

Ironically, our government fights to make sure as few people as possible vote in our elections. Since the mainstream media has been captured by corporate America, only alternative media now reveals how the wealthy and the powerful game the systems.

So tell your sun-bleached Cali friends to demand a real ballot with the presidential candidates on it. I’m not going tell you or them who to vote for, but in consequence whereof the American Independent (Homophobe) Party is fighting for your rights, such as the right to speak like it’s the mid-1800s. (As long as you’re a white male landowner of military age. Immigrants and women need not apply.)

If you think this column is important, please share it. Lee Camp’s new book, “Bullet Points & Punch Lines,” is available at LeeCampBook.com.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show, “Redacted Tonight.”

After watching Iowa devolve into chaos like a car crash in slow motion, I regret to inform you that California will be stolen from Bernie Sanders.

It’s happening now, and anyone with a vague understanding of what took place in 2016 should know how the grand theft will go down. But the good news is there’s still a chance to have a legitimate vote in the land of sunshine and broken dreams, which is why the Democratic National Committee probably doesn’t want you to read this column. So if DNC Chair Tom Perez comes around and dumps hot tea in your lap in the next few minutes, you’ll know why. (He has a lot of free time.)

California is one of the biggest prizes, with 495 delegates up for grabs. And it’s even more important this year because its primaries have been moved up to Super Tuesday, March 3. Right now, Bernie Sanders, aka  “Old Man Rational,” has jumped to the top of the California polls. So if you were the ruling elite of California and you wanted to rig your primary against people like Bernie Sanders, what would you do (Short of breaking the legs of anyone who gives change to a homeless man)?

Well, I guess one thing would be to make it really hard for a person to vote if he isn’t a full-on bread-and-butter Joe Biden-loving Democrat who owns a T-shirt featuring Barack Obama riding on a dinosaur. Candidates like Bernie attract a lot of voters who are outside the two corrupt Wall Street parties, i.e. independents. And independents are no small group. In fact

So if you’re an independent in California, when you registered to vote, some of you probably checked the box that said “American Independent Party.” There’s only one problem: The American Independent Party is a borderline neo-Nazi group. It’s the name of a party that opposes gay marriage, hates immigrants and apparently hates women, because the last line of its manifesto (of course it has a manifesto) actually states, “In consequence whereof, we call upon all men who value their God-given liberty to join us in pursuit of these political convictions!” (Emphasis added … but you could feel it.)

Can I also add that I strongly believe one can’t just follow racist, sexist crap with the antiquated phrase “in consequence whereof” and think that makes it OK? Rarely do you hear a story like, “The other day someone said to me, ‘In consequence whereof, I consider you a bucket of dicks.” And I responded, ‘Why thank you, my good man. Henceforth and forsooth, go screw yourself.’”

So, do you think a lot of independents in California accidentally sign up for the bigotry party? Yes they do. “A Los Angeles Times investigation has found that a majority of [the American Independent Party’s] members have registered with the party in error. Nearly three out of four people did not realize they had joined the party. …”

Therefore, Californians should be forewarned that if they want to vote for someone outside the centrists — say, Bernie Sanders — they need to change their party affiliation to either Democrat or No Party Preference. But it gets even worse.

In order to stop the “No Party Preference” people from voting, the state (read: the corporate Democratic machine) does not give them a ballot with the presidential choices on it … which is RIDICULOUS! Do they honestly think millions of people skipped work to stand in line at a polling place playing Pokemon on their phones for three hours in order to vote for the City Council’s assistant treasurer?! No! They showed up to tell Joe Biden to check into a retirement home. And there is indeed a way they can vote in the presidential primary, but it’s complicated.

To sum up — millions of California independents are accidentally signed up for a racist, homophobic party. Millions more are handed a ballot without presidential candidates. In consequence whereof — millions of people will not get to cast a vote in the primary. But, as investigative journalist Greg Palast has revealed, it gets even worse! He wrote, “… if an NPP voter asks the poll worker, ‘How do I get to vote in the Democratic party primary?’ the poll workers are instructed to say that, ‘NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots.’”

The poll workers are not lying … kinda. NPP voters can’t get Democratic ballots, but they can get Democratic crossover ballots, which do include the presidential race. So as Palast explains, “…if you don’t say the magic words, ‘I want a Democratic crossover ballot,’ you are automatically given a ballot without the presidential race.”

You have to say the goddamn golden phrase to get to vote?! Poll workers are nearly instructed to lie to Independents unless the voter has the passcode. It is bananas that it’s this hard to obtain the correct ballot in California! (I’ve had an easier time procuring meth in a Mormon household.)

Because of these intentional hurdles designed to stop Independents from voting, millions of Californians will be handed something called a “provisional ballot.”

Let’s see, how do I explain a provisional ballot? You know when a little toddler has a ball and they go to throw it, and they cock their arm back and then the ball rolls out of their hand behind them, and they end up throwing nothing but air? But they think they threw the ball, so you can see them watching for where the ball is going to land? That’s a provisional ballot. It’s a lot of buildup, but you didn’t do shit. Because no one will ever count it.

In truth, a certain percentage of provisional ballots are indeed counted, but by the time they are, it’s too late. The results have been reported, and the provisional ballots are really just an afterthought. For this reason, Palast calls them “placebo ballots” — they’re designed to make you think you voted. So don’t accept a provisional ballot. Demand your right to vote in the presidential primary. Demand a crossover ballot.

Election integrity activists in California also recommend people vote early, which can be done right now, in person, at your county Department of Elections. That way you’ll have plenty of time to deal with what they call in the election integrity biz — fuckery.

Ironically, our government fights to make sure as few people as possible vote in our elections. Since the mainstream media has been captured by corporate America, only alternative media now reveals how the wealthy and the powerful game the systems.

So tell your sun-bleached Cali friends to demand a real ballot with the presidential candidates on it. I’m not going tell you or them who to vote for, but in consequence whereof the American Independent (Homophobe) Party is fighting for your rights, such as the right to speak like it’s the mid-1800s. (As long as you’re a white male landowner of military age. Immigrants and women need not apply.)

If you think this column is important, please share it. Lee Camp’s new book, “Bullet Points & Punch Lines,” is available at LeeCampBook.com.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show, “Redacted Tonight.”

In 2012, the Iowa Republican Party named Mitt Romney (now Utah’s senator) as the winner of its presidential caucuses. But 16 days later, long after Romney rode a wave of momentum into New Hampshire, the Iowa GOP said that then-Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had actually won after votes that weren’t turned in on caucus night were counted.

In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Independent-turned-Democrat Bernie Sanders virtually tied in the delegates they had won to the next stage of Iowa’s process. At 2:30 A.M. the next day, the Iowa Democratic Party said that Clinton had won 699.57 state delegate equivalents, while Sanders won 695.49 delegates. Her spokesman declared victory and she got the headlines.

With 2020’s Iowa caucuses days away on February 3 and a tight Democratic field, the question if some version of history will repeat itself is not conjectural. But today’s scenarios mostly concern a disruption of the caucus process in Iowa in cyberspace: from either sabotaging the voting technology or disinformation about the reported outcome. The same threats would also face Nevada, 2020’s third contest and also a state party-run presidential caucus.

National media like National Public Radio and the Associated Press have worried that Iowa’s use of a smartphone app by 1,600-plus precinct chairs to report local results is a cybersecurity risk. The Washington Post has worried about disinformation because the Iowa Democratic Party will release two potentially conflicting figures—raw vote counts and delegates awarded. (Nevada is also using a precinct-reporting app and will release these same figures.)

The response to these threats has been predictable. Officials at the Iowa Democratic Party, the Nevada State Democratic Party, Democratic National Committee and even the federal Department of Homeland Security (whose election security team has worked with both states) all said that many steps have been taken to avert threats that could disrupt the process. The state parties also further said that they have ramped up efforts to combat disinformation.

“Iowa Democrats have worked in partnership with the DNC and national cybersecurity experts to develop systems and safeguards to efficiently and securely report results on caucus night while actively monitoring and combating disinformation,” Troy Price, Iowa Democratic Party chair, said by email. “We take our responsibility to protect the integrity of the democratic process and secure Iowans’ votes very seriously.”

“From the beginning, NV Dems [the Nevada State Democratic Party] has been committed to making our First in the West Caucus the most accessible, expansive and transparent caucus yet,” Shelby Wiltz, Nevada State Democratic Party Caucus director, said by email. “We developed a reporting application [smartphone app] in order to streamline the process and provide our volunteers with additional support to run their caucuses as efficiently as possible.”

However, if something were to go badly wrong with compiling results in Iowa or Nevada—something of a scale that exceeds the random confusion that comes with using any new voting tool—it is unlikely that the two states’ backup systems could quickly verify the results in the wee hours after the caucuses end; certainly not before some candidate claims victory and boards a post-midnight plane to the next state.

That assessment comes from examining publicly available partydocuments about potential caucus recounts. Both states are using similar technology, procedures and press statements. The documents, especially a Nevada 2020 Caucus Recount Manual, suggest that it could be a week or more before the party could examine their paper records to see if they matched the app-filed electronic results. The initial delays come from assembling all the paper records.

“If something fails, then what?” asked David Jefferson, a computer scientist who has analyzed voting systems since the 1990s and a board member of Verified Voting, an advocacy group. “The question is not as easily answered by saying, ‘There are paper backups, so don’t worry.’”

“If there are failures, what is the backup plan?” he continued. “What is the process if there are electronic failures of some kind? What happens if something written down on paper doesn’t match the electronic versions? Then what do they do?”

Party-Run Contests

Presidential caucuses are unlike most elections in America. They are party-run town meetings in more than a thousand local precincts spread across their state. Democrats will only have a few caucuses in 2020, but the two that come early are pivotal. Iowa is 2020’s first contest. Nevada is the third.

Caucus voting is also different. The caucuses will have two rounds of voting, where any candidate who gets less than a viability threshold (usually 15 percent) is disqualified. Voters rank their choices, and if their first choice is not viable, their next viable candidate will get their vote. This process requires the caucus chairs to do some math. After the voting, each caucus divides a preset number of delegates to the winners. The allocations are based not on how many people show up locally, but by geography to balance urban, suburban and rural representation.

All of this complexity is why the Iowa and Nevada state parties wanted to develop an app for precinct chairs to use: first for the caucus math and then to transmit the results of their rounds of voting and delegate allocations. (In Nevada, the caucus chairs will also receive the results of early voting before their caucus begins; Iowa does not have an early voting option.)

Using the app as a calculator is not controversial—although it is likely to lead to some degree of user confusion due to unfamiliarity. That assessment comes from Iowa academics who note that most caucus chairs are over 60 years old and would rather call in their results. But security experts consider receiving and sending data via Wi-Fi or cell phones as risky. Also, because caucuses aren’t government-run elections like primaries, there are few legal penalties for meddling.

There are a few other differences between Iowa and Nevada in the approaches and technology each has chosen. The only time Iowa will expose voting data to online threats is at the end of the night when precinct chairs use the app to file results.

In Nevada, there are more digital systems in use. That state party will link early voting sites to an online voter registration system. (Iowa will print precinct voter lists.) Nevada also will offer four days of early voting, where participants will use party-owned tablets, which is online voting. Nevada also will send the early voting results to each precinct chair’s app, so that all of the early votes and live attendee votes are applied at the local level. In other words, Nevada’s digital system is more complex than Iowa’s system—and perhaps more inclusive.

Both state parties also have backup plans that were approved by the DNC’s technology team and by the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee. The states must have paper record backups of all the voting. Thus, every caucus voter will fill out presidential preference cards. The caucus chairs also will fill out summary sheets that document the precinct’s two rounds of voting and resulting delegate allocations. And, if a precinct chair can’t use an app—for any reason—they can telephone in the results to party headquarters.

In general, coverage of these 2020 plans has focused on the cybersecurity and disinformation threats. Those reports, in turn, have prompted top party officials to take second looks at their mostly undisclosed precautions and publicly seek to project confidence.

“The Rules Committee has been following the news stories and has inquired about the facts,” said James Roosevelt Jr., Rules and Bylaws Committee co-chair. “And while it is not something that comes to us for approval, we have not learned anything that would lead us to intervene.”

But the media coverage hasn’t focused on what would happen next if something significantly interrupted, disrupted or corrupted any part of the caucus process. Nor have statements by top party officials addressed that scenario, as party officials at state and national levels are all making the same points to express confidence in their new procedures and digital tools.

However, if one parses the timelines laid out in state party documents concerning any possible recount, it appears that it could be many days before the final results would be publicly released should some large-scale disruption occur.

Iowa has not released any document explaining how it will handle recounts. But Nevada has, and its process would not look at the voter intent on the individual presidential preference cards, its recount manualsaid. It also would not look at falsified registrations or bad behavior by participants. Both happened in the past. It would only manually compare the results on the precinct summary sheet to what the caucus chair app reported or the chair called in. Campaigns, which would have to pay for the recount upfront, can send their representatives to observe. But reporters and the public are excluded, the documents said.

Nevada’s recount process starts by giving precinct chairs two days to turn in all of their paper voting records. It envisions finishing 13 days after the state’s February 22 caucus.

Iowa and Nevada Risks Differ

These details suggest different potential snafus in these two high-profile caucus states.

Iowa has fewer cybersecurity risks because their system has fewer online elements. But because the state party will release two sets of numbers—raw vote totals and delegates awarded—there is a prospect of some disinformation if the popular vote winner does not emerge as the winner of the most delegates to the process’s next stage. In other words, the likelihood of disinformation seems more likely than a voting system meltdown, especially if people do not understand the delegate allocations are akin to a state version of the federal Electoral College.

To be sure, Iowa and national party officials are well aware of this scenario.

“Fundamentally, if people want to cast doubts on the results, they can always find ways to say, ‘This is not what democracy looks like,’” said Roosevelt, the Rules Committee co-chair. “In fact, this is what democracy looks like in a diverse country. There are urban areas. There are academic areas. There are rural areas. And different numbers of people will caucus in those areas. But they will be aggregated for a congressional district total. So it is what democracy looks like.”

On the other hand, Nevada’s state party is asking more from its digital tools and from its caucus chairs and volunteers that will run their caucuses. While they, like the Iowa party, have partnered with the same security experts in government (DHS) and academia (Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project) that government officials have been working with to prepare for 2020’s elections, Nevada’s 2020 caucuses will rely on several online-based elements—vote total transmissions, voter registration and online voting for early voters.

For months, the Nevada party’s statements have been upbeat and emphasized their expectations of success. They have released documents with timelines and details if a recount is necessary. But compared to the Iowa Democratic Party, Nevada is placing a bigger bet that their digital tools will deliver.

“Throughout this entire process, protecting the voices of Nevada Democrats has been our number one priority,” said Shelby Wiltz, caucus director. “We continue to work with a team of security experts with varying backgrounds to combat disinformation and to ensure the integrity of our process.”

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

During a recent conversation with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) did not mince words about the state of the Democratic Party. “We don’t have a left party in the United States,” she said. “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center, or center-conservative, party.” The congresswoman later added that while there are “left members inside the Democratic Party that are working to try to make that shift happen,” there are still many true believers in the status quo. If anything, she reasoned, they’re “probably the majority.”

The 2016 primaries marked the beginning of a major struggle between party loyalists and progressive reformers. While the former championed Hillary Clinton and took umbrage that anybody might challenge her path to the nomination, the latter backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the hope of transforming the Democratic Party into a truly progressive institution. In the years since, they’ve made serious strides toward achieving their goal, with Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., gaining national recognition and pushing the conversation to the left. But as Clinton’s latest attacks on Sanders make clear, the Democratic establishment is loyal first and foremost to itself.

Among the party’s reformers, Ocasio-Cortez has been perhaps the most outspoken and unapologetic since her election in 2018, and her recent run-in with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) indicates she has no plans of backing down. Responding to contentions that she had withheld her “dues,” Ocasio-Cortez criticized the DCCC for blacklisting progressive candidates and supporting centrists in competitive primaries while pledging to give directly to candidates who share her values. “I can choose not to fund that kind of exclusion,” she said after raising more money than any other House Democrat in the third quarter of 2019.

Considering some of the candidates the party machine has backed in recent years, who can blame her? In 2018, for example, the DCCC helped New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew fight off a primary challenge from his left. A year later, he announced that he would be switching parties, pledging his “undying support” to President Donald Trump.

Not long after the DCCC complained about unpaid dues, Ocasio-Cortez announced her decision to launch a new political action committee — the Courage to Change PAC — to help progressive newcomers run for office. “We are pushing the envelope in D.C. by rewarding those who reject lobbyist money, fight for working families and welcome newcomers,” the congresswoman tweeted.

This bold effort to boost progressives has predictably put Democrats on the defensive. Establishment figures have pushed back against what they perceive as a hostile takeover, portraying leftists as outsiders who want to undermine the party and tarnish its legacy (along with those of Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton). Not surprisingly, the 2020 Democratic primary race has become the most visible arena for this struggle, with reformers like Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal endorsing Sanders. Centrists who want to preserve the status quo, meanwhile, have mostly lined up behind Joe Biden.

Interestingly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., seems to have attracted both loyalists and reformers to her campaign over the past year, and for a while it looked as if she could be a compromise candidate between the two factions. In recent months, however, the party loyalists seem to have gained the upper hand within the campaign, and it now looks doubtful whether Warren could become the “unity” candidate after her unfortunate and bizarre spat with Sanders over a private conversation they had a year ago.

Partisans who preach party loyalty over ideological consistency now seem to be flocking to the Warren campaign, and as Sanders has climbed in the polls, they have been eager to portray him as a fake Democrat who wants to destroy the party. “The idea Sanders was ever an ally of *any* Democrat was always pure fantasy,” declared the prominent 2016 Clinton surrogate and current Warren supporter Tom Watson. In her 2017 memoir, Clinton herself wrote that: “He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. … I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.”

That Sanders attended almost four times as many rallies as she did for Obama in 2008 make her latest remarks all the more grotesque. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the former Democratic candidate refused to say she would endorse the Vermont senator if he secured the party’s nomination and claimed that “nobody likes him”—ironic coming from someone who has a lower favorability rating than Trump. As if determined to “disrupt the Democratic Party,” Clinton went on to rehash a discredited “Bernie Bro” narrative from 2016, revealing more about herself than Sanders and his movement.

Increasingly, it appears that Clinton and her ilk are only loyal to the Democratic Party when they control its levers of powers. In other words, they are loyal to the same status quo that most American voters are now revolting against. The fact that Sanders has been a registered Independent throughout most of his career is often touted by partisan critics as evidence of his disloyalty or bad intentions. But among a broader electorate that includes many Democrats, it’s one of his primary appeals.

According to Gallup, a plurality of voters identify as independent, while less than a third identify as a Democrat or Republican. What’s more, most voters don’t feel a strong sense of party loyalty, and consider the two-party system to be bad for the country. Nearly six in 10 Americans want an alternative to our political duopoly, including 54% of self-identified Democrats and 72% of independents. (Republicans seem to have the most party loyalty, with only 38% saying a third party is needed).

All of this should make recent polling from Morning Consult, which has Sanders nine points ahead of Trump with independent voters, unsurprising. (By comparison, Biden is ahead four points, and Warren is tied with the president, unsurprisingly.) Trump won these voters by four points, so it’s very possible they could be the deciding factor this November.

After the Democratic Party suffered its historic collapse in 2016, losing not only the presidency but also state legislatures and governorships across the country, many Democrats did some soul-searching and concluded that the party needed to change. Unfortunately, this period of self-examination didn’t last long for some. In the coming months, Democratic voters will have to decide what kind of party they want to be going forward; one can only hope that the lessons of 2016 haven’t been completely forgotten.

What if, the idea went, it was actually Ukraine — and not Russia — that was interfering in the 2016 election?

Never mind that the notion has since been amplified by the president of Russia, the country that U.S. intelligence agencies unequivocally blame for interfering in that year’s presidential race. Or that Trump’s hand-picked FBI director and other American officials have said there’s no information pointing to Ukraine interference. Or that 25 Russians stand charged in U.S. courts with hacking into Democratic emails and waging a covert social media campaign to sway American public opinion.

The Ukraine theory lives on.

Now, Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the matter and a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, is at the heart of a congressional inquiry that produced Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives. A Senate trial is next.

The discredited theory, spread online by GOP allies in interviews and tweets, has been embraced by a president reluctant to acknowledge the reality of Russian election interference, and anxious to show he had reason to be suspicious of Ukraine as the U.S. withheld crucial military aid last year.

The effect: blurring the facts of the impeachment case for many Americans even before it reaches a trial that could begin with days.

Experts fear the strategy leaves the U.S. vulnerable to more misinformation campaigns in the 2020 election and signals to the Kremlin and other foreign actors that Americans are willing to cling to falsehoods.

A review by The Associated Press shows that the Ukraine conspiracy theory traces back to Trump’s 2016 campaign, was spread online and later advanced by Russian President Vladimir Putin weeks after his own country was blamed for election interference. Finally, some of America’s own elected leaders made it their truth.

“The ultimate victim is democracy, is the stability of our nation,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert at the nonpartisan Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

THE SEEDS OF A CONSPIRACY THEORY

As U.S. authorities collected evidence in 2016 that Russia had hacked and stolen years of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had cultivated extensive business contacts in Ukraine and worked for pro-Russia politicians there, was privately pointing to another culprit.

Manafort, now serving more than seven years in prison for tax fraud and other crimes, suggested then that the attack was probably executed by Ukrainians, according to FBI notes from an April 2018 interview with Rick Gates, Manafort’s former deputy. The idea parroted that of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate who U.S. authorities have assessed has ties to Russian intelligence — an accusation Kilimnik has denied.

Trump aide Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s first national security adviser, was also adamant within the campaign that Russia couldn’t have carried out the attack and that U.S. intelligence wouldn’t be able to figure out who had done it, Gates recalled.

That skepticism was adopted by Trump himself, who memorably said during a presidential debate that “it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?”

All the while, U.S. officials were agreeing with a private cybersecurity firm’s findings that Russia was responsible, collecting evidence over the next several months that tied individual Russian military intelligence officers to the hack.

Adding to the FBI’s concern was the revelation that a Trump campaign official had been told Russia had damaging information about Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. That July, the bureau opened an investigation into whether Russia and the Trump campaign were working together to sway the election in Trump’s favor, a probe eventually taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.

TWEETS, ARTICLES FUEL THEORY

As the Democrats’ stolen emails were published online and the U.S. prepared to publicly blame the Kremlin for the hack, assertions surfaced online that Ukraine had meddled — directly or indirectly — in America’s presidential campaign.

In September 2016 Roger Stone, a Trump confidant later convicted of lying about his efforts to get inside information about the emails, tweeted: “The only interference in the U.S. election is from Hillary’s friends in Ukraine.”

His tweet highlighted a Financial Times article that said some Kyiv leaders were determined “to intervene, however indirectly” in the U.S. election. The story detailed efforts by Serhiy Leshchenko, a former Ukrainian parliament member who opposed Trump’s bid, to expose off-the-books payments Ukraine’s pro-Russia political party made to Manafort.

Leshchenko maintains his efforts don’t amount to interference or compare to Russia’s attack on the U.S. elections.

Still, some Republican legislators, including a few contacted by AP, pointed to the article as proof Ukraine interfered.

“I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press. He cited the Financial Times as evidence.

As Trump prepared to take office, news reports fueled doubts online over the conclusion that Russia had hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign.

“So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?” Trump tweeted on Jan. 5, 2017, the day after a BuzzFeed News article reported that the FBI did not physically examine the Democrats’ servers to determine Russia infiltrated the system.

A Politico report days later documented a Democratic consultant’s opposition research in 2016 on Manafort’s work in Ukraine — which included consulting on behalf of former leader Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia after his 2014 ouster — and described efforts by some Ukraine leaders to support Clinton over Trump.

The article said there was not a top-down effort by Ukraine to push voters toward Clinton, but some Republicans now point to the reporting to support their allegations of meddling.

Citing the reports, anti-establishment conservative and liberal bloggers made misleading connections between Ukraine and CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that traced the hack back to Russia.

This online speculation helped shape the Ukraine conspiracy theory, explained Thomas Rid, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has tracked disinformation campaigns and election interference.

“The landscape has made it so easy to find rabbit holes, and go down these rabbit holes, stay there, and find a community of like-minded amateur sleuths,” Rid said.

It is the nebulous nature of the Ukrainian theory, which leaves room for both direct and indirect interference, that has given the idea a shape-shifting, evolving form that has contributed to its staying power.

One online commentator misleadingly claimed CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch works for a think tank funded by a Ukrainian oligarch. Alperovitch is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, which is based in the U.S. and receives funding from a variety of sources. Donations from Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk’s foundation made up less than less than 1.6 percent of the group’s funding in 2018.

“A great deal of misinformation relies upon serendipity or mere contacts,” said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “Then they draw egregious or conspiratorial conclusions based on those contacts.”

Putin himself weighed in days after Trump moved into the White House, publicly claiming that Ukraine’s entire government had favored Clinton during the election and now needed to “improve relations” with the new Trump administration.

“As we all know, during the presidential campaign in the United States, the Ukrainian government adopted a unilateral position in favor of one candidate,” Putin said in at a news conference that February with Hungary’s prime minister.

Russian media used the comments to suggest it was Ukraine that had actually interfered.

It was convenient for the Kremlin to point the finger at another offender: Just weeks earlier, U.S. intelligence agencies had released a detailed report accusing Russia of interfering in the election on Trump’s behalf. And Ukraine was the perfect scapegoat, experts said. The Kremlin has been locked in a 5-year war with Ukraine that has killed more than 14,000 people.

“It’s in Russia’s interest to amplify this issue because it wants Ukraine to be undermined,” said Jankowicz, the disinformation expert.

By April 2017, the Ukraine conspiracy theory was being promoted by Trump himself.

TRUMP TESTS NEW UKRAINE CONSPIRACY THEORY

Trump sat at the desk of the Oval Office, just shy of his first 100 days on the job, when he falsely suggested in an Associated Press interview that CrowdStrike had even stronger ties to Ukraine.

“I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard,” Trump said. “Why didn’t they allow the FBI in to investigate the server? I mean, there is so many things that nobody writes about. It’s incredible.”

In fact, CrowdStrike is a publicly held California company founded by two U.S. citizens — George Kurtz and Alperovitch, who was born in Russia but spent his adult life in America. The company has identified cyberattacks for major U.S. clients, including the U.S. government and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

And the FBI didn’t need to physically take the DNC servers to confirm CrowdStrike’s findings that Russia was behind the attack, said Eugene H. Spafford, a computer science professor at the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University who has assisted the bureau in cases.

Instead, CrowdStrike took digital images of the DNC system, capturing files, photos, emails, and browsing history to determine who had breached the system. Copies of those images were then handed over to the FBI, the company says.

The process is similar to how investigators at a crime scene take photos that are later analyzed for clues.

A physical review of the DNC’s data, a cloud system comprised of at least 140 servers, would have disabled the Democrats’ computer systems for days or weeks amid a presidential election, Spafford noted.

But Trump took his suspicions about the servers directly to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the newly elected Ukraine president in the now-infamous July 25 phone call that resulted in articles of impeachment against Trump.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people…” Trump asked of Zelenskiy on the call, according to notes released by the White House in September. “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Dozens of news outlets debunked Trump’s comments and continue to do so. Finding itself at the center of the phone call, CrowdStrike then released a blog post rebuffing the president’s claims. The president’s own national security advisers rebutted the theory to no avail, former White House aide Fiona Hill told impeachment investigators in November.

“We spent a lot of time … trying to refute this one in the first year of the administration,” Hill said.

THE THEORY ENDURES

Still, Trump keeps the notion alive.

He insisted to Fox News viewers in November that he only withheld aid from Ukraine to investigate corruption in the country, hinting once again that the DNC’s servers are hidden there.

“You know, the FBI has never gotten that server,” Trump said “That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”

Parts of the Ukraine election interference theory have since been echoed by a growing number of the president’s Republican allies — some of whom concede that Russia interfered but posit that Ukraine did too.

Days before the president was impeached, Sen. Ted Cruz told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that there’s “considerable evidence” that Ukraine had interfered.

His office later said in a statement: “Russia’s campaign to interfere in our election was real and systematic. It is also true that Ukrainian officials did not want … then-candidate Trump to win. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

And as his Senate impeachment trial looms, Trump is pressing GOP senators to rally behind the discredited theory — asking his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to brief them on his trip to eastern Europe, where he searched for witnesses and documents to back up the claims. Videos documenting his trip have aired on the pro-Trump television network, One America News, and have been viewed thousands of times online.

Hill, a Russia expert, told Congress in November that political leaders who spread such falsehoods about Ukraine are only polarizing the U.S. further and turning it into an easy target for misinformation campaigns by such foreign powers as Russia.

She warned: “These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes.”

_____

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv contributed to this report.

How, exactly, did I get here? My political journey has somehow taken me from canvassing for Obama north of Fort Knox, KY in 2008, to voting for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary outside of West Point, NY in 2016, to – gulp! – “defending” Trump against impeachment in 2019. What a long, strange, trip it has been, as they say. Truth is, I couldn’t sleep last night and have been watching CNN’s wall-to-wall impeachment coverage since 4AM. When the clock struck a reasonable hour on East Coast time, and once I couldn’t contain the frustration any longer, I called my father.

Now, Dad and I are political opposites. No, that’s too mild. We are toxically antithetical. A bit of back story: he and I have gone months without speaking in the past over arguments surrounding the Iraq War and other polarizing political topics. It’s gotten ugly at times. Years ago, we called an armistice and agreed, for the most part, to limit our daily conversations to grandkids and the NY Yankees. Dad voted Trump; I was a Bernie-bro who held my nose then cast for team Hillary. Yet, against all odds, we agree, mostly, that – though for perhaps different reasons – the Democrats’ impeachment crusade is equal parts distraction and farce. As we took turns venting this morning, it struck me that, in hyper-polarized – Red Team / Blue Team – America, our middle-ground discussion must be about as rare (or mythical) as a unicorn.

Look, I know I’m about to get hammered as soon as this piece hits the web. I’m not all that naive. Most left-leaning publications wouldn’t likely have touched it; the few mainstream liberal friends I have left may bolt; and online critics – whether famous or nameless – will once again slap me with the standard labels: Trump-apologist, Putin-stooge, Russian-asset, and/or blatantly un-American. So it goes. Nonetheless, no matter the cost (count me a free-speech-nostalgist), whatever principles I possess demand that I throw my two cents in.

Allow me one caveat (which my pops won’t like): personally, I think Trump is utterly unfit for office – in part, due to his temperament, but mainly because of his policies. What a novel thought, I know! So, I’ll save you the suspense – I ain’t gonna vote for the guy … ever. Furthermore, I think Trump’s committed plenty of impeachable acts, mainly in the foreign policy arena, from overseeing U.S.-abetted, unsanctioned war crimes in Yemen, to escalating America’s bombing of several nations upon whom Congress has not declared war. Problem is, as I’ve written, the same can mostly be said of Baby Bush and “Saint” Obama. And we all know the DNC-machine has zero stomach for criticizing the latter, no matter how mildly.

All that said, I truly believe that Ukraine-gate, like Russia-gate before it, was a dangerous charade – smoke and mirrors – from the start. The entire Russian collusion angle, no matter hard MSNBC liberals wished it were otherwise, never amounted to much of anything. In fact, the whole masquerade served (and serves) mainly as a cudgel for establishment Dems and their media lackeys’ attempt to delegitimize a duly elected president from the very moment he was elected. I know, I know – the Electoral College is a travesty, an undemocratic anachronism. I agree wholeheartedly. Still, according to the rules of the game, Trump won. Period.

Matters deteriorate from there, unfortunately. So polarized, so tribal, has Washington become, that the Democrats marched down this impeachment road knowing full well that they didn’t stand a chance of removing Trump. No one seriously believed the Republican-led Senate, especially with ice-cold Mitch McConnell at the helm, would convict this president. Proof positive came this morning, when first Nancy Pelosi, then Rep. James Clyburn, hinted they might even withhold the impeachment articles from the Republican Senate indefinitely, or, forever. Say again? So what was all this for, then, exactly?!? Clearly, the entire process constituted little more than political masturbation from Jump Street. Though, admittedly, it’s been – and will continue to be – a boon for the media. Like pornography, impeachment-theater makes for great (if guilt-ridden) entertainment – which is precisely the business the media is in these days.

There was hardly an ounce of statesmanlike bipartisanship in yesterday’s vote; and there won’t be any going forward, either. Not a single Republican crossed the aisle to censure the president. Only two Democrats voted against impeachment. This nearly clean party divide is as instructive as it is disturbing. Consider an historical comparison: even before Nixon’s (far more deserved) impeachment came up for a full floor vote in the House, key Republican senators told him he’d lost their confidence. He resigned almost immediately. It’s hard to imagine such a scenario on either side of the aisle in our tortured present.

Tulsi Gabbard, at least, showed some political courage – even Meghan McCain referred to Tulsi’s “balls-of-steel” – and voted “present”, rather than with her party. Rep. Gabbard wasn’t prepared to vote “Nay,” and, admittedly, that may be due to limited political expedience – a last lifeline to what remains of her Democratic connections. Seen in another light, though, hers amounts to a plea for moderation, for bipartisanship. She’d said, previously, that her decision on impeachment would depend, in part, on whether there’d be cross-aisle consensus. And of course there wasn’t. In the email I received from her campaign this morning – worth quoting at length – she explained it thus:

A house divided cannot stand. And today we are divided. Fragmentation and polarity are ripping our country apart. This breaks my heart, and breaks the hearts of all patriotic Americans, whether we are Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. So today, I come before you to make a stand for the center, to appeal to all of you to bridge our differences and stand up for the American people. My vote today is a vote for much needed reconciliation and hope that together we can heal our country.

When the smoke clears, and Election Day 2020 passes, I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised if Tulsi Gabbard leaves the Democratic Party and joins her friend Bernie Sanders as an Independent.

The enormous elephant in the proverbial impeachment room, though, is the little matter of what U.S. policy towards Ukraine and Russia should be. That ought to be at least part of the rub, no? There are, I’d submit, serious questions worth asking about Obama’s – and the entire establishment’s – preferred strategy on this front. The late-stage Obama team – and, certainly, had she been elected, Hillary’s gang – seemed intent, in the wake of Crimea and Ukraine, on drumming up a New Cold War with the world’s other major nuclear power. Is this warranted; is it smart? Count me doubtful. Furthermore, who, exactly, are, America’s “partners” in Ukraine? Well, it might be inconvenient to admit, but a solid chunk are legitimate fascists, neo-nazis, in fact.

Okay, Trump shouldn’t have used the language he did with Ukraine’s president; his transactional style strikes me as immature and unstatesmanlike. That said, is it truly in the interest of the US to arm military factions – some army, some militia – in a proxy war with Russia? It didn’t end so well last time Washington played that very game a few decades back in Afghanistan. Ukraine is as near to Russia as Mexico is to Texas. Thus, logic – or even a simple glance at a map – should put to rest the notion that the whole proxy campaign has anything to do with the well-worn fiction that the US must fight the Russians “there,” rather than “over here.” No, I’m sorry: the Democratic (and Republican-National-Security-insider) plan strikes this author as a terrifyingly dangerous form of brinksmanship.

Another potential result of the impeachment show is what it forebodes. In the future, expect both parties, whenever they are in the opposition, to treat every election loss as evidence that the new president is illegitimate. Impeachment proceedings might just become the new normal – hardly, if my memory of high school civics serves me, the intent of the Founding Fathers. Sure, maybe Mitch McConnell started down this trail with his post-Obama-election statement that “The single most important thing we [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Even if we grant them that, the Democrats have exponentially upped the ante. Mark my words, Americans will come to regret that escalation when Washington politics fracture (is it even possible?) ever further in the years to come.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the distraction aspect of the all-Trump-all-impeachment, all-the-time, phenomenon. Trump isn’t going anywhere; in fact, I predict he’ll win by an even larger margin in 2020. Nothing tangible, after all, will come of this vote. Not a thing will change. So here’s the real pity: as the show unfolds over the next several months, impeachment will suck all the air out of the actually important problems and stories of the day. Meanwhile, the forever wars will rage, and US foreign policy – along with the world, itself – will sink ever deeper towards hell in a hand basket. Impeachment will bury the true scandal of the moment – the Afghanistan Papers, remember those? Yemen will keep getting bombed; Iraq will drift towards yet another collapse; Israeli apartheid will cement ever further; and India’s Prime Minister Modi will escalate his potentially civil-war-inducing suppression of Muslims.

Through all that, count on one thing: America will remain paralyzed, distracted. Last night, all the female Democrats in the House – at Pelosi’s behest, one assumes – wore black to mark the “seriousness” of their faux somber occasion. Turns out the attire was totally appropriate, if for the wrong reasons. Black befit the moment, not because Trump behaved badly, but because the Democrats just ushered in the Age of Impeachment, of sustained partisanship, of ignoring the real scandals and existential threats before this wayward republic of ours. With that, I yield the floor.

This article originally ran on Antiwar.com.

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.