When the Message Is Controlled Despite the Messenger

If you're convinced it's possible to win populist concessions with billionaire money, this post will be as much a waste of your time as all of your activism on behalf of 501(c)(4) organizations has been and will continue to be.

Overt brainwashing is done through advertising campaigns and distracting slogans. Covert brainwashing involves purchasing silence from some critics and co-opting the messages of others. We've all seen movies that depict these transactions as direct negotiations between the person who wants to expose corruption (e.g. Frank Serpico) and the people who want to keep the corruption concealed (e.g. the NYPD). Invariably, the reporter/private investigator/district attorney faces a moral crisis when s/he is bribed/threatened/blackmailed by the amoral powers that be. One purpose of such films is to give the audience faith in the integrity of individual human beings (from Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith to Julia Roberts' Erin Brockovich) who refuse to be persuaded/bullied/frustrated into silence.

But sometimes the integrity and dedication of the truth teller simply doesn't matter, as in the case of Phil Donahue.

In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Donahue was one of few media pundits who tried to explain why the pending war was unjustifiable. He was right, and he had the integrity to stick to his position. But that didn't matter because the network that aired his show (MSNBC) belonged to the RCA holding company, which was owned by General Electric, which stood to profit immensely from the war in Iraq and therefore wanted conflict regardless of whether Saddam Hussein posed a threat to US security.

When it was time for MSNBC to start pushing the pro-war propaganda GE wanted, memos drifted down from GE to RCA to MSNBC. As Jeffrey St. Clair explains:

Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC’s firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network’s executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue’s show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered “a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.”

The memo warned that Donahue’s show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, “a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.

If Donahue's story can't affirm our faith in individual integrity, it's because the silence GE executives imposed on him was never his to sell. The war profiteers never had to offer him a briefcase full or cash or threaten to break his legs. Instead, they muted him by high-jacking the network upon which he relied for dissemination of his anti-war message.

If we learn nothing else from "The Day the News Died" (as Chris Hedges refers to Donahue's firing), it should be that in our mass media culture, individual integrity isn't enough to shield us from the depredations of corrupt, concentrated wealth.

Remaining committed to one's principles may be morally laudable, but it is often logistically meaningless. Certainly Donahue's resolute opposition to the war made no difference in the outcome for Iraqi citizens or GE shareholders.

Strangely, even those who are willing to accept this critique of the corruption inherent in the capitalist marketplace are often reluctant to see how it applies to non-profit 501(c)(4)s. "How is the lesson of Donahue in the for-profit world of television," such readers may wonder, "applicable to outfits such as OurRevolution or MPACT?"

For many of us, the integrity of people like Bernie Sanders and Nina Turner is something that we must be willing to count on in order to get anywhere. Such people are like Serpico--putting their necks on the line to make the world better for all of us. We have to trust them to do what's right--and if that means letting them accept dark money from billionaires in order to advance the agendas to which they are committed, then we just need to trust that their hearts are in the right place.

But how much carbon has been kept out of the atmosphere because 350.org activists have their hearts in the right place? How many black lives have been protected from police brutality because the hearts of Black Lives Matter activists are in the right place? How many casualties have been prevented because Code Pink activists have their hearts in the right place?

Let's say that in all three cases, the integrity of those involved is 100% beyond reproach.

What has that integrity achieved? And isn't it reasonable to suspect that it hasn't achieved more because the NGO/non-profit culture in which these organizations exist is funded and shaped by the very donors who profit from corruption?

It's reasonable to suspect that PBS doesn't cover climate change more aggressively because the Koch family contributes to PBS funding. And it's equally reasonable to suppose that when Soros family hedge funds will profit from the disruption of certain economies through war, particular purse strings for Code Pink get cut.

Sanders lovers are the first to laugh at the idea that billionaires donate to the Clinton Foundation out of the goodness of their hearts, but Jeff Weaver expects us to believe that it's important for OurRevolution to accept money on precisely that premise.

This post isn't meant to suggest that the fecklessness of activist culture in America is specifically attributable to 501(c)(4)s, but such non-profits are particularly vulnerable to corruption because they are set up in such a way as to conceal donors and donations from public scrutiny. Weaver was so heavily criticized for making OurRevolution a 501(c)(4) that in September he promised to formulate "a disclosure policy so that we disclose larger contributions that we receive" even though such disclosures aren't required by law. In December, the organization "promised to disclose all donors giving more than $250," but no disclosures have been made to date. Worse yet, it's not even clear how useful such information would be, since OurRevolution could honor this promise by releasing a list of names without distinguishing between Donor A (who gave $300) and Donor B (who gave $300 million).

Most Sanders supporters trust his team so much that they're willing to let Weaver and Turner and others associated with OurRevolution raise and spend money in whatever ways they deem most effective.

But trusting in the OurRevolution team to do the right thing with dark money is like trusting Donahue to use his show to prevent the invasion of Iraq. The big money in charge of MSNBC always had control of Donahue's platform. And the big money funders of OurRevolution will always have control over that outfit's ability to realize its agenda.

It doesn't matter how much integrity Weaver and Turner have if someone else is in charge of whether they can rent meeting spaces or buy airline tickets for staffers to coordinate activities. And in dark money organizations, it's impossible for supporters to know who's in charge of the purse strings (even if we get some lame list of everyone who donated over $250).

This is why I urge Turner to distance herself from organizations such as OurRevolution and MPACT and focus on grassroots groups that are completely transparent about their fundraising procedures.

I understand that in economically distressed times (such as ours), it seems suicidal for political figures to cut themselves off from billionaire angel investors.

But the times are so economically distressed precisely because those billionaires almost invariably prove to be devils in disguise. If your 501(c)(4) is opposed to big pharma and big oil and Wall Street, then it could be almost entirely dependent on big pharma and big oil and Wall Street for funding--without anyone in the general public having a clue about it.

To understand how bonkers that is, answer this question honestly: Would you trust Jordan Chariton's coverage of Energy Transfer Partners if Chariton's expenses were covered by a 501(c)(4) funded by Kelcy Warren? Does your faith in Chariton's integrity make you think such an arrangement would have no effect on his coverage? If not, then why is your faith in Sanders and Turner so strong that they get "integrity exemptions" for associating with non-profits whose doors remain open to precisely such arrangements?

We, the grassroots, need to form something like a non-party-based citizen's union with monthly dues--an organization in which everyone agrees to chip in the same amount on a regular basis so that operatives know they will be able to cover their expenses without having to worry about stepping on the toes of bigwig donors.

Even if Turner couldn't raise as much money through such an organization as she might through a dark money outfit like OurRevolution, the enthusiasm and volunteer support that she could count on would make it much more nimble and dare I say impactful than she could ever hope for OurRevolution and MPACT to be.

The failure of the Democratic Party to understand how and why it failed voters may be the most disappointing phenomenon of 2016.

But the second-most disappointing phenomenon is the failure of luminaries such as Turner and Weaver to recognize that people-powered movements (such as the Reddit-based phonebanking done by volunteers on behalf of the Sanders campaign) are more important assets for politicians than billionaire cash. Until that lesson sinks in, professional progressive operatives appear doomed to continue servicing the donor class instead of the voters they purport to care about.

When Justice Is Derided as "Purity"

If Elizabeth Warren fails your ideological purity test, maybe the problem isn't Elizabeth Warren.

— shauna (@goldengateblond) June 10, 2016

Bernie Sanders' critics called him a "single-issue" candidate because he exposed the ever-widening wealth gap as the engine that drives social, racial, and environmental injustice. By the same logic, they could argue that Jesus became a single-issue messiah the moment he said, "love of money is the root of all evil."

For a single-issue candidate, Sanders advocated a wide variety of policy solutions. Sometimes those solutions highlighted the economic underpinnings of injustice, as when he called for equal pay for women in the workforce. Sometimes he found it more effective to propose responses than to offer diagnoses, as when he contended that we could best address the murderous repression of our racist police state via new standards of community policing--or when he suggested that a strong alliance with Israel need not hinge on support for apartheid policies that treat Palestinians as second class citizens. American cities obviously brutalize communities of color for the same reason that Israeli settlements expand illegally into Palestinian land: because such exploitation is profitable for over-privileged people at the expense of under-privileged people.

The reason Sanders' campaign resonated so powerfully with people from disparate backgrounds was that he insisted upon viewing economic matters through the lens of justice. We all know that the US government shouldn't have blown $6 trillion on the war in Iraq since the entire fiasco was predicated on lies about weapons of mass destruction and an unfounded connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. We know it's unjust that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are dead because of the cupidity of our war profiteers and the stupidity of our citizenry.

But the Sanders campaign made it plain to us that we are being punished for our crime. If we can't afford the systems of public healthcare and education that characterize other industrial nations, it's because we are too busy bankrupting ourselves on unjustifiable wars. Sanders' critique of our many flawed domestic and foreign policies is simple: When you do the wrong thing, other people suffer--and so do you.

If we don't let greed rob our women workers of the wages they deserve, we will all be better off. If we don't let greed rob our communities of color of safety and dignity, we will all be better off. If we don't let greed destroy the planet we inhabit, we will all be better off. In every case, the message resonates because it's true. 

If Sanders really was a single-issue candidate, his issue appears to have been the contention that justice and economics are intertwined and that fighting for a more just world amounts to fighting for a better world.

Anyone who watched or attended a Sanders rally saw this sense of justice become infectious for attendees from disparate backgrounds with disparate priorities. Men cheered for equal pay for women; soldiers cheered for non-interventionism; fossil fuel workers cheered for lower carbon emissions. Sanders' supporters intuitively grasped the implicit lesson that the obfuscation of economists and policy wonks cannot bewilder any of us as long as we refuse to lose sight of the basic notion of justice.

But that sense of justice has come under attack by analysts who make it their business to sneer at political "purity tests." The faulty assumption of such analysts is that the Sanders coalition would have been stronger, somehow, if only he had been willing to abandon one plank or another of his platform. Perhaps he should have embraced fracking as "clean energy" or hung the Palestinians out to dry in an appeal to Zionists or argued that what looks like systemic racism in our police culture is really just a "few bad apples."

Such cynical concessions, in the mind of the pundit class, are the essence of coalition building. If you're not willing to throw some group (women, Native Americans, the LGBTQ community) under the bus, how can you possibly expect to get everyone else on your side?

According to this argument, if I find Keith Ellison repugnant because he supports a no-fly zone in Syria and opposes the boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement, then I've fallen into a purity trap. By daring to believe that a person who wants to provoke a war with Russia is not my ally, I have somehow allowed perfection to become the enemy of the good.

But how do I know that Ellison is good? I don't know any such thing, though Democratic spokespeople insist it must be so for three main reasons.

First, he's black--and since black people are underrepresented in American politics, I should be cheering for him. (Never mind that Clarence Thomas is also black and has consistently voted against civil rights initiatives.) Second, he's Muslim--and since Muslims are underrepresented in American politics, I should be cheering for him. (Never mind that Ellison's opposition to the BDS movement indicates his eagerness to appease moneyed interests, such as AIPAC, at the expense of voiceless Muslims.) Third, he was one of a handful of superdelegates who endorsed Sanders during the primary campaign. (Never mind that he later flipped to supporting the warmongering corporatist nominated by the Democrats--suggesting that his transient support for Sanders was, like Sanders' candidacy itself, a sheepdogging exercise meant to lend an air of progressive legitimacy to Clinton's candidacy.)

To suggest that Ellison is an otherwise great candidate who just barely fails a purity test is to overlook the glaringly obvious fact that he is a puppet of his donors rather than a champion of the people. When a politician claims to stand up for justice on four out of five issues, that doesn't mean he's 80% pure. It means that his donors only have a vested interest in injustice 20% of the time. They're happy to let him talk about justice for groups x, y, & z as long as they're not profiting from injustice against those specific communities.

But when a politician like Ellison advocates war with a nuclear-armed power, it's not because his perspective on justice is a tiny bit cloudy on that particular issue. It's because going to war with Russia is the particular injustice from which the major donors behind the curtain of the Democratic Party expect to profit.

The same goes for any so-called progressive on any issue of injustice. Alan Grayson claims to be a Democrat with a spine who will stand up for his constituents. But in the wake of June's Orlando nightclub shooting, Grayson championed the inane no-fly/no-buy bill advocated by Democrats (a bill that would not have prevented the Orlando massacre) over his own proposed reinstatement of the ban on assault weapons (a bill that would have prevented the massacre):

You can call this absurd position of Grayson's a lapse in judgment. It was no such thing. It was a calculated betrayal of justice. If Democrats like Grayson wanted to protect civilians from mass shootings, they would ban assault weapons. But donors don't profit from such bills. Donors profit from the expansion of the powers of the unaccountable surveillance state. Grayson served the interests of those donors--not the interests of his constituents. He didn't fail a purity test; he showed you who is pulling his strings.

Whenever political analysts concede that a politician fails this or that purity test, they are really just acknowledging which particular corrupt agenda pays the bills for the politician in question. Democrats love to say, "People are going to have honest disagreements about difficult questions," but they don't mean that there will be debates about the best mechanisms we can install to insure that police stop murdering black motorists. What they mean is that some Democrats will pay lip service to the idea of addressing police brutality while a handful of others controlled by donors with a vested interest in perpetuating that brutality ensure that it is perpetuated.

Justice is justice. You're committed to it or your aren't. The Sanders campaign proved that the broader your appeal to justice is, the more people you will draw into your coalition.

The purity test argument is an attempt to persuade people that coalition-building means excluding certain forms of justice from consideration. It's a lie. 

The Democrats Have a Donor Problem that Even Bernie Sanders Can't Solve

Like a lot of people, I'm woke because of Bernie Sanders.

And like a growing number of people, I'm too woke for the post-election DNC propaganda Sanders is peddling to have its intended effect.

Correct-the-Record operatives on Twitter harass me non-stop about how my antipathy for Hillary Clinton helped elect Trump. That doesn't bother me. I believe we're better off with Trump than we would have been with Clinton because—asJimmy Dore has long argued—Trump puts an ugly face on the ugly policies at the center of American life.

Progressivism would have remained asleep under Clinton the same way it's slumbered under Barack Obama for eight years. Although I don't expect Trump's Department of Justice to protect children like Tamir Rice from homicidal cops any better than Obama's did, I do expect people to pay closer attention to such injustices under Trump.

But there's a different form of Brockbot harassment that does bother me because I see it working on some people. It takes the form of tweets like this:

.@EtsiSusi @rosiebudpisces @PoliticsPeach @chrislhayes why are we re-litigating teh primaries and general. There is real work to be done now

— Michael Lockett (@mal2091) November 18, 2016

The purpose of Lockett's tweet is 1) to remind people that a Trump presidency is a horrifying prospect (which it certainly is); and 2) to drive those horrified people back into the arms of the Democrats as their only protection (which the Democrats certainly aren't, as their neoliberal corruption is precisely what led to Trump's rise in the first place).

Instead of acknowledging the glaring flaws of Clinton's candidacy (FBI investigations are no big deal) and platform (even though the generals know that a no-fly zone in Syria will lead to war with Russia, that doesn't really count as long as CNN finds something else to talk about), Brock's minions continue to focus on fearmongering about the GOP:

The #GOPPlaybook since 1968. https://t.co/H2GQVnYuJL

— Michael Lockett (@mal2091) November 18, 2016

If Brock had not just met behind closed doors with George Soros, Neera Tanden, Keith Ellison, and the other neolib masterminds who brought us the Trump presidency, this hillbot nonsense would be easy to ignore.

But it's difficult to ignore when Sanders himself participates, as he does in this speech:

"When you lose the White House to the least popular candidate in the history of America... It is time for a new direction." #FeelTheBern pic.twitter.com/QJh2VzmFZd

— Bernie Wan Kenobi (@Old_Bern_Kenobi) November 17, 2016

It's great to see Sanders calling out the failure of the Democratic Party, but chilling to see him transition immediately to cheering for a Soros puppet like Ellison, who is simply a male embodiment of Clinton's warhawkishness. (The fact that Ellison also happens to be black and a Muslim is simply part of the identity politics screen behind which the DNC loves to hide its most destructive and oppressive policy priorities. Just as Obama's pigmentation was an effective diversion from the racist incarceration state over which he presided, Ellison's religion deflects attention from his eagerness to bomb Muslim children in Libya and Syria and anywhere else Soros desires.)

I don't deny that Ellison supports some genuinely progressive policies. The problem is that the Democratic Party funnels all progressives to the same group of donors, and the insidious influence of those donors invariably compromises the progressive instincts of these candidates. Ellison's progressivism is the window dressing that makes him palatable enough for voters to support him. But the end result is that the donors always get what they want from these candidates--while the voters who put them into office never do.

That's too grand a claim for me to prove in one blog post, but I hope to make the case watertight with additional entries in the coming weeks.

For the time being, I want to make my overarching thesis as clear as possible:

Since the Democratic Party is, as Kshama Sawant observes, a "graveyard" for progressives, the most important step the woke community can take towards defeating Trumpism is to move away from the Democrats as quickly as possible. I'm not saying we automatically have to get behind the Greens. I'm not saying we automatically have to form a new national third party. But I am saying that any progressive energy expended on behalf of the Democratic Party will be systematically opposed and dissipated by that party--even if the great Sanders says otherwise.

This truth is as painful for me as it is for anyone else who simply wants to fall back in line behind Sanders, but I have reached this conclusion based on evidence that I look forward to examining publicly (via this blog) as systematically as time permits.

The upshot is that when a hillbot asks me what I'm doing to stop Trump, my answer is that I'm trying to persuade Nina Turner to leave the Democratic model of fundraising-via-bribery. Accepting such a challenge will require bravery on her part, as she would have to cut her ties to the dark money (almost certainly from Soros and other prominent DNC donors) that taints 501c4 outfits such as Our Revolution.

I look forward to donating my time, energy, and money to the first political leader with nationwide recognition who has the courage to stand up to Trump by recognizing that we must first stand up to the Democratic machine that created him. In the meantime, the hillbots harassing me are wasting their time (except that I guess they aren't, since they're getting paid by Brock, who's getting paid by Soros, who's also paying Ellison).

For now, I'll just let this tweet from Smithee sink in:

Best single sentence description of Democratic dimwittedness I've seen yet. https://t.co/w5XlAk8tF0 pic.twitter.com/4GZwpLxkvM

— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) November 17, 2016

Exploring Plans for a Brand New Congress

Brand New Congress (BNC) sounds like a great idea to almost everyone who learns about it. Americans of all political stripes need a way to fight back against the corrupt legislators who have a stranglehold on our laws, so the goal of targeting 2018 as the year when we will replace the professional politicians in Congress with engaged citizens who care about the future of our country is bound to have wide appeal.

Bernie Sanders generated a lot of energy in the U.S. not simply by appealing to progressives, but by waking everyone in the country up to the possibility of meaningful change in the way our government conducts itself.

Americans have wised up to the tricks of our Congresspeople. We know that polarizing debates about everything from flag burning to restroom access are cynically deployed by our politicians to keep us arguing about distractions instead of facing the reality that the U.S. government is working overtime to destroy democracy here and throughout the world so that it can get on with the important business of destroying the world itself.

Nina Turner taught Berners to say, "Enough is enough,"—and we've said it for so many months now that it's impossible for the millions of us who became politically engaged to shrug off the nomination of Hillary Clinton with some halfhearted agreement to "try again in 4 years." That's not an option for us. We have to do something. We have to work towards practical gains because there's too much at stake.

BNC seems practical because it provides us with a realistic opportunity to change the fundamental makeup of Congress. Check out the methodical BNC timeline that details how we ordinary citizens, if we stay organized and committed for two years, can recapture the U.S. Congress from the corporate interests that currently control it.

I very much hope that BNC will achieve its stated objective of building a progressive Congress, but my initial experience with the organization was a painful reminder of how vulnerable progressive causes are to the entrenched neoliberalism of the Democratic Party. The organizers of BNC presumably have their hearts in the right place, but those of us who seek to continue the Sanders revolution have good reason to worry about the ways in which our "friends" in the Democratic Party will try to manipulate BNC into supporting a toxic corporate agenda.

My exploration of BNC earlier this week left me deeply skeptical about the willingness of Democratic operatives to separate the progressive agenda of BNC from the corporate agenda of the DNC. In the remainder of this blog post, I'll chronicle that experience partly as a warning to my fellow progressives and partly as a challenge to BNC to improve their sales technique.

Problem #1: Lack of information

BNC is just getting started, so it's unfair to fault them for having an under-developed website at this point. But my experience in reading their materials, corresponding with the volunteers at their help desk, and participating in a BNC conference call convinced me that their problem goes beyond the limitations of their online presence. They haven't yet figured out how to communicate effectively with the people who would be most inclined to support them.

The fundamental problem with BNC's website is that it fails to answer the question likely to be foremost in the minds of visitors: "How can I get in contact with like-minded people in my area to help support a progressive candidate from my congressional district in 2018?" The website can't answer that very simple question in a lot of places because there aren't enough people involved to make networking with local progressives as easy as it should be, but BNC promotional materials certainly lead curious readers to believe that if they participate in a conference call, they will have a chance to learn how they can support BNC both at the national and the local level.

That's simply not true at this point. Although the leader of my BNC conference call assured me that she would explain how BNC could connect me with other progressives in Austin during the "meat" of her presentation, she never touched on the subject in her 20-minute spiel. 

Problem #2: Structural flaws in the conference call setup 

In the Q&A session at the end of the conference call, another participant repeated my question about how to get in touch with local progressives, and the call leader's answer was that since BNC's website wasn't really set up to give people that information just yet, the working method was to visit BNC on Facebook, sign up within our own states, and see what activities were scheduled in our area. I did so; no BNC activities are currently scheduled in Austin, Texas—one of the most fiercely progressive cities in the country.

That's not BNC's fault. It's to be expected at this point in their development. But the problem is that instead of answering that question in a forthright fashion, BNC wasted three hours of my life (90 minutes of reading and 90 minutes of participation in a conference call) by evading the question so that they could get me to tell them what sort of volunteer work I was best suited to do for them. 

The folks at BNC assume that their bona fides are beyond question by progressives, so when they invite you to participate in a conference call, it's not because they intend to persuade you that they're a good fit for you; it's for them to find out what you can do for them. As an organization that will have to rely on volunteers in much the same way that Sanders did, it's obviously important for BNC to figure out how supporters can contribute to the progressive cause ASAP, but they skip the critical first step of convincing potential volunteers that supporting BNC is the best possible use of their time and energy.

Problem #3: Apart from repeated assurances of non-partisanship, nothing about the process of registering for BNC or participating in the conference call felt remotely non-partisan

Even though BNC is an avowedly "non-partisan" organization, my limited involvement made me feel like I was simply discovering a new way to hitch my wagon to the fading star of the Democratic Party. BNC has perfectly good reasons to use the Act Blue fundraising website, but their claims of non-partisanship were undermined when a browser issue (presumably a cookie created during my previous donations) caused me to finish my interaction with Act Blue on a Texas Democrats page. 

That may not be BNC's fault, but such problems will undermine confidence in their commitment to non-partisan progress. They need a clear cyber-signpost at the end of the registration process to assure people that their interaction with BNC has been concluded.

The single most disappointing thing about my conference call leader was her habit of using the word "we" to blur the lines between BNC and the Democratic Party. When she said that "we" only needed to elect a handful of senators for "us" to have a simple majority in the senate, she was plainly assuming that Democratic senators somehow automatically qualify as progressive. That's a huge part of the problem that independents such as myself have with the Democratic Party. We're sick of being told to accept warmongering corporatist advocates of the surveillance state as "progressive" simply because they are pro-choice. 

The call leader's response to my explanation of what made me interested in BNC was also disappointing. I explained that the main lesson I learned while protesting the DNC in Philadelphia is that voting for Jill Stein in 2016 isn't enough. I need to help progressives work for lower-profile, higher-impact goals.

She responded by saying that it was okay for me to vote for Stein.

What kind of person would be most likely to construe my comment as a request for permission not to vote for Hillary Clinton? A corporate Dem (or perhaps someone who spends a lot of time in the company of corporate Dems).

My skin began to crawl when she later explained that the non-partisan approach of BNC on issues like climate change would be to persuade Republicans that even if they don't accept climate change as part of reality, they can still get behind measures that will help us reduce our reliance on foreign oil. That doesn't sound like support for green energy to me; it sounds exactly like Hillary Clinton clearing her throat to explain why fracked natural gas will be a clean energy bridge to a green energy future.

Hey BNC, people like me are not going to help you raise money and win hearts and minds for the privilege of destroying the atmosphere with American natural gas instead of Saudi oil. If you're as green as your promotional materials say you are, we need you to come through on that message loud and clear.

Problem #4: I'm less confident about BNC's commitment to progressive policies after participating in the conference call than I was before

A few hours after the conference call, I received a survey from BNC with this question:

I would have checked the third option ("More skeptical") if the prompt had ended there. But I'm not more skeptical because of any doubt concerning the viability of the plan. I think it's a brilliant plan, and I absolutely think it can work. The problem is that I'm not sure it won't be co-opted by traditional Dems who will be happy to save their corporate sponsors a little money by promising not to rely on super-pac dollars. Just because candidates insist on taking small dollar donations from ordinary citizens, that doesn't mean they are committed to single-payer healthcare or ending perpetual warfare or recognizing the humanity of Palestinians or stopping the racist war on drugs or curtailing the powers of the surveillance state.

Sure, they can sign a pledge affirming that they have adopted progressive positions on all those issues, but I don't see reliable mechanisms built into BNC to ensure that the candidates BNC elects will really champion the progressive agenda once they're in office.

With all that said, I can end on at least one positive note. After I raised these concerns to BNC's help desk in a long email that I expected to go unread, a volunteer replied with a thorough and thoughtful response. 

She knew she couldn't allay all my concerns because BNC is still in embryonic form, but she did make an honest effort to engage those concerns with the information available to her at the time of the response.

For now, however, I remain unconvinced that BNC is where my civic energies can best be put to use.

The Sane Progressive Wants a Revolution Because She Knows We Need One

Debbie Lusignan, host of YouTube's The Sane Progressive, released a segment earlier today in which she took TYT's Cenk Uygur to task for "kicking the can [of revolution] down the road [of history]."

She was responding directly to Uygur's #TeamRevolution campaign, which he kicked off yesterday with a video in which he explained that "election days come and go"--and that when they don't go our way, we have to keep looking forward and thinking about what we can achieve in the future.

According to Uygur, it's unsurprising for people to claim that the election of 2016 is the most important of our lifetime--since we hear similar claims about every election.

But according to Lusignan, the claim is actually correct this time because we are on the brink of irrevocably compromising the habitability of our planet.

Although I share Lusignan's alarm about what we're doing to the planet, I think she actually understates the importance of the 2016 election because of what a Trump or Clinton presidency is likely to do to net neutrality and our ability to tell each other what we're thinking (instead of letting mainstream media tell us what everyone else is supposedly thinking).

Part of Sanders' success is attributable to widespread environmental concerns, but an even more important part of it is the fact that despite a mainstream media blackout on Sanders, he continues to attract throngs of supporters throughout the country and around the world. The role of alternative media in fueling the Sanders revolution cannot be overstated.

That's why it frightens me to hear the sense of resignation in Uygur's plea. It's one thing to say "Let's get 'em next time" at the end of a soccer tournament that we lost fair and square, but another thing to say it as we watch footage of the winning team cheating its way to victory, destroying every soccer field on the planet, and proactively working to prevent rival squads from communicating with each other about how they can get together for practice in the future.

Uygur's lack of urgency is alarming, just as it's alarming to hear so-called progressives saying that Sanders' agenda will inevitably become the future of the Democratic Party simply because it appeals to voters under 30.

In 2016, the Sanders agenda never reached the people who rely on mainstream media for information. And in 2024, a similar agenda will never reach the people who rely on an establishment-mediated internet.

But even though I share Lusignan's sense of urgency, I'm still willing to give Sanders and his team the benefit of the doubt--at least until the convention in Philadelphia.

Sanders may not be as thoroughgoing a revolutionary as Lusignan likes, but he has proven himself to be a canny and adept politician. It's reasonable to wonder why he hasn't made more of a stink about election fraud in the Democratic primaries, but it's also reasonable to consider the possibility that he is managing that narrative to his own advantage and--more importantly--to the advantage of his cause.

Winning elections means getting more people on your side than the other candidates have on theirs, and Sanders has shown a keen understanding of crowd psychology throughout the primary process. Sure, there are plenty of people like Lusignan and myself who are ready to follow him right now in a full and open assault on our deeply corrupt establishment.

But there are other people who haven't woken up yet. They would do the right thing if they knew what it was, but they haven't paid enough attention to suspect that this election is any different than the other pantomimes of democracy we go through every four years.

Sanders would have alienated those folks if he had started whining about election fraud earlier in the primaries.

Perhaps even more importantly, he would have put the Clinton campaign on guard.

By pretending not to notice what was happening, he encouraged the Clinton camp to become ever more brazen in its efforts to rig the election. What started as a deeply suspicious series of six consecutive coin tosses going Clinton's way in Iowa has since turned into rampant voter suppression in Puerto Rico and statewide fraud in California.

The evidence is certainly overwhelming enough for Sanders to present an ultimatum to the Democratic Party in Philadelphia. They can either award him the nomination that he rightly won, or he will justifiably break his pledge not to run as an independent.

Then, instead of the narrative being, "That Sanders guy is always whining about cheating," it will be, "That Sanders guy showed video evidence of cheating in almost every state. I don't blame him for turning his back on a party that screwed him over."

Maybe Lusignan is right to be distressed about Sanders' low-key speeches since the California primary. If Sanders does behave as she fears by falling in line behind Clinton, then I will be right beside Lusignan championing Jill Stein.

And I won't be hoping to get Jill Stein over the arbitrary thresholds necessary for the Greens to receive federal assistance or an invitation to the debates; I'll be fighting tooth and nail to win her the presidency because the 2016 election--even with all its irregularities and disenfranchisement--might really be the last time voters have any influence at all on an electoral outcome.

But until Sanders actually concedes and offers his support to Clinton, I'm going to trust his judgment in guiding the revolution more than Lusignan's or my own.

I think he's got some aces up his sleeve.

He's not just good at policies; he's not just good at principles; he's not just good at integrity. He's really good at politics.

#StillSanders

Parsing Comments Sanders Made on Sunday, June 12

At one point in Bernie Sanders' brief press conference on Sunday, he remarked, "We are going to take our campaign to the convention with the full understanding that we are very good at arithmetic and that we know, you know, who has received the most votes up to now."

Those who have internalized the distortions of the corporate media assumed that he was talking about Hillary Clinton as the person "who has received the most votes up to now."

I don't believe that's what he meant at all--because she doesn't have the votes that our news sources claim she has.

Evidence of rampant and systematic election fraud--not just in California, not just in New York, not just in Puerto Rico, not just in Arizona, but everywhere in the country--is prompting lawyers to file a racketeering lawsuit against the Clinton campaign.

That lawsuit will attempt to prove what many of us suspect: that Sanders has already won the Democratic nomination.

Americans don't pay attention to their own politics, much less the politics of other countries. But we need to wake up and prevent the corporate media from accomplishing the same sort of coup for corruption here that we recently saw engineered in Brazil.

In 2016, coups are no longer achieved with guns in the halls of power, but with bullets of misinformation being fired into the brains of incredibly busy and easily distracted populations.

We must oppose those bullets of misinformation with a vigorous demand for transparency.

Whatever happens in the coming days, please consider exercising your constitutionally guaranteed right to peaceful assembly in Philadelphia for the Democratic Convention at the end of July.

When we showed up on social media for Sanders, the establishment said we wouldn't show up to vote.

When we showed up at the polls, they threw out our votes, misreported them, or even turned them into votes for Hillary with the magic of their black box voting machines.

If we let them get away with it--if we fail to show up in Philadelphia--they will say that American citizens are satisfied with things the way they are.

This is the way democracy ends . . .

This is the way democracy ends . . .

This is the way democracy ends . . .

Not with a bang but a whimper--unless we show up in Philadelphia.

You can think of that qualifier at the end as Woody Allen improving on T.S. Eliot--since Allen is the one who observed that 80% of life is showing up.

My Dog Has More Sense Than Noam Chomsky

My dog Twinkie fears two household items: vacuum cleaners and bathtubs.

The roar of the vacuum scares her simply because it’s loud and annoying. She’s never had an unpleasant experience with a vacuum. There’s no traumatic tale of a suction accident in her puppyhood. She just hates and fears the racket instinctively—so much so that she will do whatever gymnastics are necessary to avoid coming within five feet of a running vacuum. 

As for bathtubs, they didn’t scare her until she learned to associate them with becoming wet and miserable.

She reacts to the sound of the vacuum running and of tap water filling the downstairs bathtub in exactly the same way. As soon as she hears either one, she freezes and then, sneakily, peers left and right, plotting the course of her escape.

One night I happened to be vacuuming the hallway just as my wife was preparing the bathtub for Twinkie, who was napping in the bedroom between us.

The nightmare clatter of the vacuum and the filling tub roused her to the doorway.

First she looked my way—presumably to see if the vacuum cleaner was far enough down the hall for her to clear it at a safe distance on her way to the doggie door.

No chance. The hallway was blocked.

She looked the other way and saw my wife approaching with her sleeves rolled up and a towel over her shoulder.

We chuckled at each other as poor Twinkie gulped in terror. For a moment, she seemed paralyzed. 

But then she made up her mind. She bolted towards me and leapt over the vacuum.

She fears the vacuum because of what it might do to her—not because of anything it’s actually done. But the bathtub makes her miserable every time she’s plunged into it, so her decision wasn't difficult.

She evaluated her options and made the correct choice.

I wish Noam Chomsky could be as clear-headed as my dog.

On one hand, Chomsky must be smarter than Twinkie because he explains the role the corporate media plays in manufacturing consent far more lucidly than my dog can. 

But on the other hand, Twinkie must be smarter than Chomsky because she understands that sometimes we have to overcome our fears of the unknown if we want to avoid an outcome that we know in advance to be miserable.

Donald Trump is as loud and annoying as any vacuum. Most of us share the instinct to steer clear of him.

Hillary Clinton makes a much more soothing sound. The gentle whoosh of flowing water is attractive to us even if there’s lead in it.

But what do Clinton’s benign words about fighting for ordinary folks really portend? Presumably the same things they’ve always portended: 1) people of color being shipped off to prisons at disproportionate rates to perform slave labor; 2) fossil fuels being called “clean” as long as their pollution takes the form of invisible methane leaks instead of visible smoke; 3) helpless women and children being championed on camera while they are systematically murdered and displaced behind the scenes as a direct result of compulsive international meddling; and 4) American citizens being deprived of the basic protections of citizenship against international corporate profiteers through instruments such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Clinton calls herself a progressive who gets things done.

She’s right—as long as your idea of progress involves enslaving an ever-broadening swath of the American population to pay for wars that they never asked for—wars that are somehow supposed to make us safer from terrorists by killing innocent civilians all over the world.

If that thoroughly predictable future is less frightening to Chomsky than the unknowns associated with a Trump presidency, he needs a phobiametric recalibration.

But the most frustrating thing about Chomsky’s coerced-by-the-circumstances endorsement of Clinton is that it buys into the very binary logic we must explode. When you get trapped in a binary, the mistake is almost always to race towards one extreme or the other.

Twinkie didn’t charge towards the vacuum to embrace it. She took the risk of coming too close to it so that she could escape to safety. Life presented her a choice between the vacuum and the bathtub, and she selected option #3: the doggie door.

For me, option #3 will be Bernie Sanders until he refuses to run any longer. I think the abundant evidence of election fraud and voter suppression in this year’s primary process may yet prove that Clinton’s campaign lacks much of the support it claims. I think it’s possible (though improbable) that James Comey of the FBI and Attorney General Loretta Lynch will hold Clinton to the same standard of law as any other American entrusted with classified information. I admit that superdelegates are unlikely to betray their donors by representing their constituents, but I remain hopeful that enough Americans will rally in Philadelphia on July 25th to pressure the Democratic Party as dramatically as Icelanders pressured their government leaders in the wake of the Panama Papers scandal. Non-violent assembly can be very persuasive when it occurs on a large enough scale. 

Maybe that’s all wishful thinking.

Maybe the Democrats really will decide that the recipe for winning the presidency is to nominate a widely despised candidate under criminal investigation—as long as her opponent is Donald Trump.

If that’s their decision and Sanders subsequently endorses Clinton, then Chomsky is free to run towards misery with his vote.

As for me, I prefer to face the dangers associated with coming too close to Trump in order to move towards a brighter, safer, healthier, saner world. Even if Sanders becomes a fearmongering party hack on Clinton’s behalf, I’ll attempt to jump over Trump by supporting Jill Stein.

The strategy of jumping will work if enough people who are paying attention (such as Chomsky and the swing state voters he hopes to influence) are willing to vote out of hope instead of fear. 

But what if it doesn’t work? What if Stein shaves off just enough votes for us to land on the surreal comb-over of an orange-faced vacuum?

That’s still preferable to ending up miserable for a minimum of four years.

The vacuum will be loud and annoying. Everyone who hears it will try to turn it off or unplug it. Frightening though it sounds, the vacuum probably isn’t going to eat us even if we land on it. 

As for the tub, we know for a certainty that it will leave us wet, shivering, and miserable. 

I don’t care how pleasant the bath tap sounds relative to the vacuum. I cannot in good conscience choose the path that leads to poisoning the planet, enslaving my fellow citizens, and murdering/displacing innocent civilians all over the globe.

I won’t be taking my cue on this one from a graying academic—however highly regarded he may be. Instead, I’ll be following the lead of a mutt rescued from a local pound. This vacuum-bathtub binary is unacceptable, so I’m taking my chances on reaching the doggie door whether I succeed or not.

Call me a low-information voter if it makes you feel better. Depict me as an unwashed mongrel if you like. But even if there is something canine about my rationale, I fail to see anything humane about Chomsky’s.

It’s really that simple. Bernie or bust.