The Political Revolution Will Continue Long After Bernie Sanders’ Campaign. Here’s How.

http://inthesetimes.com/features/political-revolution-after-bernie-sanders.html

Bernie Sanders' call for political revolution has inspired grassroots groups to continue his work even after the election is over.

By Ethan Corey

FEATURES | MAY 8, 2016

A year ago, when Bernie Sanders announced his run for president, few thought his bid would amount to more than a protest campaign. But today, after more than 2 million donors and 400,000 volunteers have helped Sanders build a highly effective political organization that has earned him victories in 18 states so far, activists are strategizing about how to turn his campaign into a long-term movement.

In nearly every state in the nation, autonomous grassroots organizations began campaigning for Sanders months before his campaign established any official presence on the ground. Ranging from state-level organizations such as Illinois for Bernie and Team Bernie NY to city and even neighborhood groups, they brought together thousands of volunteers—many of whom had never participated in electoral politics—to work together toward a common goal.

Now, those organizations are beginning to build coalitions with labor, socialist parties and progressive groups to set a post-election agenda for the political revolution. To that end, National Nurses United, which endorsed Sanders, is organizing a People’s Summit on June 17 in Chicago, while the People’s Revolution, a group founded by former Occupy organizers, is hosting a People’s Convention in Philadelphia two days before the Democratic National Convention in July. As with any project to unite the Left, however, these efforts must first grapple with long-standing divides around tactics and priorities.

“The advantage of a presidential campaign is that it unifies competing interests around a common goal,” says Charles Lenchner, cofounder with Winnie Wong of People for Bernie, one of the largest pro-Sanders grassroots organizations and a partner in the People’s Summit. “Without a candidate to rally around, the contradictions become more visible.”

One of the biggest open questions is what role Sanders and his campaign infrastructure will play. On a number of occasions, Sanders has expressed his desire to continue fighting for political revolution, win or lose. Larry Cohen, former CWA president and senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, says that Sanders will continue to be a “transformational force” in American politics well beyond the election. The Sanders campaign recently began fundraising for three progressive insurgents who are challenging Democratic incumbents: Zephyr Teachout in New York, Lucy Flores in Nevada and Pramila Jayapal in Washington. The campaign also plans to support other down-ballot candidates, according to Cohen.

Cohen thinks that Sanders will also support grassroots efforts to further his political revolution. “His own support for it won’t be centralized, but more of a facilitating role within that network,” says Cohen. “That is a characteristic of how this campaign has operated from the start, and that’s not an accident.”

“We want Bernie to share what he built in large part thanks to our help. We want to make sure it goes back to the people.”

The People’s Revolution envisions “Bernie without the Bernie,” says Jack “Jackrabbit” Pollack, who in October cofounded the group with fellow Sanders organizer Shana East. “What Bernie has shown us is that you can actually rally people around a set of policies that are really all going in a positive direction.”

The People’s Revolution sees Sanders as a critical partner in building a broad issues-based progressive movement to ensure the promise of the campaign—“A Future to Believe In”—becomes a reality. At the People’s Convention, the group plans to develop and ratify a People’s Platform to present to the Democratic National Convention and set an agenda for the broader movement.

The People’s Revolution also hopes to convince Sanders to turn over the resources his campaign has amassed—money, voter data and an email database—to the grassroots. “We want Bernie to share what he built in large part thanks to our help,” Pollack says. “We want to make sure it goes back to the people.”

To that end, an unrelated group of more than 1,000 Sanders supporters recently signed an open letter, drafted by New York teacher and labor activist Erik Forman, calling on Sanders to devote his resources toward building a permanent organization.

While he declined to go into specifics, Cohen says these questions are on Sanders’ mind as well. “There’s been a recognition by Bernie that this is about supporters feeling like they own a chunk of this campaign. That’s what accounts for the number of donations, and more importantly the number of volunteer hours.”

But Charles Lenchner cautions against relying on the Sanders campaign for direction and support. “The lesson of People for Bernie has been that you don’t need those traditional gatekeepers to make a difference,” he says. “The early weakness of the Sanders campaign was its greatest strength. People had to figure out how to build the infrastructure of a political campaign by themselves. We were able to create a massive volunteer network with almost no money at all. We want to make it as difficult as possible for outside groups to co-opt the movement that’s united behind Bernie.”

Another obstacle, of course, is that not everyone on the Left is united behind Sanders. Critics from the movement for Black lives have argued that Sanders’ focus on economic issues fails to confront the racialized nature of American capitalism.

“For too long, economic justice movements have asked people from marginalized communities to bracket their identities for the sake of the cause,” says Jessica Pierce, national co-chair of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). “It’s one thing to say, ‘This is the people’s movement,’ but who are those people and how are they coming together?” Pierce continues. “Inclusion has to be completely integrated into your organizational structure. If I’m not seeing anything in a platform that speaks to what I deal with every day as a Black person, then that’s telling me I don’t matter.”

Pierce says BYP100 has not yet been contacted by organizers of the Summit or the People’s Convention (both groups say they plan to reach out). Pierce sees strategic potential in such large-scale collaborations, but for BYP100, she says, the key question would be, “How does it help us advance our cause, too?”

Lenchner believes that addressing concerns like Pierce’s is vital to creating a sustainable long-term movement. “We need to be intentional about bringing new people into leadership positions in the movement,” he says. “One of the big challenges is that movements tend to be led by the first people who showed up. That’s not a good way to decide who leaders are. It also shouldn’t just be the people who can work the most, because they’re the ones who have enough privilege to be able to do so.”

Lenchner hopes to address such questions head-on at the People’s Summit in Chicago, as well as moving beyond the “silos” that progressives often work in. Democratic Socialists of America is joining People for Bernie and NNU in organizing the event, and they’ve brought in a diverse array of groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, People’s Action, United Students Against Sweatshops and 350.org.

The goal is to “use the opportunity of a political campaign to generate broad unity on the Left, while creating a space for people to act autonomously to pursue their own goals and interests,” Lenchner says.

“The lesson of People for Bernie has been that you don’t need those traditional gatekeepers to make a difference.”

One point of tension is the age-old question of whether to continue to engage in electoral politics. “For many of us, participation in electoral politics feels like an abusive relationship,” reads Erik Forman’s open letter to Sanders. “Many of us poured our hearts into the presidential bids of the Rainbow Coalition, or the long-shot campaigns of Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates. Many of us turned out to put Obama in the White House. … All of these electoral campaigns left little behind but broken hearts.”

Pollack, however, argues that the Sanders campaign has shown that the Left can actually win elections and use them to build power. “My experience with the Left has been that we reject electoral politics, and we agitate and we lobby,” he says. “But today Bernie is illustrating the idea that an electoral insurgency can take place that can actually push our agenda forward.”

The People’s Revolution hopes to spark similar insurgencies in future races on every level of the political system. Toward that end, they are talking with Grassroots Select, a digital collective founded by Sanders supporters to channel resources and volunteers to candidates who share Sanders’ agenda. Pollack also points to Berniecrats.net, a crowdsourced list of more than 250 pro-Bernie candidates running in 2016, as another example of how Sanders’ grassroots support can buoy other progressive candidates.

Differences on strategy aside, however, Pollack thinks the most important goal is ensuring that the political revolution promised by the Sanders campaign doesn’t fade away. “People who didn’t believe they had anything to fight for suddenly realized that they weren’t alone,” he says. “We need to organize, we need to strategize and build power to make our ideas a reality.”

This is the first in a new series on the political revolution sparked by the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the impact it's having beyond the election.

Ethan Corey is a New York-based reporter writing about politics, social movements and inequality. Follow him on Twitter at @ethanscorey.

This is the first in a new series on the political revolution sparked by the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the impact it's having beyond the election.

Chicago Election Board Meeting - 2016-04-05

0:00 Meeting opens and introductions
0:30 1st item of business (accept the results)
0:45 From the audience “Can we object?” – “No, not yet”
1:01 “Any discussion? Does not let audience know this is the time to object/discuss
1:14 Motion passes and they accept the results.
1:38 Meeting is adjourned.
1:48 You can see her visibly exhale in relief, as they have just certified the results and the public has not realized Special meeting is started (but they have already accepted the results). The entire rest of the video is essentially meaningless and just putting on a show for the public to air grievances with no legal recourse available. Really wish we could fix it, bureaucracy is bullshit. It’s all certified legally official before 2 minutes into the video.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/chicago-election-official-admits-numbers-didnt-match-hillary-clinton-vs-bernie-sanders-election-fraud-allegations/

The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World

May 13, 2016

by Luciana Bohne

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/the-great-leap-backward-americas-illegal-wars-on-the-world/

Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21st century.

If not stopped, it will be a short century.

Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people. In the 19th century, America exterminated another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (“Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.” By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.

American external imperialism was born.

Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler’s war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.

For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a “the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.

All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation” in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition parties. Behind the civilized façade was a ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world.

By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last, the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume. The global frontier reopened and America’s identity would be regenerated through violence, which had delivered the American West to the European invaders in the 19th century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s property on earth could be fulfilled.

The “civilizing mission” was afoot.

A cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. “The Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC) envisaged the 21st century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally—what the PNAC ideologues call “freedom and democracy”—through preemptive wars and regime change. This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9/11, but it was the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare before 9/11, that shut the door on the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter, remaking the map of the world into a borderless American hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty and replacing it with “right to protect” (R2P)—or humanitarian pretext for use of force.

Clinton’s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty, exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, “Changing Our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” The report recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must be noted, too, that the principle of “humanitarian war” has no authority in international law. The Charter of the United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human rights. The reason behind the proscription was not heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany, Italy, and Japan—by militarist imperialism, in other words.

The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war’s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action.

As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.

So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.

Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (“the Arab coalition”) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?

$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pacts—TTP, TTIP, etc.—that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called “Washington Consensus.”

It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global neoliberalism and core finance capital’s economic control of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option to poverty and social chaos.

Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of nations has yielded anything close to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death, destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden called “the international wrong,” which he named “imperialism” in his poem “September 1939,” is the crisis that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces, and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where imperialism drives.

In this scenario, no potential presidential candidate—even establishment-party dissenter—who does not call for both the end of the bi-partisan “Washington Consensus” and the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the “international wrong” or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle “imperialism,” elections will be a sleepwalker’s exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.

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Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: lbohne@edinboro.edu