A Confederacy of Dunces: The Democratic Establishment’s Assault on Sanders Begins

by John Atcheson

http://commondreams.org/views/2016/01/26/confederacy-dunces-democratic-establishments-assault-sanders-begins

"When a true genius appears in your world, you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are against him in a confederacy."
—Jonathan Swift

Well, it’s started.  You knew it would.  The Democratic establishment is going into attack mode as their anointed one  – Hillary Clinton – is in danger of losing.

Take a look at some of the assaults that have been launched within the last five days:

Sandy Goodman, a former producer at NBC Nightly News, published a piece on the Huffington Post, entitled, Voting for Sanders is Voting Republican. The fact that Bernie does better than Hillary against Republicans is an inconvenient fact Goodman ignores in this ludicrous hit piece;

Paul Krugman’s column last Friday suggested that progressives voting for Sanders weren’t being “adults” and had no idea how change occurred – in Krugman’s world, change doesn’t come from the people, apparently. It comes from party apparatchiks working with the plutocracy;

Thomas Friedman, another New York Times columnist, essentially called Sanders a communist – something he knows isn’t true, but it’s a great scare tactic;

President Obama said Bernie Sanders' ideas haven’t yet been tested and went on to heap praise on Hillary.  It wasn’t an endorsement, but it came mighty close.

All of these are coming from credentialed liberals who have been staunch supporters of the Democratic Party.  And therein lies the problem. The Democratic Party’s interests are no longer aligned with the people’s interests and they haven’t been for a long time.  

And this comes after Debbie Wassermann Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, set up the modern era’s first stealth debate program, designed to guarantee a coronation for Mrs. Clinton and keep real progressives like Sanders and O’Malley under wraps.

But it’s not just the press and the Party.  Civil institutions, environmental groups, and unions that should be with the people – and therefore with Sanders – are lining up to back Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s traditional PAC candidate. 

The bottom line is, the institutions that used to represent the people no longer derive their power from the people, so they are threatened by Sanders, because he does. 

Make no mistake – this is about power

After decades, a right-wing cabal of the uber-wealthy, in conjunction with corporations, has literally seized control of government.

Not only have they rolled back controls on Wall Street, turned elections into a bidding war in which politicians are purchased like livestock, and pared government funds down to the point where it can no longer function; they’ve also set up the rules so that corporations are our largest recipients of welfare and the 1% walks away with all the spoils. Incredibly, they’ve convinced people it’s good for them.

And Democrats have been co-authors of the problem. Even when poll after poll showed that the majority of American people are left of center on an issue-by-issue basis, Democrats inched to the center and then to the right of center … where, until a few months ago, is where you’d find Hillary, by the way.  

Bottom line: until Sanders, the terms of the national debate were dictated by the Plutocracy, and there was no way to pierce the interlocking web of money, media, and myth the Oligarchs constructed.  Oh, there were voices – but they were largely consigned to the fringes of society, with little or no chance of breaking through to reach the masses of people who’ve been duped, fleeced, and fooled into believing that government is inevitably inept, taxes are a curse, and an uber-free market is our salvation.

Some of the players in media are a part of this process; some are merely so immersed in the system they’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always this way.  But either way …

The Revolution has not been televised—but the counterattack will be.  

Up until now, the mainstream media has all but ignored Sanders, despite the record crowds, the good poll numbers, and the record-breaking contributions from everyday Americans. 

But of course, the better he does with the people, the more he threatens their power base—which is their relationship with corporations and the uber-rich and the PACs they fund.  Now that Sanders has become a real threat to their dominance, brace yourself for the well-financed counter attack that’s coming soon to a media outlet near you.

It will be nasty. It will be swift. It will be merciless.

They will use fear. They will use bigotry. They will use greed. And – oh, yes – they will use money. Lots of money.

The most dangerous of all, though, may be those who are so inured to the system, they can’t see the prospect of real change – of a real, and much needed, revolution.

In Sanders we have a leader who – against all odds – has broken through the rigged system, reached out to us, and given voice to the 99% who’ve been left behind.  

If we choose, choose courage over fear. We must choose tolerance over jingoism, hate and bigotry. We must hold a belief in our own industry, resourcefulness and ability over the siren song of magic markets and easy money. If we stand together, then we can put this evil genie back in its bottle and we can take back our country and make government work again – for all of us.

That is the source of our power.  And it is the only power that can take on the establishment confederacy that is now gathering against us.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.

Marginalizing the Ones You Impoverish

[…]

Hillary Clinton’s website says all the right things when it comes to boosting incomes and job creation—just enough information so one can enter a voting booth and with a hazy rationale pull the lever against your own interests. Candidates like Clinton may wax empathetic talking about the poor, but the reality that Democrats and their Republican colleagues have created over the last four decades is deeply different from the fuzzy optimism of their websites. Bernie Sanders is the outlier. He has consistently punctuated the “rigged” system that benefits the one percent at the expense of everyone else. He seems the only candidate willing to launch a real jobs program, rather than tinkering with small business taxes or new lending regimes that will theoretically produce job growth but in the end deliver just the sliver of sound-byte ‘progress’ needed for the re-election campaign.

Aside from Sanders, though, Democrats aren’t interested enough to acknowledge the depth of the American malaise. For instance, that most Americans haven’t got a $1000 in savings. That household wealth is cratering. 

That workers haven’t seen a raise this century. That one in four children lives in poverty. That 640,000 individuals exited the labor market last month, though these people aren’t counted in the widely reported unemployment rate. This last point reflects the Bill Clinton’s innovative formula for disguising the poor: to be uncounted is to be unseen, and to be unseen is to be non-existent. Clinton also found that the formula worked nicely for welfare reform.

Instead, as we’ll see in Philadelphia this summer at the Democratic National Convention, Clintonites will arrive touting the millions of jobs produced on Obama’s watch. No one will mention what kind of jobs these are, or that they represent our glide path into third-world economic status. If the created jobs are so desirable, why are half of the 24 million citizens that rely on food banks already employed?

[…]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/27/slouching-toward-hillary/

From Whitewater to Benghazi: A Clinton-Scandal Primer

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/tracking-the-clinton-controversies-from-whitewater-to-benghazi/396182/

There are at least 22 top-secret emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server. The question is how they got there and when they became top secret.

That fact comes from the State Department on Friday—the Obama administration’s first public confirmation of classified material on the server. However, “these documents were not marked classified at the time they were sent,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

The mailer demon continues to haunt Hillary Clinton’s campaign, even as the Iowa caucuses approach. The first indications of the 22 top-secret emails came in recent reports from Fox News, NBC News, and Politico. Charles McCullough, inspector general of the Intelligence Community, wrote in a letter that the private email server Clinton used to conduct business while secretary of state contained information about “special access programs.” That label applies to a subcategory of sensitive messages more restricted even than top secret. Kirby said the 22 emails include data about the special access programs.

The State Department and the Intelligence Community have previously tangled over a different pair of emails. The IC argued that the emails were top secret both at the time they were sent and in the present, while the State Department demurred. The dispute led to an FBI investigation. The emails in question in this case are newly unearthed messages, not ones that were previously under discussion.

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Among the Hillary Haters

In addition, some of Clinton’s emails—which the State Department is currently releasing in batches, per a judge’s orders—have been found to include information that is now marked top secret, but which depending on who you believe was not or possibly was top secret at the time it was sent. Clinton and her aides have consistently maintained that she did not send or receive classified information on the account while secretary. (She says she used a separate system for viewing classified material.) And so far, despite various reports and salvos from the various parties involved, there hasn’t been any clear evidence to contradict that. Yet there are many emails left, and there continue to be reports that suggest there may be more damaging information yet to come—a sword of Damocles hanging over the Clinton campaign, even as the candidate seeks to beat back a strong challenge from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic nomination.

In an additional twist of irony, the “special access programs” involved appear to be drone strikes, which the U.S. government officially maintains are secret, even though the press reports on them frequently, and White House officials have spoken about them on the record and privately to reporters.

Are you confused yet?

The emails have become a classic Clinton scandal. Her use of a private email account became known during the course of the Benghazi investigation. Thus far, the investigations have found no wrongdoing on her part with respect to the 2012 attacks themselves, but Clinton’s private-email use and concerns about whether she sent classified information have become huge stories unto themselves. This is a pattern with the Clinton family, which has been in the public spotlight since Bill Clinton’s first run for office, in 1974: Something that appears potentially scandalous on its face turns out to be innocuous, but an investigation into it reveals different questionable behavior. The canonical case is Whitewater, a failed real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Clinton made in 1978. While no inquiry ever produced evidence of wrongdoing, investigations ultimately led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice.

With Hillary Clinton leading the field for the Democratic nomination for president, every Clinton scandal—from Whitewater to the State Department emails—will be under the microscope. (No other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.) Keeping track of each controversy, where it came from, and how serious it is, is no small task, so here’s a primer. We’ll update it as new information emerges.

What? Setting aside the question of the Clintons’ private email server, what’s actually in the emails that Clinton did turn over to State? While some of the emails related to Benghazi have been released, there are plenty of others covered by public-records laws that haven’t.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Serious. Initially, it seemed that the interest in the emails would stem from damaging things that Clinton or other aides had said: cover-ups, misrepresentations, who knows? But so far, other than some cringeworthy moments of sucking up and some eye-rolly emails from contacts like Sidney Blumenthal, the emails have been remarkably boring. The main focus now is on classification. We know that some of the material in the emails is now classified. The question is whether any of it, and how much of it, was classified at the time it was sent. Clinton has said she didn’t knowingly send or receive classified material on the account. The State Department and Intelligence Community have disagreed about that. In addition, the Intelligence Community’s inspector general wrote in a January letter that Clinton’s server contained information marked “special access program,” higher even than top secret. Some emails that Clinton didn’t turn over have also since surfaced.

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Benghazi

What? On September 11, 2012, attackers overran a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Since then, Republicans have charged that Hillary Clinton failed to adequately protect U.S. installations or that she attempted to spin the attacks as spontaneous when she knew they were planned terrorist operations. She testifies for the first time on October 22.

When? September 11, 2012-present

How serious is it? Benghazi has gradually turned into a classic “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” scenario. Only the fringes argue, at this point, that Clinton deliberately withheld aid. A House committee continues to investigate the killings and aftermath, but Clinton’s marathon appearance before the committee in October was widely considered a win for her. However, it was through the Benghazi investigations that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server became public—a controversy that remains potent.

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Conflicts of Interest in Foggy Bottom

What? Before becoming Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills worked for Clinton on an unpaid basis for four month while also working for New York University, in which capacity she negotiated on the school’s behalf with the government of Abu Dhabi, where it was building a campus. In June 2012, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin’s status at State changed to “special government employee,” allowing her to also work for Teneo, a consulting firm run by Bill Clinton’s former right-hand man. She also earned money from the Clinton Foundation and was paid directly by Hillary Clinton.

Who? Both Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin are among Clinton’s longest-serving and closest aides. Abedin remains involved in her campaign (and she’s also married to Anthony Weiner).

When? January 2009-February 2013

How serious is it? This is arcane stuff, to be sure. There are questions about conflict of interest—such as whether Teneo clients might have benefited from special treatment by the State Department while Abedin worked for both. To a great extent, this is just an extension of the tangle of conflicts presented by the Clinton Foundation and the many overlapping roles of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

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The Clintons’ Private Email Server

What? During the course of the Benghazi investigation, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt learned Clinton had used a personal email account while secretary of state. It turned out she had also been using a private server, located at a house in New York. The result was that Clinton and her staff decided which emails to turn over to the State Department as public records and which to withhold; they say they then destroyed the ones they had designated as personal.

When? 2009-2013, during Clinton’s term as secretary.

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; top aides including Huma Abedin

How serious is it? It looks more serious all the time. The rules governing use of personal emails are murky, and Clinton aides insist she followed the rules. There’s no dispositive evidence otherwise so far. The greater political problem for Clinton is it raises questions about how she selected the emails she turned over and what was in the ones she deleted. The FBI has reportedly managed to recover some of the deleted correspondence. Could the server have been hacked? Some of the emails she received on her personal account are marked sensitive. Plus there’s a entirely different set of questions about Clinton’s State Department emails. The FBI is investigating the security of the server as well as the safety of a thumb drive belonging to her lawyer that contains copies of her emails. And the AP reports that the setup may have made the server vulnerable to hacking. Given the shabby state of State Department cybersecurity, she might not have been any better off using the official system.

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Sidney Blumenthal

What? A former journalist, Blumenthal was a top aide in the second term of the Bill Clinton administration and helped on messaging during the bad old days. He served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and when she took over the State Department, she sought to hire Blumenthal. Obama aides, apparently still smarting over his role in attacks on candidate Obama, refused the request, so Clinton just sought out his counsel informally. At the same time, Blumenthal was drawing a check from the Clinton Foundation.

When? 2009-2013

How serious is it? Some of the damage is already done. Blumenthal was apparently the source of the idea that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous, a notion that proved incorrect and provided a political bludgeon against Clinton and Obama. He also advised the secretary on a wide range of other issues, from Northern Ireland to China, and passed along analysis from his son Max, a staunch critic of the Israeli government (and conservative bête noire). But emails released so far show even Clinton’s top foreign-policy guru, Jake Sullivan, rejecting Blumenthal’s analysis, raising questions about her judgment in trusting him.

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The Speeches

What? Since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, both Clintons have made millions of dollars for giving speeches.

When? 2001-present

Who? Hillary Clinton; Bill Clinton; Chelsea Clinton

How serious is it? At one time, this seemed like the most dangerous of the bunch, but it has since gone dormant—which isn’t to say that it’s dead. For the couple, who left the White House up to their ears in legal debt, lucrative speeches—mostly by the former president—proved to be an effective way of rebuilding wealth. They have also been an effective magnet for prying questions. Where did Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton speak? How did they decide how much to charge? What did they say? How did they decide which speeches would be given on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, with fees going to the charity, and

[…]