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Is America Undergoing a Major Political Sea Change? Inside the Shocking Rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/america-undergoing-major-political-sea-change-exploring-shocking-rise-bernie-sanders?akid=13338.123424.tn7jbS&rd=1&src=newsletter1040052&t=1

2015-07-30 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Add MediaSource: AlterNet

Author: Stephan Rosenfeld

Emphasis Mine

America’s political center, if it ever really existed, appears to be shrinking.

On the left, Bernie Sanders’ issue-oriented presidential campaign of economic justice is drawing the crowds and generating the most passion, eclipsing his more moderate competitors. And on the right, Donald Trump’s loud promises to use his dealmaking moxie to fix the country, with a dose of racist comments thrown in, has pushed him to the top of the polls in 2016’s early states.

There’s no shortage of pundits writing off their surges. Surely, you’ve heard them all, which amount to saying that when the campaign gets serious, they will seriously falter. The latest analyses from this past weekend’s polling noted that both were doing well in two of the whitest states—Iowa and New Hampshire—but not in bigger, more diverse ones. So now these hallowed presidential proving grounds prove nothing?

But there is one explanation you won’t find among the politicos who are parsing the interior numbers in polls—such as the negative approval ratings, or appeal by race and gender. That explanation is that the political spectrum is changing, or stretching toward its blunter extremes, which also accounts for the muted enthusiasm for both party’s leading establishment candidates, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

A shifting electorate is the last thing many pundits want to confront. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, pointing to four recent polls, merely says Hillary should worry about her rising unpopularity. He does not touch the deeper question: is she out of tune with what’s engaging the public now? His colleague, Phillip Bump says she’s lagging among whites in Iowa and New Hampshire, but climbs back up in later states where she appeals to non-whites. Sanders and Trump aren’t doing that, he said.

At Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, another go-to site for reporters to get zeitgeist quotes, the reflex is to dismiss both Trumps and Sanders for different reasons, rather than probe how the electorate may be shifting. Trump’s surge, according to associate editor Geoffrey Skelly, is because he’s well-known, loud, in a crowded field, and keeps getting press coverage. Even worse, the GOP idiotically tied participation in its upcoming presidential debate to how candidates are polling, he said, where Trump will be “attacked from all sides.”

One can go very far in political analysis by being cynical. But that does not mean you’ve got your finger on a changing pulse. Politico’s piece on Trump’s latest rise in New Hampshire and Iowa points to the politics of anger, especially against Washington power-brokers, which includes the GOP’s congressional majority.

“Just 16 percent among all Republicans (15 percent of Republican registered voters… [and] 50 percent of Democrats (51 percent of Democratic registered voters) feel that they are [well] represented in the nation’s capital,” it reported. “Among independents, just 27 percent feel well-represented.”

What are people angry about? Who is giving voice to their problems, or offering solutions? CNN says the top concerns facing voters are the economy (44 percent), health care (20 percent) and terrorism (12 percent). If those numbers are accurate, it is not surprising that Sanders and Trump, on the left and right, have captivated voters because they are speaking outside the safe centrist political box.

Trump’s bragging that most of politics comes down to being the best negotiator has an appeal when the Republican-controlled Congress is bumbling at best. His slaps at immigrants are ugly, but there have always been racists in modern Republican ranks. Today’s GOP is not the party of Lincoln, nor is it Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-corporate reformers. Most of their 2016 candidates have been recycling Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric or predictable policies benefitting the upper classes.

While it remains to be seen what broad new agenda will emerge on the right, it is not surprising that the cliché-ridden remedies spouted by a field of predictable candidates isn’t creating much excitement, even as they try to out-do each other on the far right. Trump’s rise strongly suggests something in the GOP’s base is shifting.

Bernie Sanders’ surge is more easily traced, and also shows shifting voter sensibilities. His messaging has been saturated with specifics, from his speeches to e-mails. On Monday morning, he sent out a long missive seeking $3 donations that listed 12 issue areas and his solutions: jobs, jobs, jobs; raising wages; wealth and income inequality; reforming Wall St.; campaign finance reform; fighting climate change; health care for all; protecting our most vulnerable; expanding opportunity and equality; dismantling structural racism; college for all; war and peace. This is not political fundraising as usual.

It is easy to say that Sanders, like Elizabeth Warren before him, is pulling the Democrats closer to their progressive heart. But Sanders would not be as successful as he has been if Democrats in the electorate were not embracing his message. As one of Iowa’s leading pro-Democrat bloggers, BleedingHeartland.com, wrote this weekend, “Bernie Sanders continues to draw the largest crowds in Iowa–including roughly 1,200 people in West Des Moines on Friday—and polls indicate that he is cutting into Hillary Clinton’s lead among likely Democratic caucus-goers.”

Clinton still led Sanders by 29 points, 55 percent to 26 percent, with Martin O’Malley at 4 percent and Jim Webb at 2 percent, it reported, citing the latest polls. But “his message is resonating with a sizable part of the Democratic base, as anyone could see on Friday night during his town-hall meeting at West Des Moines Valley High School. I challenge any Democrat to find one substantive point to disagree with in Sanders’ stump speech. Many people who attend his events are already ‘feeling the Bern.’ My impression is that the undecideds who show up walk away giving him their serious consideration. I doubt anyone leaves a Sanders event thinking, ‘I could never caucus for that guy.’”

BleedingHeartland continued, “Listening to Sanders on Friday, I was again struck by the senator’s distinctive way of speaking. He packs a lot of facts and figures into his remarks without sounding wonky. He conveys a lot of passion without raising his voice often. Compared to many candidates, he says very little about his children and grandchildren. Still, his feelings about family come through loud and clear when he contrasts Republican ideas about ‘family values’ (a ‘woman shouldn’t be able to control her own body’) with what family values should mean (for instance, a mom and dad having paid time off from work so they can get to know their new baby). Although the Sanders stump speech is overly long—pushed well past the one-hour mark by many interruptions for applause—he keeps his listeners’ attention. Even my 12-year-old was still engaged….”

Next years’ presidential caucuses are a long way off, and the November election is even further away. It’s easy for pundits to dismiss Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, for different reasons, with respect to their eventual prospects. But doing so can overlook what’s happening now, which is the assumed frames, views and mood of the electorate are shifting, or stretching, or changing, and favoring the blunt and unconventional.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/america-undergoing-major-political-sea-change-exploring-shocking-rise-bernie-sanders?akid=13338.123424.tn7jbS&rd=1&src=newsletter1040052&t=1

What Trump’s Surging Popularity Says About the GOP Base

The word “fascist” has been abused by the left over the years. But a look at Trump’s rhetoric shows scary parallels.

2015-07-27 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Salon, via AlterNet

Author: Connor Lynch

Emphasis Mine

(N.B.: about 30 years ago I read in the Humanist magazine that religious fundamentalism appealed to those who liked simple answers to complex questions. Given that, we might expect that voter block to be drawn to the Donald…)

In the political discussion of today, there always comes a risk of being discounted as a crackpot when using a word like “fascist” to describe a political opponent. The word, much like “socialist,” has been so abused since the fall of fascism that it lost its meaning quite some time ago. Comparisons of modern leaders to Hitler tend to be completely void of any substance, and there is even an Internet adage, “Godwin’s law,” that says, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

In a recent article by Jeffrey Tucker, however, it is argued, quite justly in my opinion, that Donald Trump, whether he knows it or not, is a fascist (or is at least acting like one). Much like Mussolini and Hitler, Trump is a demagogue dedicated to riling up the people (particularly conservatives) with race baiting, traditionalism and strongman tough and, according to polls, it’s working — for now. Tucker writes:

“Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.”

No doubt about it, Donald Trump has decided to stir the pot, and, as Tucker says, he seems to be running for a CEO position, rather than president of a nation. Trump discusses Iran and Mexico as if they were competing corporations, and says that, as president, or CEO, he will drive them into the ground, make them file for bankruptcy — something Trump legitimately knows a thing or two about. Trump, of course, is largely taken as a joke, and most rational commentators assume he is doing this for publicity — which he is certainly getting.

The thing is, his style — full of race baiting, xenophobia and belligerent nationalism — is not unique to Trump; he is simply the most blatant and vocal about it. There’s a reason he’s leading in the GOP polls: the party’s base likes what he’s saying. The people are angry about illegal immigrants murdering white women (anyone who has followed Bill O’Reilly over the past week knows what I’m talking about), homosexuals destroying the tradition of marriage, and so on. Much like fascism reacted to modernity and social progress in the early 20th century, right-wingers are reacting angrily to social progress of the new century. (Of course, there has been no economic progress, which is why the left is also angry.)

So is the GOP becoming the new fascist party? That might be an exaggeration, but it does share many similar features, and Trump, with his demagogic style, is simply exposing how very similar the passions of the GOP base are to the passions of fascism of the early 20th century.

The modern GOP is a party of unwavering and dogmatic patriotism mixed with traditionalism and intolerance. The social progression we have been witnessing over the past decade in America, most clearly with the acceptance of the LGBT community, seems to be triggering a reactionary movement on the right. We see this most recently with the religious freedom controversies and the angry protests of the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. Fascism of the early 20th century was also largely a negative reaction to modernity (in a social sense at least; fascists did tend to worship technology). Communism, which was the ultimate evil to fascists, promoted the destruction of traditional institutions such as the family, the bourgeois state and organized religion. In some ways, fascism was the conservative answer to communism — the defender of tradition.

It was also a very contradictory ideology, as Umberto Eco describes in his essay, “Ur-Fascism: “Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market?”

The modern GOP is also somewhat contradictory. Its followers, for example, promote free market ideals and despise welfare for the poor, while exclaiming the worship of Jesus Christ, whose teachings are almost socialistic.

Overall, however, the GOP has a pretty straightforward idea of its platform. Like fascism, tradition is holy — the tradition of marriage, family values, Christian ideals. Controversy over the confederate flag has also been based largely on tradition — a tradition that the South cannot give up. Another similarity is its belligerence. After news of the Iran deal agreement came out last week, the GOP faithfuls were outraged that America would actually practice diplomacy with an Islamic country in the Middle East. President Obama responded to criticism from the right by saying,

“I challenge those who are objecting to this agreement to, Number One, read the agreement, explain specifically where they think… and then present an alternative. If the alternative is we should bring Iran to heel through military force, then those critics should say so.”

The GOP alternative would indeed be military force, as it has been many times before. (This is not to say the Democratic party is not also a belligerent force, which it is. But clearly not as outright hawkish as the GOP).

Beyond these values, the GOP tends to preach and practice intolerance, xenophobia, nationalism and anti-democratic values (i.e., voter suppression). In many ways, the GOP is anti-enlightenment, and embraces passion over reason. The dangerous denial of climate change and other scientific facts seems to come out of the corrupt alliance of anti-intellectual traditionalism and corporate influence (i.e., oil and gas).

Now, the fact of the matter is that fascism died in the mid-20th century. The GOP are obviously not fascists, but they share a family resemblance. As stated above, the base have many similar passions — traditionalism, nationalism, intolerance towards immigrants or minorities. They react with hostility towards the social progress of others and largely believe in a ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology.

Giovanni Gentile, the “philosopher of fascism” and ghostwriter for Mussolini, said of the definition of fascism in the Encyclopedia of Italiana: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” This definition may very well fit the GOP ideology: a kind of corporate fascism, where large corporations have the ultimate power; where the politicians spew a hateful, intolerant ideology based on “traditional” values, on a platform funded by corporate interests, elected by the people to serve those very corporate interests; and deny environmental degradation because it would be unprofitable for the funders to do anything about it, using the anti-intellectual hostility to convince the people that it is nothing more than a left-wing conspiracy.

Donald Trump is no doubt a wealthy buffoon — but he is a buffoon who understands the underlying passions of the GOP base. Fascist leaders also understood these passions, and knew how to exploit them for political gain. These passions may seem irrational, but they should not be underestimated.

Conor Lynch is a writer and journalist living in New York City. His work has appeared on Salon, The Hill, AlterNet, and openDemocracy. Follow him on Twitter.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/what-trumps-surging-popularity-says-about-gop-base?akid=13333.123424.h42YOV&rd=1&src=newsletter1039927&t=5

10 Brutal Ways the American Safety Net Is Being Shredded

http://www.alternet.org/economy/10-brutal-ways-american-safety-net-being-shredded?akid=13331.123424.rqA_Q7&rd=1&src=newsletter1039872&t=1

2015-07-26 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: alterNet

Author: Alex Henderson

Emphasis Mine

On the 80th anniversary of the Social Security Act of 1935, which established the social security system in the United States, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal is on life support as the American middle class continues to be squeezed and millions of Americans struggle with poverty.

1. Income Inequality Is Going from Bad to Worse

FDR firmly believed that capitalism cannot function well without a strong middle class, and even auto magnate Henry Ford agreed with him: Ford famously said that American workers needed to be paid a decent wage in order to be able to afford his products. And during the post-FDR America of the 1950s and 1960s, having a robust middle class was great for a variety of businesses. But in 2015—with the gains of the New Deal having been imperiled by everything from union busting to the outsourcing of millions of American jobs—income inequality in the U.S. is a huge problem. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently released a report on income inequality among OECD members and found that the U.S. was among the worst offenders. The U.S., Mexico and Turkey had some of highest income inequality of OECD countries, while Denmark, the Czech Republic, Finland, Iceland and Belgium fared much better. OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría commented that “high inequality is bad for growth,” and he’s absolutely right.

2. Republicans Yearn for Social Security Privatization

Although President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Republican, he supported elements of the New Deal and saw the need for a strong social safety net: in fact, Eisenhower expanded social security, and in 1954, he bluntly asserted that any oligarchs who would “attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor law and farm programs” were “stupid.” But in the 21st century, Republicans have been going after social security with a vengeance. The privatization of social security was proposed by President George W. Bush in 2004, and far-right Republicans, the Tea Party and wingnut lobbying groups like the Club for Growth have been doubling down on the idea of privatizing social security. GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush called for social security privatization at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in June, and he also favors raising the social security retirement age to 69 or 70, which would be especially bad for blue-collar workers who have spent decades in physically demanding jobs.

3. The 1% Continue to Dodge Taxes

FDR had no problem asking the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes: the U.S.’ top marginal tax rate rose to 94% in the early 1940s, when the country entered World War II. Taxes for the ultra-rich didn’t go down much under Republican Eisenhower, who lowered the top tax rate to 91% in the 1950s—and after that rate decreased to 28% under President Reagan, it rose to 39.6% under President Clinton and decreased to 35% under President George W. Bush. Looking at the last 80 years of tax history, one sees a clear pattern: the American middle class does much better when the 1% pay their fair share of taxes. And even though the Tea Party tries to paint Barack Obama as a soak-the-rich president, their assertion is laughable because Obama extended the Bush tax cuts and hasn’t been nearly as forceful as FDR or Eisenhower when it comes to taxing the 1%.

4. The Minimum Wage Is Much Too Low

One of the important elements of the New Deal was FDR’s strong belief in a national minimum wage. FDR began to push for a federal minimum wage after taking office in January 1933, saying, “By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level. I mean the wages of a decent living.” And Congress enacted one in 1938, when the U.S.’ first federal minimum wage was set at 25 cents per hour. But in recent years, the federal minimum wage (which was raised to $7.25 an hour in 2009) has not kept up with inflation. Economist Robert Reich has proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, which he sees as a crucial part of economic recovery. And in some cities, including Los Angeles and Seattle, city councils have raised their local minimum wages to that amount. But at the federal level, an increase to even $10.10 an hour (President Obama’s proposal) is a steep uphill climb when both houses of Congress are dominated by far-right Republicans who hate the poor with a passion.

The U.S. desperately needed a New Deal 3.0 after the crash of September 2008 and a program of aggressive reforms. Instead, most of the welfare that followed the Panic of 2008 has been corporate welfare rather than programs to help America’s embattled poor and middle class. Overall, the U.S. has been moving away from the New Deal when it should be reinvigorating it. Below are 10 ways in which the New Deal (and by extension, LBJ’s Great Society) continues to be under attack in the United States.

5. Infrastructure Continues to Deteriorate

The New Deal was great for the U.S.’ infrastructure thanks to programs that built or strengthened everything from roads to water and electric systems to municipal power plants. But in recent years, the American infrastructure has been seriously decaying—and a major wake-up call came on May 12, when an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia and eight passengers were killed. But the nation’s railways are only one of the ways in which the U.S.’ infrastructure has deteriorated. According to Ray LaHood (former secretary of transportation for the Obama Administration), 70,000 bridges in the U.S. are now structurally deficient. That is in addition to all the roads that are in desperate need of repair. And when it comes to high-speed rail travel, the U.S. lags way behind Europe (where one can get from London to Brussels in just under two hours or from Madrid to Barcelona in less than three hours).

6. Union Representation Has Reached Historic Lows

One of the most important pieces of New Deal-era legislation was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, a.k.a. the Wagner Act, which did a lot to advance labor unions in the U.S.: by the mid-1950s, around 35% of America’s labor force was unionized. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a mere 11.1% of salaried U.S. workers (factoring in both the public and private sectors) were union members in 2014. Among private-sector workers, the number was a paltry 6.6%. And the decline of unions has been encouraged bad working conditions: according to the Economic Policy Institute, executives at large companies earned, on average, 296 times as much as their average workers in 2013 compared to only 20 times as much in 1965. But as much as labor unions have declined in the U.S., Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (a GOP presidential hopeful for 2016) and his fellow Republicans would like to see them decline even more. Walker recently set a disturbing precedent in that state when he supported anti-union legislation that prohibits private-sector unions from requiring members to pay union dues; Walker has, in essence, made Wisconsin a northern “right to work” state. And it’s safe to say that Walker, based on his actions in Wisconsin, would be among the most anti-union presidents in U.S. history.

7. “Too Big to Fail” Is Bigger Than Ever

Unlike many of today’s extreme-right Republicans and neoliberal corporatist Democrats, FDR was not afraid of offending the banking sector. FDR said of the banksters of the 1930s, “They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.” One of the New Deal achievements that banksters detested was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which mandated a strict separation of commercial and investment banking and was designed to prevent another major Wall Street calamity like the crash of 1929. Glass-Steagall served the U.S. well for many years: although there were some tough recessions in the mid-1970s, early 1980s and early 1990s, none of them cut as deep as the Great Depression. But the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 was a major blow to the New Deal and paved the way for the crash of September 2008, clearly the most devastating financial event in the U.S. since 1929. Unfortunately, there was no real banking reform after the 2008 calamity, and as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders points out, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are now “80% larger” than they were in 2007. Critics of the banking sector propose bringing back Glass-Steagall, including Reich (who warns that another major Wall Street crash “is not unlikely”) and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. And Sanders has proposed New Deal-like legislation that would break up the U.S.’ largest banks.

8. Medicare, An Expansion of the New Deal, Is a Major GOP Target

Medicare, which established a single-payer health care system for Americans 65 and older, was not part of the New Deal per se: Medicare came into being in 1965 as part of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society (which was very much an extension of the New Deal). And the program proved to be so popular that even Republican President Richard Nixon (who was considered an arch-conservative in his day) expanded Medicare in both 1969 and 1972. But these days, far-right GOP wingnuts in the House of Representatives—especially Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee—have repeatedly called for drastic Medicare cuts and for replacing traditional Medicare with a privatized voucher program. In June, a variety of pro-Medicare groups (including the Alliance for Retired Americans and the Medicare Rights Center) sent a joint letter to the House criticizing representatives who wanted to cut $700 million from the Medicare program.

9. Home Ownership Is Becoming Increasingly Difficult for Many Americans, and the Rent Is Too Damn High

Before the New Deal, five-year or 10-year mortgages were the norm in the U.S., and were unaffordable for most Americans. But FDR saw home ownership as a crucial part of building a strong middle class: between the Federal Housing Administration, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the introduction of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages—all of which came about under FDR—home ownership in the U.S. gradually increased. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, home ownership in the U.S. went from 45% in 1920 and 47% in 1930 to 55% in 1950, 61% in 1960 and 62% in 1970. But the Crash of 2008 has been terrible for American homeowners, resulting in countless foreclosures, and banksters have been allowed to acquire and rent out many foreclosed homes. The private equity firm Blackstone Group had, as of late 2013, bought almost 40,000 homes in the U.S. in order to rent them. To make matters worse, all those post-2008 foreclosures have caused rents to skyrocket all over the country. And the more one pays in rent, the harder it is to save for a down payment on a home. To quote Jimmy McMillan, the rent is too damn high.

10. Wingnut Attacks on Food Stamps Never End

The American food stamps program started on a pilot basis under FDR’s secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, in 1939 but became permanent when LBJ signed the Food Stamp Act of 1964 into law as part of his Great Society. In recent years, the U.S.’ economic decline has been so painful that, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of Americans poor enough to quality for food stamps was 46.2 million in 2014 compared to only 17 million in 2000. Food stamps, as envisioned under the New Deal and the Great Society, are designed to be a stepping stone for the poor—and the benefits (which presently average $127.91 per month per person, according to USDA figures) are hardly lavish. But that has not prevented Republicans in Congress from repeatedly proposing dramatic food stamp cuts during the Great Recession. And in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker has been trying to punish and shame food stamp recipients by subjecting them to drug-testing.

Alex Henderson’s work has appeared in the L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Spin, Creem, the Pasadena Weekly and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter @alexvhenderson.

See: http://www.alternet.org/economy/10-brutal-ways-american-safety-net-being-shredded?akid=13331.123424.rqA_Q7&rd=1&src=newsletter1039872&t=1

Three Things to Know About That Terrifying New Climate Study

Science and politics are both in play as scientists warn of dire sea-level rise.

2015-07-22 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: TakePart

Author: Emily Gertz

Emphasis Mine

James Hansen is one of the most respected and recognizable names in climate science.

When this ex-NASA researcher speaks, reasonable people listen. That good reputation has made his latest research finding that much more frightening.

That good reputation has made his latest research finding that much more frightening.

According to a new paper by Hansen and 16 equally expert coauthors, seas could rise by 10 feet within 50 to 85 years, making coastal communities and cities worldwide uninhabitable.

Whether this is good or bad depends on what you think and believe about the intersection of science and climate change with politics. But this much is true: The international climate action process has not slowed global warming. And Hansen and colleagues have been transparent about their motivations.is one of the most respected and recognizable names in climate science. When this ex-NASA researcher speaks, reasonable people listen.

That good reputation has made his latest research finding that much more frightening.

According to a new paper by Hansen and 16 equally expert coauthors, seas could rise by 10 feet within 50 to 85 years, making coastal communities and cities worldwide uninhabitable.

So, Why Should You Care? That’s much sooner than the forecast of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the climate science group of the United Nations, which informs international climate treaty negotiations. IPCC scientists predict sea levels could rise to 2.6 feet by 2100, much lower and later than the Hansen report’s projections.

Hansen and colleagues concluded that to avoid this crisis, global temperature rise must be kept at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) or lower, rather than the informal international target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

To make that happen, nations would need to slash fossil fuel use nearly to zero within 30 years.

In June, the G-7 major industrialized nations, including the United States, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany, committed to fully phasing out coal, oil, and gas-fueled energy by 2100.

Here are three things to keep in mind about Hansen’s worrying new study.

1. This research paper hasn’t been peer-reviewed—yet.

The peer-review process for traditional scientific journals is meant to weed out poor research from stronger. It’s not a perfect process, but it’s valuable, and it can take many months to play out.

So Hansen and colleagues intend to release their work this week in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussion, an open-access journal where peer review happens after publication, in public.

Putting the findings out ahead of peer review isn’t traditional for scientists of Hansen’s stature and has increased the buzz around the paper and its conclusion about catastrophically high seas in less than a century.

2. A consensus among scientists regarding the study’s conclusions about ice melt and sea-level rise hasn’t been reached.

Scientists are still learning how to judge the speed at which the world’s land-bound ice is melting and will continue to melt in coming decades and centuries. We’re also still remarkably ignorant about the oceans, including how currents are affected by changing water conditions. All these unknowns make melting glaciers and sea-level rise contested arenas in the research world, with significant disagreements among respectable experts over whose ideas are wrong and whose are right. That’s how science rolls. To reach their conclusions, Hansen and colleagues looked at recent figures on the faster-than-anticipated rate at which the Greenlandic and Antarctic ice caps are melting. They also looked at modeling data and the prehistoric record for the last time Earth’s surface temperatures were as warm as they are now—and sea levels were 30 feet higher.

Based on what those data showed, the authors posit that if the world stays on its course of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in temperature rise, contemporary ice caps could hit a tipping point and melt exponentially faster than the more linear rate projected by the IPCC.

This isn’t a conclusion that a majority of climate scientists and ice experts yet accept, but it’s an analysis that warrants consideration.

3. Hansen and colleagues stated plainly that they published their findings quickly, before peer review, to influence the outcome of the December international climate treaty conference in Paris.

Already some informed observers are suggesting that the unorthodox publishing approach may backfire. Whether this is good or bad depends on what you think and believe about the intersection of science and climate change with politics. But this much is true: The international climate action process has not slowed global warming. And Hansen and colleagues have been transparent about their motivations.

See: http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/07/22/3-things-know-about-terrifying-new-climate-study?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-07-22

How Did This Monster Get Created? The Decades of GOP Lies That Brought Us Donald Trump

Donald Trump did not happen overnight. He’s the product of a dangerous, cynical GOP strategy that dates back years.

2015-07-20 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Salon, Via AlterNet

Author: Heather Cox Richardson

Emphasis Mine

How did America get to such a place that someone like Donald Trump can command a lead in the Republican primaries? Trump is the product of a deliberate Republican strategy, adopted by Richard Nixon’s people in 1968, to attract voters with an apocalyptic redemption story rather than reasoned argument. It has taken almost 50 years, but we have finally arrived at the culmination of postmodern politics in which Republican leaders use words to create their own reality.

After World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower and men like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller led the Republican Party with policies based in reasoned argument. They used the government to regulate the economy and to promote social welfare, much as Democrats did, although with a philosophy that emphasized social unity rather than class conflict. The policies of these “Me Too” Republicans infuriated Movement Conservatives on the far right, who insisted that all government activism was communism. In 1964, Movement Conservative spokesman Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination when Rockefeller’s womanizing spectacularly imploded his candidacy. Movement Conservatives used their hero’s nomination to advance a new kind of politics.

America’s moderate consensus was enormously popular, but Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, flat-out denied that reality. In her famous book “A Choice Not an Echo,” she insisted that studies showing that voters who opposed Goldwater’s extremism were part of a “propaganda machine” that used fake polls, radio and newspapers to destroy anyone but the chosen candidates of an elite cabal. She explained that all government activism outside of military buildup was a conspiracy to bankrupt regular Americans. Financiers and banking interests fed off expensive policies pushed by an educated Eastern elite, and together these men were dragging America into the web of communism.

The world was really quite simple, Schlafly insisted, and it could be understood without any fancy education. It was divided in two, black and white, Communism and Freedom. Eggheads complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. What should America do about communism? Stop it! The very fact that establishment Republicans opposed Goldwater’s nomination proved that he was the right man for the job. He was the “grass roots” candidate, the candidate for the little guy who voted his principles, not because he wanted a payoff.

Goldwater’s candidacy crashed and burned, leaving Republicans in trouble in 1968. To candidate Richard Nixon was left the task of pulling together mainstream Eisenhower Republicans and upstart Movement Conservatives. How could his team attract support for an unlikable candidate who needed to bridge a fundamental ideological gulf? Nixon’s handlers used new media to play to Schlafly’s script. They ignored people’s brains and went for their guts.

“Voters are basically lazy,” one Nixon media adviser wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we… seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable….” Nixon’s people hired advertising executive Harry Treleaven, who believed the new medium of television had changed the nature of politics. For him, politicians were no longer policy wonks; they were actors with a narrative.

Under Treleaven, Nixon’s people ignored policy positions and instead used television to create a candidate with a simple message: America was on the brink of disaster, and only Nixon could save it. They hired a brilliant young photographer to put together a series of television ads from stock photographs strung together to create a sense of doom; at the end a voice intoned “Nixon” over an iconic image of the nation. At the end of every ad ran the words: “Vote like your whole world depended on it.”

The campaign also hired a young television producer named Roger Ailes to stage “town hall” events for the candidate. Ailes hand-picked “regular” people to question Nixon in carefully managed shows from which the press was excluded. Ailes arranged applause, the set, Nixon’s answers, the camera angles, the crowd cheering the candidate, the careful shading of Nixon’s makeup. “Let’s face it,” he said. “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But carefully managed television could “make them forget all that.”

It did. And so, after 1968, Republicans increasingly relied on their apocalyptic redemption story. America was in terrible trouble, because grasping minorities, women and workers wanted government policies that would suck tax dollars from hardworking white people. Democrats backed those policies because they would do anything to buy votes. It was up to Republicans to restore America to its former glory. In a time of dramatic economic and social upheaval, this story reassured voters left behind in the new conditions that the answers to their problems were simple, and that coming up with those answers required no great education or thought. It simply required the right principles.

The Movement Conservative story was never based in reality. Facts repeatedly gave way to the narrative that America was on the ropes because of Democratic social welfare policies that sucked tax dollars and threatened the nation’s safety. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen represented the misuse of tax dollars for lazy African-Americans, for example, but he also incorrectly insisted that President Carter had slashed the nation’s military budget, and warned in his inaugural address that the nation was in a crisis that rivaled the Great Depression, a crisis created by government activism.

To avoid niggling fact-checkers, in 1987, President Reagan’s FCC abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, a decision that meant that public broadcasters were no longer required to provide their audience with opposing viewpoints. Within a year, talk radio had taken off, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh hammering home the vision of a nation gone to ruin, awaiting redemption from the latest Movement Conservative candidate. In 1992, Limbaugh began to broadcast a television show, produced by Roger Ailes, to take the story to viewers. By 1994, the show was carried by 225 television stations. Two years later, Ailes would become the CEO of a new media channel, Fox News, which used the same formula—albeit updated—that Ailes had used to package Nixon’s story almost 30 years before.

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, the Movement Conservatives had erased the line between image and reality. In 2004, a senior adviser to Bush famously dismissed “the reality-based community” to journalist Ron Suskind. Gone were the days when politicians could find solutions based on their observations of the careful study of discernible reality. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. When we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,” he said.

This disregard for fact in favor of narrative appears to have become so accepted in the Republican Party that it is now openly driving Republican presidential candidates. Trump’s celebrity candidacy follows the formula. According to him, America is in free fall, with GDP below zero, unemployment at 18-20 percent, and the country overrun by minorities—his venom reserved primarily for Mexicans who, he says, are drug dealers, criminals and rapists.

“Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the day and we as a country are getting weaker.” Politicians can’t “make America great again” because they are “controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests.” Trump promises to be a “great leader” who has simple answers: He will bring back jobs, make sure Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons, reduce the debt, in short, find a way to do everything fast and well. “Sadly,” he says, “the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

Trump is the most cartoonish of the Republican candidates, but he is far from being the only one to bend reality to image. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told a group of Republican donors that British Prime Minister David Cameron had said he had no faith in President Obama’s leadership, a claim Cameron categorically denied. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal insists he has slashed spending 26 percent, a claim professor Robert Mann has eviscerated. Journalist Tom Moran at the Newark Star-Ledger says simply of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, “he lies.”

Perhaps most disturbing is that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Scott Walker and surgeon Ben Carson, Republican candidates all, have taken to attributing false quotations to the Founding Fathers. They deny the reality of America’s founding principles and claim instead that America was conceived in the image that they have constructed, the same image that has given us Donald Trump as a leading candidate for the presidency.

Heather Cox Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at Boston College.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-did-monster-get-created-decades-gop-lies-brought-us-donald-trump?akid=13314.123424.z3bgZg&rd=1&src=newsletter1039595&t=7

Don’t Count Out the GOP From Trying to Sink Obama’s Historic Iran Deal: They’ve Done It Before

Republican attempts to sabotage a Democratic president’s deal with Iran are nothing new.

2015-07-15 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: Thom Hartmann

Emphasis Mine

Ronald Reagan – or at least his campaign – committed treason to become president, and normalizing relations with Iran may expose the whole thing.

As news of a US-Iranian nuclear deal spread like wildfire this week, the mainstream media began to ask its usual set of questions. Is the deal for real? Can we trust the Iranians? And the Republicans in Congress are going totally nuts.

Republican attempts to sabotage a Democratic president’s deal with Iran are nothing new, however. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

In the early fall of 1980, Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr over the release of the 52 hostages held by radical students at the American Embassy in Tehran. President Bani-Sadr was a moderate, and as he explained in an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor published on March 5, 2013, he had successfully run for president of Iran on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

President Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November 1979. But Carter underestimated the lengths his opponent in the 1980 presidential election, California governor Ronald Reagan, would go to win the presidency.

Behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign had previously worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 presidential election in order to humiliate Carter and hand the election to Reagan. This was nothing short of treason.

As President Bani-Sadr wrote for the Monitor, “I was deposed in June 1981 as a result of a coup against me. After arriving in France, I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism. Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place.”

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “October Surprise” — were successful in sabotaging Carter and Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages. And as President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor, “The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the [1980] election in Reagan’s favor.”

Iran released the hostages on Jan. 20, 1981, at the exact moment Ronald Reagan was sworn into office, by way of saying, “We kept up our part of the deal; now we expect you to start shipping us those weapons you promised.”

That October Surprise emboldened the radical forces inside Iran. A politically weakened Bani-Sadr was overthrown in June 1981 and replaced with Mohammed Ali Rajai, a favorite of Khomeini’s.

The October Surprise also led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people around the world, and in Central America in particular. Reagan took money from the Iranians and used that money to destabilize Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador in ways that still haunt the region. And he set the Supreme Court (by appointing Scalia and two other right-wingers) and the nation on a course that would see the destruction of much of the New Deal and the evisceration of America’s middle class.

But those are just the most obvious results of the October Surprise. If Carter were able to free the hostages like he and Bani-Sadr had planned, Carter would have won re-election. After all, he was leading in most polls in the months leading up to the election, and most Americans saw Reagan as a right-wing radical shill for the billionaire class (history proved them right).

So, now that the doors of Tehran may be thrown open to the press, Republican leadership is facing a huge crisis: Saint Ronnie could be exposed. If former Iranian president Bani-Sadr is telling the truth – and all the evidence (including the fact that Reagan was selling weapons to Iran in violation of US law) points to his treason — then there’s certainly evidence of it floating around in Tehran. If that evidence surfaces, it could make for considerable discomfort on the Republican side of the aisle.

Of course, this is not the first time a Republican presidential candidate committed treason to gain the White House. Consider the case of Richard Nixon.

In the fall of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson had finally negotiated a tentative agreement to end the Vietnam war. But Richard Nixon knew that if the war continued, it would tarnish Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the election. So Nixon had envoys from his campaign talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend an upcoming peace talk in Paris. Nixon promised South Vietnam he would give them a better deal when he was president than LBJ could.

The CIA intercepted the communications and turned them over to President Johnson, who thus found out about this political maneuver to prolong the Vietnam war just three days before the 1968 election. He immediately phoned the Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen. Here’s a transcript (audio here):

President Johnson: Now, I can identify ‘em, because I know who’s doing this. I don’t want to identify it. I think it would shock America if a principal candidate [Nixon] was playing with a source like this [South Vietnam] on a matter this important. I don’t want to do that.

But if they’re going to put this kind of stuff out, they ought to know that we know what they’re doing. I know who they’re talking to, and I know what they’re saying. …Some of our

folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the president [of South Vietnam] that if he’ll hold out ’til November the second [US election day] they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand, Everett. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen: I know.

In subsequent tapes, Dirksen relates his efforts to get Nixon to pull back, and his lack of success. Unable to end the war, Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost the election to Nixon, and both Johnson and Dirksen took the secret of Nixon’s treason to their graves.

Those tapes were just released by the LBJ library three years ago, and the fact that there wasn’t a media firestorm is a true testament to how well the media protects the establishment parties… or to how incompetent the media has become after all the media consolidation of the past 30 years and the death of investigative journalism.

South Vietnam took Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks in 1968. The war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it. And the war continued for four more years, and another 20,000 Americans and a million more Vietnamese died.

And Reagan’s treason –just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly. The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — almost to the minute — the American hostages in Iran were released.

And in exchange for that, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986; remember the “Iran Contra” scandal?

So twice in recent times, Republicans took the White House through naked treason.

Makes you wonder what they’re planning for next year…and what they’re willing to do to keep Tehran wrapped in a blanket of sanctions-silence.

Thom Hartmann is an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is “The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America — and What We Can Do to Stop It.“

See: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dont-count-out-gop-trying-sink-obamas-historic-iran-deal-theyve-done-it?akid=13305.123424.CNFQGv&rd=1&src=newsletter1039390&t=1

How Bush & Cheney’s ‘Cowboy Diplomacy’ Provoked Iran’s Nuclear Growth

This is a major achievement that we cannot let Republican war-hawks derail.

2015-07-152015-07-15 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: OccupyDemocrats.com

Author: Colin Taylor

Emphasis Mine

President Obama achieved a historic victory this week by signing a deal to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions while enabling the isolated nation to rejoin the international community. Republicans across the board erupted in fury without even reading the bill, so ingrained is the knee-jerk automatic rejection of anything President Obama says or does. Some even came out of the woodwork, like former Vice President and admitted war criminal Dick Cheney, who decided it was time to rear his ugly head up once again and criticize our President for rectifying a crisis which was his fault.

For it was under the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s adminstration that Iran drastically expanded their nuclear program. The Islamic Republic of Iran had 164 centrifuges in 2003, and wanted to negotiate in order to get the sanctions that have been crippling their economy and stunting the growth of their middle class– which coincidentally repressed the growth of civil society and helped keep the theocratic regime secure. Cheney responded that “We don’t talk to evil,” and threatened war and more sanctions. In response to the disrespectful offer, Iran began drastically expanding their nuclear program. Just two years later, the Iranians had constructed 5,000 centrifuges, and had built 8,000 by the end of the Bush Administration.

Jon Chait of NY Mag notes that using Cheney’s own logic that he attempts to smear Obama with paints a very different picture of Cheney’s vendetta against Iran: “What’s more, the expansion of Iran’s power under Bush was not limited to the blossoming of its nuclear program. In 2003, an extremely hostile neighboring regime (that had launched a war against it two decades before) was deposed, creating a power vacuum that Iran filled. Cheney seems to have played a role there. A Cheney-style analysis of the Bush administration’s Iran policy would conclude that it was carrying out a deliberate plan to elevate Iran’s standing.”

What’s more, Cheney and the rest of the jingoist hyper-nationalists in the Republican Party are utterly off the mark with their fear-mongering statements and doomsday prophecies. “This is the first time that the number of centrifuges Iran operates will have been reduced. No other policy has achieved this. The critics can’t touch this.” writes Trita Parsi. “The critics said Iran would never honor its word. They were wrong. The IAEA has consistently attested that both the United States and Iran have lived up to their commitments.” Iran has wanted to negotiate and was willing to roll back their program the whole time, but Bush and Cheney never wanted to negotiate- so once again, President Obama had to clean up their mess.

This is a major achievement that we cannot let Republican war-hawks derail. Cheney must not be allowed to re-write the narrative and let the world forget that the Iranian nuclear program is just another entry on his long list of failures and crimes. The Republican Party cannot see anything beyond their desperate hunger for the White House, and will say and do anything in their ham-fisted efforts to grasp it. We cannot let the people who have already done so much damage to our nation and to stability in the world get away with their crimes, and we cannot let them torpedo this bright opportunity for a better future- not only for us, but potentially for the rest of the world.

35 Mind-Blowing Facts About Inequality

Bernie Sanders realizes that runaway inequality is a critical issue. How come the other candidates don’t?

2015-07-15 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: Larry Swartz

Emphasis Mine

While Hillary Clinton occasionally gives some lip service to the problem of extreme inequality, Bernie Sanders is the only candidate really hammering away at it. He has even blasted the orthodoxy of economic growth for its own sake, saying according to Monday’s Washington Post that unless economic spoils can be redistributed to make more Americans’ lives better, all the growth will go to the top 1% anyway, so who needs it? Sanders might know his history, but the rest of the candidates could use a little primer.

The United States was not always the most powerful nation on Earth. It was only with the end of World War II, with the rest of the developed world in smoldering ruins, that America emerged as the free world’s leader. This coincided with the expansion of the U.S. middle class. With the other war combatants trying to recover from the destruction of the war, America became the supermarket, hardware store and auto dealership to the world. Markets for American products abounded and opportunity was everywhere for American workers of all economic means to get ahead. America had a virtual monopoly on rebuilding the world. Combined with the G.I. Bill of 1944, which provided money for returning veterans to go to college, and government loans to buy houses and start businesses, the middle class in America boomed, as did American power, wealth and prestige. Between 1946 and 1973, productivity in America grew by 104 percent. Unions led the way in assuring wages for workers grew by an equal amount.

The 1970s, however, brought a screeching halt to the expansion of the American middle class. The Arab oil embargo in 1973 marked the end of cheap oil and the beginning of the middle-class decline. The Iranian Revolution in 1979, with more resultant oil instability, combined with the rise of Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution at home, accelerated the long and painful contraction of the middle class. CCuts in corporate taxes, stagnant worker wage growth, the right-wing war on unions, and corporate outsourcing of work overseas greased the wheels of the middle-class decline and the upper-class elevation. Cuts in taxes on the wealthy, under the guise of trickle-down economics, have resulted in lower government revenue and cuts to all kinds of services. All of which has led to today, an era of national and international inequality unparalleled since the days of the Roaring ’20s.

Here are 35 astounding facts about inequality that will fry your brain.

1. In 81 percent of American counties, the median income, about $52,000, is less than it was 15 years ago. This is despite the fact that the economy has grown 83 percent in the past quarter-century and corporate profits have doubled. American workers produce twice the amount of goods and services as 25 years ago, but get less of the pie.

2. The amount of money that was given out in bonuses on Wall Street last year is twice the amount all minimum-wage workers earned in the country combined.

3. The wealthiest 85 people on the planet have more money that the poorest 3.5 billion people combined.

4. The average wealth of an American adult is in the range of $250,000-$300,000. But that average number includes incomprehensibly wealthy people like Bill Gates. Imagine 10 people in a bar. When Bill Gates walks in, the average wealth in the bar increases unbelievably, but that number doesn’t make the other 10 people in the bar richer. The median per adult number is only about $39,000, placing the U.S. about 27th among the world’s nations, behind Australia, most of Europe and even small countries like New Zealand, Ireland and Kuwait.

5. Italians, Belgians and Japanese citizens are wealthier than Americans.

6. The poorest half of the Earth’s population owns 1% of the Earth’s wealth. The richest 1% of the Earth’s population owns 46% of the Earth’s wealth.

7. More locally, the poorest half of the US owns 2.5% of the country’s wealth. The top 1% owns 35% of it.

8. Inequality is a worldwide problem. In the UK, doctors no longer occupy a place in the top 1% of income earners, London plays host to the largest congregation of Russian millionaires outside of Moscow, and also houses more ultra-rich people (defined as owning more than $30 million in assets outside of their home) than anywhere else on Earth.

9. The slice of the national income pie going to the wealthiest 1% of Americans has doubled since 1979.

10. The 1% also takes home 20% of the income. This figure is the most since the 1920s era of laissez faire government (under Republicans Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover).

11. The super rich .01% of America, such as Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, take home a whopping 6% of the national income, earning around $23 million a year. Compare that to the average $30,000 a year earned by the bottom 90 percent of America.

12. The top 1% of America owns 50% of investment assets (stocks, bonds, mutual funds). The poorest half of America owns just .5% of the investments.

13. The poorest Americans do come out ahead in one statistic: the bottom 90% of America owns 73% of the debt.

14. Tax rates for the middle class have remained essentially unchanged since 1960. Tax rates on the highest earning Americans have plunged from an almost 70% tax rate in 1945 down to around 35% today. Corporate tax rates have dropped from 30 percent in the 1950s to under 10 percent today. (N.B.: the maximum tax rate was 91% from WWII until the early 1960’s)

15. Since 1990, CEO compensation has increased by 300%. Corporate profits have doubled. The average worker’s salary has increased 4%. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage has actually decreased.

16. CEOs in 1965 earned about 24 times the amount of the average worker. In 1980 they earned 42 times as much. Today, CEOs earn 325 times the average worker.

17. Wages, as a percent of the overall economy, have dropped to an historic low.

18. In a study of 34 developed countries, the United States had the second highest level of income inequality, ahead of only Chile.

19. Young people in the U.S. are getting poorer. The median wealth of people under 35 has dropped 68% since 1984. The median wealth of older Americans has increased 42%.

20. The average white American’s median wealth is 20 times higher ($113,000) than the average African American ($5,600) and 18 times the Hispanic American ($6,300).

21. America’s highest income inequality is located in the states surrounding Wall Street (New York City) and the oil-rich states.

22. Since 1979, high school dropouts have seen median weekly income drop by 22 percent. Ethnically, the highest dropout rates are among Hispanic and African American children.

23. In 1970, a woman earned about 60% of the amount a man earned. In 2005 a woman earned about 80% of what a man earned. Since 2005, there has been no change in that figure. African-American women earn just 64% of what a white male earns, and Hispanic women just 56%.

24. Over 20 percent of all American children live below the poverty line. This rate is higher than almost all other developed countries.

25. Union membership in the US is at an all-time low, about 11% of the workforce. In 1978, 40 percent of blue-collar workers were unionized. With that declining influence has come a concurrent decline in the real value of the minimum wage.

26. Four hundred Americans have more wealth, $2 trillion, than half of all Americans combined. That is approximately the GDP of Russia.

27. In 1946, a child born into poverty had about a 50 percent chance of scaling the income ladder into the middle class. In 1980, the chances were 40 percent. A child born today has about a 33 percent chance.

28. Despite massive tax cuts, corporations have not created new jobs in America. The job creators have been small new businesses that have not enjoyed the same huge tax breaks.

29. More than half of the members of the United States Congress, where laws are passed deciding how millionaires are taxed, are millionaires.

30. Twenty five of the largest corporations in America in 2010 paid their CEOs more money than they paid in taxes that year.

31. In the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. borrowed $1 trillion in order to give tax cuts to households earning over $250,000.

32. In 1970, there were five registered lobbyists working on behalf of wealthy corporations for every one of the 535 members of Congress. Today there are 22 lobbyists per congressperson.

33. In 1962, the 1% household median wealth was 125 times the average median wealth. In 2010 the divide was 288 times.

34. During the Great Recession, the average wealth of the 1% dropped about 16 percent. Meanwhile the wealth of the 99% dropped 47 percent.

35. Between 1979 and 2007, the wages of the top 1% rose 10 times more than the bottom 90 percent.

Larry Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer with a focus on health, science and American history.

See: http://www.alternet.org/economy/35-mind-blowing-facts-about-inequality?akid=13299.123424.f5Kr9w&rd=1&src=newsletter1039283&t=3

America Is Ready for Socialism! Massive Majorities Back Bernie Sanders on the Issues and Disdain Donald Trump

Trump channels the right’s angry Fox News id. But Sanders speaks to America’s soul — and our values.

2015-07-15 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Salon, via Alternet

Author: Paul Rosenberg

Emphasis Mine

Donald Trump is throwing the GOP primary into chaos by channeling the GOP’s id, spinning out wild fantasies of the Mexican government deliberately sending a flood of rapists and murderers across the border. But Bernie Sanders is disrupting Hillary Clinton’s coronation on the Democratic side by channeling the party’s soul, with a specifically issue-based focus.

In a way, both men are vividly illustrating a basic asymmetry that runs through American politics—between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican—which was first comprehensively described by public opinion researchers Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in their landmark 1967 book, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion, and which political scientist Matt Grossman discussed in a recent Salon interview. Free and Cantril found that half the population was ideologically conservative, in the sense of preferring a smaller, more limited government, while about two-thirds was operationally liberal, in the sense of wanting to spend more on specifically identified government programs.

Subsequent research has intensified this division. Conservatives win by making broad, sweeping appeals, which can often have little relationship with the facts (Iraq’s WMDs, “voter fraud,” global warming denialism, etc.). Liberals win by focusing on how to fix specific problems. Thus “government spending” in general is seen as a negative, but spending on most specific programs is strongly supported. The pattern is clear: The more practical the question, the more liberal the answers. That’s just how U.S. politics works.

Trump takes the conservative side of this formula to an extreme, making broad, ludicrous false claims in his narcissistically self-confident manner. What’s grabbing headlines now are his false claims about illegal immigrant crime, but he remains completely detached from reality regarding Obama’s citizenship as well—an act of broad stigmatization that also typifies conservative thought. When NBC’s Katy Tur brought up his birtherism, Trump treated her with disdain: “Well, I don’t know. According to you it’s not true.” When she responded straightforwardly, “He released his birth certificate,” Trump doubled down on the disdain, “You know, if you believe that, that’s fine. I don’t care. It’s an old subject.”

Bernie Sanders is the exact opposite of Trump. As a proud self-described democratic socialist, he willingly makes himself a target for the kind of demonization that Trump hands out like candy, and he responds to attacks—actual and potential—by doubling down on policy specifics, where he correctly feels he’s on very firm ground. In a recent interview with John Nichols in the Nation, Sanders sketched out his response to such attacks, which are now routinely leveled indiscriminately: Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, often criticizes President Obama, incorrectly, for trying to push “European-style socialism,” and McConnell says the American people don’t want it. First of all, of course, Obama is not trying to push European-style socialism. Second of all, I happen to believe that, if the American people understood the significant accomplishments that have taken place under social-democratic governments, democratic-socialist governments, labor governments throughout Europe, they would be shocked to know about those accomplishments. One of the goals of this campaign is to advance that understanding…. How many Americans know that in virtually every European country, when you have a baby, you get guaranteed time off and, depending on the country, significant financial benefits as well. Do the American people know that? I doubt it. Do the American people even know that we’re the only major Western industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for all? Most people don’t know that. Do the American people know that in many countries throughout Europe, public colleges and universities are either tuition-free or very inexpensive?

I have always believed that the countries in Scandinavia have not gotten the kind of honest recognition they deserve for the extraordinary achievements they have made.

Sanders is right to think that Scandanavian socialism would be popular here in the U.S., if only people knew more about it. And he’s right to make spreading that awareness a goal of his campaign. In fact, on a wide range of issue specifics Sanders lines up with strong majorities of public opinion—and has for decades.

You can get a strong sense of this from the results of the “Big Ideas” poll commissioned by the Progressive Change Institute in January, which has thus far gotten far less attention than it deserves. (Full disclosure: I’m a former blogmate with Adam Green, co-founder of PCI’s affiliate, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.) PCI first solicited ideas online through an open submission process (more than 2,600 specific proposals were submitted) and then let people vote on them (more than a million votes were cast). This bottom-up process was then tested out in a national poll. The following all received 70% support or more:

Allow Government to Negotiate Drug Prices (79%)
Give Students the Same Low Interest Rates as Big Banks (78%)
Universal Pre-Kindergarten (77%)
Fair Trade that Protect Workers, the Environment, and Jobs (75%)
End Tax Loopholes for Corporations that Ship Jobs Overseas (74%)
End Gerrymandering (73%)
Let Homeowners Pay Down Mortgage With 401k (72%)
Debt-Free College at All Public Universities (Message A) (71%)
Infrastructure Jobs Program — $400 Billion / Year (71%)
Require NSA to Get Warrants (71%)
Disclose Corporate Spending on Politics/Lobbying (71%)

Medicare Buy-In for All (71%)
Close Offshore Corporate Tax Loopholes (70%)
Green New Deal — Millions Of Clean-Energy Jobs (70%)
Full Employment Act (70%)
Expand Social Security Benefits (70%)

All of the above are in line with Bernie Sanders’ politics and all are extremely popular, with support across the political spectrum. For example, the infrastructure jobs program (a key element of Sanders’ platform) had 91% support from Democrats, 61% from independents and even 55% support from Republicans—compared to only 28% who were opposed. Donald Trump can only dream of being that popular among Republicans.

One could easily write a whole story about Sanders’ strength on issues based on this one poll alone. It’s astonishing to see all these ideas brought together which have strong support among the American people, but which can barely get the time of day in the top-down world of U.S. politics today. And that, arguably, goes straight to the heart of what the Sanders campaign is all about—opening up the political process to popular ideas that just happen to be not so popular with the billionaire class, and the political system that caters so slavishly to them.

But that’s not to say there’s no other evidence of how popular Sanders’ views are. At the American Prospect, Peter Drier recently pulled together a broad sampling of the evidence that Sanders represents majority views on a core set of issues. For example, one of the European-style socialist practices that’s particularly popular is paid leave:

Eighty percent of Americans favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to parents of new children and employees caring for sick family members. Even more (85 percent) favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to employees who are ill.

Drier broke the issues down as follows: big business, progressive taxation, inequality and poverty, money in politics, minimum wage and workers’ rights, health care and social security, higher education, same-sex marriage. His general method was to cite a number of different sources illustrating different aspects of the issue.

Regarding big business, to take one example, Drier notes that 74 percent of Americans believe corporations have too much influence on American life and politics today (New York Times/CBS News), 60 percent of Americans—including 75 percent of Democrats—believe that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy” (Pew), and 58% of Americans said they support breaking up “big banks like Citigroup” (the PCI poll, cited by the Wall Street Journal), which Drier points out is “a key plank of Sanders’ platform and the goal of a bill that Sanders sponsored in the Senate.” He also notes that 73% of Americans favor tougher rules for Wall Street financial companies (Lake Research), and finally, that 64% favor regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring utilities to generate more power from “clean” low-carbon sources (Duke University).

What this shows is that Sanders is not simply cherry-picking a few popular ideas here and there. He’s tapping into a broadly shared set of inter-related attitudes and ideas about closely related issues Although these views and ideas are usually sidelined in most political discourse, the convergence of attitudes into a coherent policy texture is remarkably consistent. And this gets to a primary problem with America’s political system: liberal policy views form a coherent whole, every bit as much as conservative ones do, but they are far less publicly recognized, articulated, discussed and explored—despite the fact that they are wildly popular!

As I’ve noted before here at Salon, Free and Cantril commented on this situation in the last section of their book “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology” almost 50 years ago:

The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study. We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting according to another set of principles in their political behavior. But the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms

There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.

That restatement has never come about, but on-the-ground support for liberal policies remains as strong as ever, despite decades of mostly unanswered ideological assault in the media. Part of the problem is that conservative ideology expresses an idealized sense of individual possibility, so it’s relatively easy for people to access. Liberal ideology comes from a much more reflective place, one that encompasses thinking about society as a whole, and seeing oneself as part of a larger social fabric. Shortly after Free and Cantril wrote, the philosopher John Rawls proposed thinking in terms of a society conceived behind a “veil of ignorance”: if we had no idea where we were to fall in the scheme of things, what kind of social order would we consider fair and just? Such a framework makes perfect sense when we act as citizens, and openly invites us to act philosophically, in a way that promotes the flourishing of our whole society.

In 2011, Michael I. Norton of and Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University published a study (which Drier cites) that took a Rawlsian perspective. “Following the philosopher John Rawls (1971), we asked Americans to construct distributions of wealth they deem just,” they wrote. The results were a resounding confirmation of Bernie Sanders’ politics. As they explained in their abstract, they aimed to insert the desires of “regular” Americans into policy debates about the optimal level of wealth inequality by asking them first to estimate the current wealth distribution, and then construct their ideal. As they explained their results:

First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution, such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

In their study, they gave people a choice between three alternatives, broken down into quintiles: the current wealth distribution in the U.S., a completely equal wealth distribution, and between the two, a wealth distribution equal to the income distribution of Sweden—one of those Scandinavian socialist countries that Bernie Sanders loves to share information about. Lo and behold, as the authors wrote in a section heading, “Americans Prefer Sweden.”

More precisely, Americans preferred Sweden over the U.S. by 92-8%. They also preferred complete equality, but less overwhelmingly: 77-23%. And they preferred Sweden over complete equality—but just barely, 51-49%. Not surprisingly, with such landslide numbers, it included everyone, the authors noted. “In addition, this overwhelming preference for the Sweden distribution over the United States distribution was robust across gender (females: 92.7%, males: 90.6%), preferred candidate in the 2004 election (Bush voters: 90.2%; Kerry voters: 93.5%) and income (less than $50,000: 92.1%; $50,001–$100,000: 91.7%; more than $100,000: 89.1%).” As the reference to Bush and Kerry gives away, although published in 2011, the original research was done well before the financial collapse—so this emphatically was not a response to the Great Recession.

If the overwhelming majority of Americans thinks that Sweden represents a better social order than America, then it’s hardly surprising that large numbers of them also agree with Sanders on a broad range of economic issues, as both PCI and Peter Drier lay out. And it’s not surprising that they agree on broader policies related to wealth and the exercise of political power, as well as policies making life better for the middle class, and helping more people to get into it. In fact, the only thing surprising about Bernie Sanders’ popularity is that people find it surprising. After all, the evidence has been all around us for a very long time now.

Does that mean Bernie Sanders ought to be taken a lot more seriously than he has been so far? Absolutely. Does it mean he’ll be president? Matt Grossman doesn’t think so. “Bernie Sanders has a long and uphill battle and, if history is any guide, little chance to win the Democratic nomination,” Grossman said. “It is true that he has focused on specific issue positions that are popular with the American public and an enduringly appealing Democratic message of taking on the rich and big business, but no candidate has won the Democratic nomination by avowedly running to the left of the other candidates since George McGovern. Democratic leaders are traditionally more concerned about maintaining a moderate image than Republicans (and more convinced that it matters for electability).”

But the question of why that asymmetric response has been so—much less if it is right—is well worth contemplating. Indeed a 2013 paper by Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal underscored the broader underlying question: “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” They present a sophisticated analysis, which considers five possible explanations:

first, an ideological shift toward free market capitalism; second, the combination of immigration and low turnout of the poor has produced an electorate more wealthy than the population as a whole; third, rising affluence has reduced the share of the public that’s attracted to government for social insurance; fourth, the rich have been able to increasingly influence politics “through campaign contributions, lobbying, and revolving door employment of politicians and bureaucrats;” and fifth, the political process is distorted by institutions that reduce accountability, such as gerrymandering and a multitude of institutional veto/pivot points.

Just reading through this brief summary of their explanation is enough to make the average voter tune out—which is precisely the point. The political system is anything but transparently responsive to the majority will. In the end, they conclude, “Overall, the kinds of government policies that could have ameliorated the sharp rise in inequality have been immobilized by a combination of greater polarization, lack of voter participation, feedback from high-income campaign contributors, and political institutions that must overcome a series of key pivots before making significant changes.”

What this means, in effect, is that the political system is in a state of drift, so far as the needs, interests and values of most ordinary Americans are concerned. All the super majority issue positions that Sanders may hold are irrelevant, because the American people as a whole are irrelevant. Such is the sorry state of our democracy.

This was further confirmed by a 2014 paper, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. In it, they used a dataset measuring key variables for 1,779 policy issues, and concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

That is what’s meant by “politics as usual,” and that’s precisely what Bernie Sanders has spent his whole life working to change. As the campaign unfolds, and more and more people become aware of how

Eighty percent of Americans favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to parents of new children and employees caring for sick family members. Even more (85 percent) favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to employees who are ill.

Drier broke the issues down as follows: big business, progressive taxation, inequality and poverty, money in politics, minimum wage and workers’ rights, health care and social security, higher education, same-sex marriage. His general method was to cite a number of different sources illustrating different aspects of the issue.

Regarding big business, to take one example, Drier notes that 74 percent of Americans believe corporations have too much influence on American life and politics today (New York Times/CBS News), 60 percent of Americans—including 75 percent of Democrats—believe that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy” (Pew), and 58% of Americans said they support breaking up “big banks like Citigroup” (the PCI poll, cited by the Wall Street Journal), which Drier points out is “a key plank of Sanders’ platform and the goal of a bill that Sanders sponsored in the Senate.” He also notes that 73% of Americans favor tougher rules for Wall Street financial companies (Lake Research), and finally, that 64% favor regulating greenhouse gas emissions and requiring utilities to generate more power from “clean” low-carbon sources (Duke University).

What this shows is that Sanders is not simply cherry-picking a few popular ideas here and there. He’s tapping into a broadly shared set of inter-related attitudes and ideas about closely related issues Although these views and ideas are usually sidelined in most political discourse, the convergence of attitudes into a coherent policy texture is remarkably consistent. And this gets to a primary problem with America’s political system: liberal policy views form a coherent whole, every bit as much as conservative ones do, but they are far less publicly recognized, articulated, discussed and explored—despite the fact that they are wildly popular!

As I’ve noted before here at Salon, Free and Cantril commented on this situation in the last section of their book “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology” almost 50 years ago:

The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study. We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting according to another set of principles in their political behavior. But the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms …

There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.

That restatement has never come about, but on-the-ground support for liberal policies remains as strong as ever, despite decades of mostly unanswered ideological assault in the media. Part of the problem is that conservative ideology expresses an idealized sense of individual possibility, so it’s relatively easy for people to access. Liberal ideology comes from a much more reflective place, one that encompasses thinking about society as a whole, and seeing oneself as part of a larger social fabric. Shortly after Free and Cantril wrote, the philosopher John Rawls proposed thinking in terms of a society conceived behind a “veil of ignorance”: if we had no idea where we were to fall in the scheme of things, what kind of social order would we consider fair and just? Such a framework makes perfect sense when we act as citizens, and openly invites us to act philosophically, in a way that promotes the flourishing of our whole society.

In 2011, Michael I. Norton of and Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University published a study (which Drier cites) that took a Rawlsian perspective. “Following the philosopher John Rawls (1971), we asked Americans to construct distributions of wealth they deem just,” they wrote. The results were a resounding confirmation of Bernie Sanders’ politics. As they explained in their abstract, they aimed to insert the desires of “regular” Americans into policy debates about the optimal level of wealth inequality by asking them first to estimate the current wealth distribution, and then construct their ideal. As they explained their results:

First, respondents dramatically underestimated the current level of wealth inequality. Second, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: All demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution, such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

In their study, they gave people a choice between three alternatives, broken down into quintiles: the current wealth distribution in the U.S., a completely equal wealth distribution, and between the two, a wealth distribution equal to the income distribution of Sweden—one of those Scandinavian socialist countries that Bernie Sanders loves to share information about. Lo and behold, as the authors wrote in a section heading, “Americans Prefer Sweden.”

More precisely, Americans preferred Sweden over the U.S. by 92-8%. They also preferred complete equality, but less overwhelmingly: 77-23%. And they preferred Sweden over complete equality—but just barely, 51-49%. Not surprisingly, with such landslide numbers, it included everyone, the authors noted. “In addition, this overwhelming preference for the Sweden distribution over the United States distribution was robust across gender (females: 92.7%, males: 90.6%), preferred candidate in the 2004 election (Bush voters: 90.2%; Kerry voters: 93.5%) and income (less than $50,000: 92.1%; $50,001–$100,000: 91.7%; more than $100,000: 89.1%).” As the reference to Bush and Kerry gives away, although published in 2011, the original research was done well before the financial collapse—so this emphatically was not a response to the Great Recession.

If the overwhelming majority of Americans thinks that Sweden represents a better social order than America, then it’s hardly surprising that large numbers of them also agree with Sanders on a broad range of economic issues, as both PCI and Peter Drier lay out. And it’s not surprising that they agree on broader policies related to wealth and the exercise of political power, as well as policies making life better for the middle class, and helping more people to get into it. In fact, the only thing surprising about Bernie Sanders’ popularity is that people find it surprising. After all, the evidence has been all around us for a very long time now.

Does that mean Bernie Sanders ought to be taken a lot more seriously than he has been so far? Absolutely. Does it mean he’ll be president? Matt Grossman doesn’t think so. “Bernie Sanders has a long and uphill battle and, if history is any guide, little chance to win the Democratic nomination,” Grossman said. “It is true that he has focused on specific issue positions that are popular with the American public and an enduringly appealing Democratic message of taking on the rich and big business, but no candidate has won the Democratic nomination by avowedly running to the left of the other candidates since George McGovern. Democratic leaders are traditionally more concerned about maintaining a moderate image than Republicans (and more convinced that it matters for electability).”

But the question of why that asymmetric response has been so—much less if it is right—is well worth contemplating. Indeed a 2013 paper by Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal underscored the broader underlying question: “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” They present a sophisticated analysis, which considers five possible explanations: first, an ideological shift toward free market capitalism; second, the combination of immigration and low turnout of the poor has produced an electorate more wealthy than the population as a whole; third, rising affluence has reduced the share of the public that’s attracted to government for social insurance; fourth, the rich have been able to increasingly influence politics “through campaign contributions, lobbying, and revolving door employment of politicians and bureaucrats;” and fifth, the political process is distorted by institutions that reduce accountability, such as gerrymandering and a multitude of institutional veto/pivot points.

Just reading through this brief summary of their explanation is enough to make the average voter tune out—which is precisely the point. The political system is anything but transparently responsive to the majority will. In the end, they conclude, “Overall, the kinds of government policies that could have ameliorated the sharp rise in inequality have been immobilized by a combination of greater polarization, lack of voter participation, feedback from high-income campaign contributors, and political institutions that must overcome a series of key pivots before making significant changes.”

What this means, in effect, is that the political system is in a state of drift, so far as the needs, interests and values of most ordinary Americans are concerned. All the supermajority issue positions that Sanders may hold are irrelevant, because the American people as a whole are irrelevant. Such is the sorry state of our democracy.

This was further confirmed by a 2014 paper, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. In it, they used a dataset measuring key variables for 1,779 policy issues, and concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

That is what’s meant by “politics as usual,” and that’s precisely what Bernie Sanders has spent his whole life working to change. As the campaign unfolds, and more and more people become aware of how well Sanders represents their views on fundamental issues, the focus on changing political structures of power will inevitably come to deepen—as Sanders, of course, already knows that it must.

In the Nation interview referred to above, Sanders began by responding to the question, “Are we at one of those pivot points—as we saw in the 1930s—where our politics could open up and take the country in a much more progressive direction?” And he responded as follows:

Obviously, we’re not in the midst of a massive depression, as we were in the 1930s. But I think the discontent of the American people is far, far greater than the pundits understand. Do you know what real African-American youth unemployment is? It’s over 50 percent. Families with a member 55 or older have literally nothing saved for retirement. Workers are worried about their jobs ending up in China. They’re worried about being fired when they’re age 50 and being replaced at half-wages by somebody who is 25. They’re disgusted with the degree that billionaires are able to buy elections. They are frightened by the fact that we have a Republican Party that refuses to even recognize the reality of climate change, let alone address this huge issue.

In 1936, when Roosevelt ran for reelection, he welcomed the

hatred of what he called “the economic royalists”—today, they’re the billionaire class—and I’m prepared to do that as well. That’s the kind of language the American people are ready to hear.

Ultimately, the question is not “Will Bernie Sanders be elected president?” We’ve had many men elected president who have done little to impact the long arc of our nation’s course through history. The real question is, “Will the Sanders campaign change the course of American history?” And that question is one that every citizen can help answer, by how they engage in the months ahead.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/america-ready-socialism-massive-majorities-back-bernie-sanders-issues-and-disdain?akid=13298.123424.NqSiKA&rd=1&src=newsletter1039265&t=5

Why the Nuclear Deal with Iran Could Be the First Step in Creating a Much More Secure Middle East

We need to avoid pouring more weapons into an area already wracked by conflict.

2015-07-15 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Huff Post, via AlterNet

Author: Bill Hartung

Emphasis Mine

The historic Iran nuclear deal is a positive development in its own right. It puts strict, detailed restrictions on Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon for ten years, with certain limits continuing for 15 to 25 years. This is a huge step away from the ill-considered calls for military action against Iran that have emanated from U.S. neoconservatives. It’s good for America, good for Iran and good for the region.

But there is one potential obstacle to the approval of the deal that needs to be cleared up. Opponents of the deal in the U.S. Congress and the region are likely to cry foul over the proposal for a phased elimination of the United Nations embargo on conventional arms transfers to Iran, alleging that it will embolden Iran, thereby increasing security threats to U.S. regional allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel. This concern is misplaced for two reasons.

First, as experts Trita Parsi and Tyler Cullis have pointed out in a recent piece in Foreign Policy, Saudi Arabia and Arab Gulf states currently have massive conventional superiority over Iran, a gap that it would take years, if not decades, for Iran to close, if it could do so at all. Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) puts Saudi Arabia’s military budget at $80 billion in 2014, four to five times what Iran spends. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has summarized the situation in a recent report on the strategic balance in the Middle East:

[T]he present forces of the Arab Gulf states have improved strikingly over the past few decades as the GCC states have made massive investments in improved land, air, and naval weaponry. In contrast, Iran has been unable to compete in terms of both investment and access to advanced foreign systems.

The second reason an Iran deal is unlikely to tilt the military balance in the region is that the nuclear deal keeps the United Nations arms embargo on Iran in place for five to eight years, further delaying any possibility that Tehran could build forces that would be a conventional threat to U.S. forces in the region. The real challenge posed by Iran comes through “asymmetric” capabilities — threats that don’t seek to match its adversaries’ tank for tank or plane for plane, but which seek to exploit particular weaknesses. These threats basically boil down to Iranian support for the Assad regime in Syria and non-state actors like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, which is Israel’s primary adversary; and the potential development of ballistic missiles that could hit Saudi Arabia or Israel with non-nuclear warheads.

There are two points to be made regarding Iran’s “asymmetric threats.” The first is that increasing Saudi Arabia and Israel’s already heavily stocked conventional forces will not eliminate the threats posed by non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah. The second is that the Iran nuclear deal prevents the sale of components that could be used by Iran to build a long-range ballistic missile by eight years. So, if anything, the nuclear deal will reduce the potential conventional threat that Iran poses to U.S. allies in the region.

There is also the possibility that once an Iran nuclear deal is in place, diplomatic initiatives on Syria and the arming of non-state groups could be pursued, perhaps involving the same nations that worked to craft the nuclear deal, supplemented by the key players in the region. It’s a case of first things first — the nuclear deal needs to be nailed down before other regional issues are addressed, as it is beneficial in its own right.

Part of any broader diplomatic initiative should involved a clear-eyed look at the impact of U.S. arms sales to the region. For example, Saudi Arabia’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons in its bombing campaign in Yemen has seriously undermined the stability of the region, creating a desperate humanitarian emergency even as it opens space for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to strengthen its position in the country. And in Bahrain, U.S. weapons have been used to put down the democracy movement there. U.S. weapons sales to the region should be assessed in their own right, not in response to an Iranian conventional threat that does not currently exist. Once the Iran nuclear deal is in place, the remaining, serious security issues in the region should be addressed diplomatically, not by pouring more arms into an area already wracked by conflict.

See: http://www.alternet.org/world/why-nuclear-deal-iran-could-be-first-step-creating-much-more-secure-middle-east?akid=13301.123424.FVOlLs&rd=1&src=newsletter1039345&t=9