Category: Uncategorized

The Prophet and Trump

The unfathomable harbinger of doomsday? Or just a political blip?

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Source: Tablet

Author:Paul Berman

Emphasis Mine

An old man banged a cane on the sidewalk and announced:

“Donald Trump’s political successes reflect a cultural crisis, and nothing else. His successes do not reflect a crisis over immigration. There is no such crisis. Nor is there a crisis of unemployment. Among white Americans the unemployment rate is 4.3 percent. Nor is some kind of right-wing ideological triumph taking place. Nor do Trump’s successes reflect a political split in the Republican Party. Ted Cruz stood for something. Trump stands for himself. He proposes to be the savior of the nation. The nation does not need a savior.”

My face radiated skepticism. The old man, unfazed:

“Yes, a cultural crisis. Every serious journalist in America understands this crisis—understands it by personal experience. The disappearance of one newspaper after another, and the shrinking of the magazines, and the fact that news depends on fewer and fewer reporters—these are more than business facts. Here is the cultural collapse. Worse: The surviving newspapers and political magazines, understaffed and underfunded, have lost their professional edge, not in every respect but in many respects; and everybody knows it. Does the collapse of the book-review supplements and the slimming of the magazines seem to you meaningless? Maybe you figure that people never bothered with books, anyway. You are wrong. The supplements and magazines survived in the past, didn’t they?

“Television news: another sad story. The decline of the trade unions: sadder yet. In days gone by, people used to get a political orientation from their unions, which was reality-based, too.

“Disembowelment by Internet—of course, that is the explanation. And yet the cultural collapse is also an event in the history of ideas. The collapse of music education and the symphony orchestras is part of it. The fate of humanities education, a larger part. The literature professors devote themselves to policing the literature of the past for its racist and imperialist political crimes, and the humanities students devote themselves to persecuting transgressors and promoting the higher cause of flaying the Zionists. But, I grant you, the universities are not the center of the problem. Nor is classical music the center.”

I said, “Where is the center, then?”

“Center? There is no center. The problem is somehow in the air. It is a cumulus cloud, in which the fog-puff cumulations are variously right-wing conspiracy theorists, left-wing theorists, old-school racists, populist anti-elitists who inveigh against highbrow culture, and highbrow professors who likewise inveigh against highbrow culture—the enemies of intellect, high and low, right and left. The effect is to leave huge portions of the population rudderless as to making political decisions—deprived of reliable political reporting, addicted to the cyber-hysterias of their electronic devices, deprived of leadership by institutional systems, deprived of a sense of history and of American political tradition, and incapable of judging any longer who is worthy of respect and who is not. People today are incapable even of identifying the simple quality that is known as presidential.”

I said, “Oh, none of this is new.”

“It is new,” he said. “The first sign of it within the world of politics took place in 2008, which is practically yesterday. John McCain understood that Sarah Palin was unfit for high office. Palin was unable to tell Katie Couric what magazines she reads!

Everyone knew why: Sarah Palin does not read magazines. She was already the modern personality: a proud barbarian, confident in her illiteracy. But McCain understood that, in order to have any chance to win, he needed to motivate the party base, which he himself could never do, nor could any other leader of the Republican party. So, he gambled on barbarism’s appeal. It was unprincipled of him, it was scandalous, but it was a matter of political survival.

“In this way, McCain, who represents the best of the Republican party, paved the way for Trump, who is not even the worst of the Republican tradition but comes from outside of it. Trump: a figure without precedent in the Republican party. It is no small thing to consider that, from the days of John C. Frémont, Lincoln’s predecessor, until Mitt Romney, the Republicans never once awarded their presidential nomination to someone visibly unqualified. Sen. Joseph J. McCarthy was a drunkard and a liar, but, at least, in those days the Republican party preferred to nominate Dwight Eisenhower.”

I interjected: “Circumstances explain everything—isn’t that a law of politics?”

The old man:

“Trump’s triumph is terrifying because it resists explanation. No large or powerful group or faction is responsible for his successes. Bernie Sanders’ railings against Wall Street and banks and Citizens United tell us nothing about what has happened. And Trump’s success is terrifying because it is not obvious what can prevent similar developments from taking place in other versions.

“If masses of Republican voters have lost the ability to make the most obvious of judgments, why shouldn’t parallel developments take place among their Democratic counterparts? Democrats may be chortling right now, and yet one day they, too, may wake up to discover that entire blocs of voters in their party’s base, the young people whom everybody loves, have decided, on the basis of information gleaned from Twitter, to nominate a guitar hero or a talk-show star. And if this can happen to the world’s most venerable democracy, why not to the newer and shakier ones?

“Here is a crisis that absolutely no one anticipated. In this one respect, though not in any other respect (thank heaven!), the successes of Donald Trump share something with the rise of the Islamic State. These are outbreaks of Proudhon’s ‘fecundity of the unpredictable.’ A characteristic of a viral age.”

“No,” I said. “You are just another prophet of the decline of civilization. Something is indeed predictable, and it is the gloomy nattering of doomsayers like you.”

“ ‘Even paranoids have enemies,’ said Delmore Schwartz,” he replied. “Today we are learning that doomsayers have dooms.”

***

To read more of Paul Berman’s essays and criticism for Tablet magazine, click here.

 

See: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/200929/the-prophet-and-trump?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=292b2bc358-Sunday_May_15_20165_13_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-292b2bc358-206691737

How Trump Brought the Republican Establishment to Its Knees

As Trump nears the nomination, GOP leaders are running out of ways to stop or control him.

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Source:AlterNet

Author:Robert Kuttner/American Prospect

Emphasis Mine

We keep hearing that the Republican Party is on track to suffer an epic split over the presumed nomination of Donald Trump. But what exactly does this mean? What happens once the 2016 election is over?

On one side are traditional business conservatives, devoted to government-bashing, low taxes, and pro-corporate globalization—coupled with dog-whistle appeals to racism. This establishment has delivered all recent GOP nominees, despite the Tea Party takeover of much of the congressional Republican Party—until this year when the party elite was upended.

Since Reagan, the business right has papered over the cracks in a coalition that used social conservatism to win votes of a suffering working class. Now, Trump has demolished that phony alliance. Over the weekend, Trump made it clear that he was not interested in any deal with House Speaker Paul Ryan and suggested that he might challenge his roles as convention chairman—and Ryan said Monday that he’d respect Trump’s wishes.

Trump’s brand of right-wing populism is anti-tax but not anti-government, and is occasionally anti-business. In place of government-bashing, Trump substitutes a crude form of political and economic nationalism. He has turned voter wrath against the financial elites in the GOP who have been calling the shots.

But what recourse do traditional conservatives have if they want to trump Trump? For starters, they could just withhold their support, as the Bush family is doing. Or they could withhold money.

The trouble, however, is that this is the year when the usual suspects have been revealed as politically impotent. The Bushes are history. It doesn’t matter to most conservative voters that the Bushes aren’t backing Trump. If it did matter, Jeb Bush would not have performed so pitifully.

As for the billionaires, some, like Sheldon Adelson, are already sucking up to Trump. There are so many very rich people involved in politics today that Trump is likely to get all the money he needs, even if he’s too cheap to dig into his own (somewhat exaggerated) fortune.

Some Republican leaders will even go so far as to vote for Hillary Clinton. And there is also talk of some kind independent conservative Republican insurgency, as a kind of ad hoc third party to divert votes from Trump.

Technically, an independent could still qualify for ballot listing in all states, according to Richard Winger of Ballot Access News. The deadlines are as early as June in some states and as late as September in others. But all require petitions with thousands of signatures, and a campaign would need to get its act together soon.

A traditional conservative might also try to run with the Libertarian Party, as a way of getting on the ballot. However, former New Mexico Republican governor Gary Johnson—a genuine libertarian—already has that ballot spot and would be difficult if not impossible to dislodge in favor of an orthodox conservative.

The Libertarian Party convention meets in just three weeks, over Memorial Day weekend. Its delegates tend to be purists; they are libertarians because they reject the traditional GOP. They are not about to help the Republican elite out of a jam.

As part of his libertarian creed, Johnson not only supports legalization of marijuana—he’s a pot entrepreneur and former CEO of a startup called Cannabis Sativa. Smoke that, Karl Rove!

This leaves the rather pathetic alternative of a write-in campaign. That would divert a few votes from Trump—maybe a few million votes—and increase the likelihood of a Clinton win.

But this may be just what lot of Republican leaders want. A write-in effort will allow them to help Hillary without having to endorse her. Then, when Trump goes down in flames, they (and not he) can pick up the pieces of their party.

Just as the GOP in Congress relentlessly blocked Obama at every turn, they will try to make Clinton look like a failed president. And just as the Republicans gained large numbers of seats in both houses two years into Obama’s first term in 2010, the Republicans can hope for big pickups in 2018, setting them up to take back the White House in 2020.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, fully 22 Democratic Senate seats are in play in 2018, many of them in usually red states, such as Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and West Virginia. So even if Democrats take back the Senate in 2016, they could well lose it two years later.

So my bet is that there will be no coming together between the Republican establishment and Trump, and that efforts by Republican leaders to block Trump’s election to the presidency will only intensify.

However, the story does not end there. Even if Hillary Clinton is the next president, the emergence of Trump (and Sanders) in 2016 reflects vast unease and legitimate pocketbook grievances in America. There is no sign of that abating.

The scale of change it will take to restore the economic prospects of the young and the working class makes Bernie Sanders’s proposals look puny. If Clinton fails to make real progress—whether due to Republican blockage or the limits of her own imagination—the anger will only fester and grow.

Trump may well be blocked in 2016, but we haven’t seen the last of Trumpism.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a visiting professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility.

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-trump-brought-republican-establishment-its-knees?akid=14263.123424.vQa75H&rd=1&src=newsletter1056516&t=16

Obama to Bernie supporters: Don’t let disillusionment set in

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Source:Washpo

Author: Greg Sargent

Emphasis Mine

Any day now, some very prominent Democrats will get down to the business of helping to unite the party behind likely nominee Hillary Clinton. One of them will be President Barack Obama, who is popular among young Democrats and thus well positioned to argue to Bernie Sanders supporters that it in their interests — and the interests of the larger Sanders movement — to support Clinton.

The President is set to give a speech at Rutgers University next week, at which (given the audience) he might begin to lay out this case. And in an interview with The Daily Targum, a student paper at Rutgers, he offered a long monologue that is perhaps a preview of the bigger argument he’ll make.

Notably, Obama called on people not to “oversimplify” how change is achieved, and argued that “incremental changes” via “consensus building” can add up to meaningful progress. Asked about the fact that many Americans who are worried about stagnant wages, the shrinking middle class, and rising inequality are turning to Bernie Sanders, the President answered:

“It is absolutely true that there are a lot of folks who still are struggling out there, and we can’t minimize that. There (are) trends that have been taking place over the last 20 (or) 30 years that have dampened wage growth, that have made it tougher for folks to save for retirement or for their kids’ college education…

“More needs to be done there. And some of the steps that we’ve taken are going to pay off over the course of the next 20 years. There are things like raising the federal minimum wage or rebuilding our infrastructure — that would put people back to work right away and that would accelerate growth….

“If we are changing just a few laws that make it easier, for example, for workers to organize, that close corporate tax loopholes or tax loopholes used by wealthy individuals so that they’re not paying their fair share — if we take that money and make sure that we’re investing in the kinds of things that make an economy grow, if we ensure that we’ve got a healthcare system that is affordable and accessible for all people, then I’m confident that America’s best days are still ahead….

“We have to make sure we also recognize this is a big country, and there’s very rarely a single set of silver bullets out there that would immediately solve all of these problems. We’re part of an interconnected global economy now, and there’s no going back from that. It’s important for us to not oversimplify how we’re going to bring about the kind of change we need.

“We’ve got to also recognize that, in a democracy like this, it’s not going to happen overnight. We have to make incremental changes where we can, and everyone once in a while you’ll get a breakthrough and make the kind of big changes that are necessary. That consensus building is important because that’s historically how change has happened in America. Those are the kinds of things that I’ll be talking about at the commencement.”

This is both a subtle rebuke to Sanders’s call for a revolution and a preview of the argument he’ll likely make in urging his supporters to get behind Clinton. Obama’s warning against oversimplification is an implicit criticism of Sanders’s suggestion that liberating lawmakers from the grip of plutocratic money and rallying millions to storm the ramparts of Congress would compel the sort of far reaching, transformative social democratic reforms that Sanders envisions — single payer, free public college, enormously ambitious action on to combat climate change.  

More to the point, though, Obama is previewing an argument he’ll likely make against allowing unrealistic assessments of what is possible to morph into political disillusionment. Here Obama makes the case that change has historically been won in a long, hard, incremental slog, and that the big breakthroughs are historically very rare. There is a lot to this: throughout the progressive era, gains in the areas of economic regulation, the minimum wage, and the graduated income tax proceeded fitfully and with great difficulty, suffering big setbacks in the courts. It took decades until a horrific depression and landslide electoral wins for Democrats helped lead to the big New Deal sea changes, which included the Supreme Court upholding (among other things) wage floors, unemployment insurance and social insurance for the elderly. Yet even Social Security had to be subsequently expanded many years later to cover millions who’d been excluded from it.

Likewise, Medicare was only achieved more than 15 years after President Harry Truman called for universal health care in 1949, and its core guarantee of government health care for the elderly actually represented a scaling back of reformers’ goals, disappointing many liberals who lamented that it only reached a segment of the population.

As the above remarks indicate, Obama will likely make the case against being dismissive of the incremental changes that Hillary Clinton has promised to pursue. He’ll argue for the value in achieving a $12 minimum wage (and $15 in certain localities); continuing to build on Obamacare (though Clinton should be pressed on how she’d do this); investing more in infrastructure (even if it isn’t as much as Sanders would invest); and tax reform that makes the system marginally more progressive. Also, Clinton would seek to implement the Paris climate deal, while a Republican president would pull the U.S. out of it.

To be clear, none of this is to denigrate Bernie Sanders’s ambitions. Indeed, I hope that Obama will make a genuine effort to acknowledge the force of Sanders’s big argument — his insistence that the constraints of our political system, however real the obstacles they pose, ultimately should not cause us to scale back our idealized vision of a far more fair economy and just society. I also hope he’ll make the case to Sanders’s supporters that they have an important role to play in trying to pull Clinton and the Democratic Party towards them on their issues and in trying to erect a bulwark in Congress against any caves to regressive centrist deal-making. If the goal is to prevent disillusionment from setting in, those might serve as two key pieces of the argument.

See:https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/05/12/obama-to-bernie-supporters-dont-let-disillusionment-set-in/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_popns

The Media Myth of the Working-Class Reagan Democrats

The numbers don’t lie. The notion that angry blue collar voters could sway the election just may not be true.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Neal Gabler/Moyers and CO

Emphasis Mine

The numbers don’t lie. The notion that angry blue collar voters could sway the election just may not be true.

Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, we are likely to get all sorts of mainstream media analysis about how his narrow pathway to Election Day victory runs through white working-class America, the way Ronald Reagan’s did, while the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, must corral young people, minorities and the well-educated.

In case you haven’t noticed, there is an unmistakable media bias in this – one that was framed perfectly in a Newsweekcover story by Evan Thomas eight years ago. It was about Barack Obama’s alleged “Bubba Gap,” and illustrated with a picture of arugula — and beer. Democrats, naturally, were the arugula eaters.

This idea that Republicans are “real” Americans and Democrats aren’t is now a generation-long meme in the media, and it has had tremendous repercussions for our politics. It used to be that Republicans were the effete ones and Democrats the salt-of-the-earth. Then Ronald Reagan came along and pried working-class voters away from the Democrats – the so-called “Reagan Democrats” – and suddenly the media reversed party roles, deciding that America tilted right, and that Democrats were elitists.

I have no idea who will win the election this November, but I can pretty much assure you of this: we will be hearing an awful lot about Trump Democrats who, like those Reagan Democrats, may abandon the Democratic Party because they allegedly find it too high-blown.

But this is what you probably won’t hear: those Reagan Democrats, at least not as we usually think of them — urban, Rust Belt laborers — didn’t last much beyond Reagan. They were a temporary blip who didn’t realign American politics the way the media tell us they did. Trump Democrats might be something of a myth, too – a collaboration of the MSM and the candidate to portray him and his party as the agents of blue-collar, middle America because it fits the media’s stereotype of angry workers blowing gaskets.

Let’s get a few things out of the way when we talk about Republican hegemony and the party’s appeal to disaffected Democrats. Yes, Republicans control both houses of Congress, and, yes, they are dominant at the governor and state legislature levels. This, however, is largely the product of certain peculiarities in the American political system rather than any great Democratic defection or love of Republicanism: things like low turnout in local and midterm elections among minorities and the poor, who are likely to vote Democratic; subsequent gerrymandering of districts to benefit Republicans; absurd disproportions in which Wyoming, with its population of 584,000, gets the same number of senators as California with its 39 million; and the role of money in elections, as money generally flows more freely to Republicans than to Democrats for the obvious reason that the GOP’s benefactors have more to gain from the system.

If you just read newspapers and watch TV news, you would probably never guess that actually there are fewer self-identified conservatives in America than there are self-identified liberals, or that Democrats outnumber Republicans 29 percent to 26 percent in the latest Gallup Poll.

These are, says Gallup, historically low figures for both parties, but they may heavily discount Democratic identification. According to a survey by Republic 3.0, if you add in self-declared Independents who nevertheless lean toward one party or the other, Democrats actually constitute 45 percent of Americans, while Republicans constitute just 33 percent. So if you have been thinking that this is a conservative GOP country, think again.

Which brings us to those Reagan Democrats. As Thomas Frank wrote in his 2004 best-seller, What’s the Matter With Kansas?,the “dominant political coalition” in America is the union of business voters and blue-collar voters, many of the latter one-time Democrats diverted from their economic interests by the bloody shirt of social wedge issues from abortion to gun rights to immigration. That was the great Republican prestidigitation. Now you see economic distress, now you don’t. And the great political realignment that followed was laid at the foot of Ronald Reagan.

But was it true? In 2006, in theQuarterly Journal of Political Science, the brilliant political scientist Larry Bartels, then of Princeton and now at Vanderbilt University, took on this story in a searching analysis of Frank’s thesis. Looking at voting trendlines over a 50-year period, from the 1952 presidential election of Eisenhower to the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush, Bartels found that there was, as Frank and pundits said, a decline in Democratic support — roughly six percentage points; not huge over five decades, but still significant.

But wait! That decline was among white voters without college degrees, which was the demographic Frank chose to use. If you include non-white voters without college degrees, Democrats actually enjoyed a two-point increase.

You may notice that when the MSM talks about the whole Reagan/Trump Democratic conversion, they are focusing on whites, too, even though the share of white voters in the electorate is falling while that of minorities is rising. Basically, it’s the media equivalent of the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution in which slaves, for the purpose of calculating representation, counted for less than whites.

Further, Bartels found that if you look at income rather than education, the results are even more pronounced in favor of Democrats. The percentage of low income voters going Democratic has actually risen since the 1980s. In 2012, Barack Obama received 60 percent of the votes of those with household incomes under $50,000, roughly the American median, and only 44 percent of those over $100,000. And here is something else Bartels discovered. Nearly all the Democratic decline among low-income white voters without college degrees came in the South: 10.3 percent. Outside the South, the Democratic percentages actually increased (11.2 percent) for an overall national increase of 4.5 percent. Again, that is just among whites. The inescapable conclusion: All those blue collar workers who are supposed to have left the Democratic Party for Reagan and then stayed in the GOP, or who might soon be leaving for Trump, didn’t in the first case, and aren’t likely to do so in the second.

I suppose there is a reason why the MSM doesn’t feel comfortable broadcasting those numbers. Doing so would force them to label Republicans for what they are: the party of white, rich, disproportionately Southern folks, as opposed to the Democrats, who are a diverse party racially and economically. When put that way, it inevitably sounds like the media are taking sides, even though it would only be fact-providing.

This isn’t to say that in 1980, when it came to union households, Reagan didn’t cut seriously into the lead Carter had over Ford in 1976. And he made some inroads into the working class as defined by income as well. But the real story of the so-called post-Reagan Republican tilt is that white Southerners, who had long been departing the Democratic Party, until one of their own, Carter, stanched the flow in 1976, were the primary defectors. And presumably they were leaving not over economics but over race.

That’s another story neither the MSM nor the Republicans are eager to tell because it makes the GOP out to be overly dependent on racist troglodytes. For the MSM to tell the truth this way would, again, seem to be picking on Republican salt-of-the-earth rank and file, and the MSM won’t risk doing that. Picking on allegedly Democratic elitists? That’s OK.

None of this is to say that Trump won’t attract lots of angry, white working-class voters. It is to say that it’s highly unlikely he will draw many working-class voters away from the Democrats, in large part because there probably aren’t a whole lot of white Democratic votes left in the South to take away, and because most blue-collar workers still identify with the Democratic Party. So get ready to hear about all those angry, blue-collar white guys who love Trump and might hand him the election. But when you do, remember this: Democrats drink beer too, even though the MSM has you thinking they’re all sipping chablis as they munch their arugula.

Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA TImes Book Prizes, Time magazine’s non-fiction book of the year, USA Today’s biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/media-myth-working-class-reagan-democrats

The Left Is Winning the Debate Around the World: So Now What?

The days of standing for office just to make a point may be over.

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Source:AlterNet

Author:Gary Younge

Emphasis Mine

After the Labour Party’s electoral defeat in Britain last year, the party’s small left caucus debated whether it should stand a candidate for the leadership at all. Some feared defeat would expose just how small the caucus was. Others insisted that someone needed to at least raise the arguments against anti-austerity and for a progressive foreign policy to counter the narrative that Labour had lost because it was too progressive.

Once the caucus resolved in favor of standing a candidate, the next challenge was to find a candidate. There were few takers. “What about if I stand?” asked Jeremy Corbyn, a consistent socialist standard-bearer over several decades. The question was initially met with silence. But when nobody else came forward, Corbyn got the nod. Then came the final task: getting on the ballot. For that, Corbyn needed 35 members of Parliament to nominate him. With just hours to go before the deadline, he was still several signatures short. With seconds left, his supporters rounded up some parliamentarians who didn’t support him but voted for him anyway, just so the party could have the fullest debate possible.

Nobody—least of all Corbyn—assumed that he would win the debate, let alone the election, with one of the largest majorities of any Labour leader.

The trajectory of Corbyn’s ascent—the unlikeliness, pace, and impact of it; the breadth, depth, scale, and insurrectionary nature of it—is emblematic of a broader and growing trend in much of the Western world. In different ways, and to different extents, it is reflected in Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic nomination, as well as the rise of Podemos in Spain, the Left Bloc in Portugal, and Syriza in Greece. (The fact that Sanders is all but certain to lose is irrelevant. What is remarkable is that he ever had a chance, no matter how slim.)

All of these political movements are, of course, different in their own way. Some, like Podemos and Syriza, are relatively new formations, expressing the hope for a different kind of political engagement. Others—the challenges by Sanders and Corbyn in particular—are fronted by older men within established institutions and blend nostalgia for an abandoned social-democratic agenda with the youthful energy of a generation that speaks the language of class almost as fluently as it does that of identity. Some are the product of movements that have grown out of the most recent crisis; others are trying to create movements in order to sustain them.

But all have this in common: They have created electoral space on the left where few believed it was possible to thrive, let alone win. In so doing, they have surprised both themselves and their moderate opponents, upending the political certainties of a generation. This new situation poses challenges for everyone.

For a generation, the liberal establishment claimed that radical agendas were self-indulgent precisely because they could not win. “We want to change people’s lives,” went the mantra of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and any number of social democrats in between. “But we can’t do that if we’re not in power, and we can’t gain power with a radical agenda.” This, of course, became a self-fulfilling prophecy: No one will vote for those radical policies, so we won’t offer them; since they weren’t offered, no one could vote for them. Pretty much everything could be justified on the basis that the other lot were much worse.

This logic no longer holds. In any number of theoretical general-election matchups, Sanders has outshined Hillary Clinton against both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, with double her national lead in the polls. Though Sanders fares worse against John Kasich, this admittedly crude yardstick still suggests he’d win in November.

In the United Kingdom, despite hostile media, a parliamentary party in revolt, and considerable self-inflicted wounds, Corbyn has, in the last couple of months, started to lead in the occasional opinion poll. Syriza won reelection in Greece; the Left Bloc is propping up the social-democratic government in Portugal; Podemos is now a serious force in Spain that could, if it joins forceswith another radical party (United Left), eclipse the long-established Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party.

This electoral revival on the left is impressive, but hardly decisive. None of this makes victory likely, let alone inevitable in most cases. But it does make these candidacies viable and their agendas quite evidently plausible. It belies the claim “Vote for Bernie and you’ll get Trump.” That line of reasoning was always more of a threat than an argument. But it doesn’t work even as a threat now. The facts simply don’t support it; informed conjecture can no longer sustain it.

So the establishment has to own its politics. If it wants to balance budgets on the backs of the poor or deregulate industries to fill the pockets of the rich, it will have to make its case. If, ultimately, it doesn’t seek a society that is fair but one that is merely a bit less unfair, then it should say so rather than hide behind the ostensible will of an electorate that has been offered no other choice. If what masqueraded as pragmatism was really principle in drag, then it deserves to be outed.

But, similarly, it falls on the radical left to take itself far more seriously. When it comes to elections, it can no longer act like the dog that chases a car only to end up confounded when it actually catches the vehicle. True, there’s more to politics than elections and more to elections than just winning. But the days of standing for office in order to shift the debate, broaden the base, or just make a point may be over. The debate has shifted; the base has been broadened; the point has been made unmistakably.

Radicals now have to take yes for an answer and decide how to employ the electoral strength they’ve marshaled. Having cleared political space through the ballot box, the left must now decide how to build on it.

Gary Younge is an author, broadcaster and award-winning columnist for the Guardian, based in Chicago. He also writes a monthly column forThe Nation magazine and is the Alfred Knobler Fellow for The Nation Institute.

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/world/left-winning-debate-around-world-so-now-what?akid=14240.123424.BUpvkz&rd=1&src=newsletter1056110&t=12

It’s “the Donald”

Trump’s political successes come from throwing out the rules, and saying what he pleases—now it’s going to reflect on the party itself.

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Source:AlterNet

Author: Stephen Rosenfeld

Emphasis Mine 

Republicans across the country are swallowing hard and wondering what Donald Trump is going to be like as their presidential candidate—as if the answers are not clear enough.

Some are hoping he will dial down his vulgar mouth and start acting presidential, as if magically transformed by what mainstream media had been calling an “aura of inevitability.” You saw hints of that in his speech Tuesday night, where, in his typical swing of the pendulum style, he praised Ted Cruz after savaging him for days, even accusing Cruz’s father of consorting with John F. Kennedy’s assassin.

(N.B.: I submit that a candidate qualified for POTUS should BE presedential, not need to ‘act’ the role.

Americans who have been paying attention already know more than enough about Trump, even if he has a showman’s gift to endlessly keep stunning and provoking. That is why two-thirds of Americans not only tell pollsters they not only strongly disappove of him, but many are scared of him. Hillary Clinton’s negatives are high, but not like that.

There are open questions about the race as it enters a new orbit, such as how low will his ugly swipes go, or what scandals from Trump’s past will emerge, or how and when will Democrats hit back, and will they be able to stop him when all the Republican presidential hopefuls did not? The Democrats, and especially Hillary Clinton, have their playbook, while Trump’s political successes have come from throwing out the rules.

Here are seven things we know about Trump and what his candidacy will likely mean, even as the country heads into new territory led by a crazed super-celebrity billionaire.

1. Trump won’t keep his mouth shut. Any notion of better behavior or a classier act has repeatedly shown itself to be a mirage. His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, has said that Trump will continue to be Trump, because he is “a person who tells it like it is.” That means building himself up by putting others down, whether it’s attacking Mexicans, Muslims, women who question him or his values, and anybody else for any headline-grabbing reason.

2. His persona is based on unpredictability. He bragged to the Washington Post’s editorial board that part of being a top negotiator was acting out and upsetting the other side’s expectations. And so he can be rabidly anti-choice to please evangelicals, yet come out for same-sex marriage, saying he’s known Elton John and his partner for years. Or within 24 hours he can trash Ted Cruz and then praise him. Trump believes this somehow is a magnificent virtue, not a liability for the person at the helm of national power. As Lewandowski said, Trump “has the ability to change the narrative at any moment,” as if that is a bedrock principle for governing. When Bill Clinton was president, he infamously said and believed whatever he wanted on TV all the time—facts be damned. But Trump is introducing a whole other level of dysfunction.

3. There will be no moderate makeover. That’s the old cliché; appeal to the purists and extremists to win primaries and caucuses, and come the General Election, tack to the political center because that’s where tens of millions of voters who didn’t take part in the nominating contests start paying attention. (In 2016, it looks like the primary and caucus turnout will be 30 percent of all voters next fall.)  But there is no way Trump can pretend to be moderate, given everything he has already said and social media’s reach. There’s no denying that he exults in ranting and raging as has been seen on the campaign trail. There’s no undoing what he’s done and said ad nauseum for months.

4. He’ll split the party into factions. After Trump won Indiana, Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus called for the party to line up behind the presumptive nominee. That will be much harder for Republican candidates running this fall, who, looking at their own futures, will have to decide if they’ll run with him, in spite of him, or against him. All those shades are already occuring, with many longtime party leaders saying never. These fissures are likely to cost the GOP its U.S. Senate majority.

Before Trump’s clinching the nomination, there were predictions the Senate was ripe for a Democratic takeover. Twenty-four of the 34 Senate seats in play this fall are held by Republicans. Democrats only need to pick up five for a majority. The party has strong candidates in states that turn out blue majorities in presidential years, such as Illinois and Pennsylvania. Trump not only weakens these GOP incumbents, his candidacy raises a question of what may happen in the House, though GOP gerrymandering after 2010’s redistricting still deeply favors House Republicans. Nonetheless, there’s little to suggest that Trump is about to become the great unifier, meaning Republicans could face a historic meltdown and defeat this fall.

5. His campaign will be marred by scandal. Most people—except for supporters who have fallen under his “make America great again” spell—know that Trump has issues with telling the truth. You can be sure there’s plenty of dirt behind however rich he really is. The country has yet to see his tax returns, which will be a Pandora’s box of slick moves to avoid taxes. There’s Trump’s four business bankrupties involving $4.7 billion in debt, where small business vendors at his casinos were partly paid, hurting the little guy. He has a little-known but extensive history with New York City’s mob, as he built and ran his casinos according to journalists who covered him for decades. And there is even his strange personal life, as pondered by the New Yorker’s new profile of a future possible first lady, Melania Trump.

6. Toss in the Supreme Court and it gets uglier. It is pretty easy to decode the game Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been playing doing everything he can to block President Obama’s latest Supreme Court nominee. McConnell is going for broke, hoping somehow the GOP will not lose its conservative majority on the Court for decades, even if it loses the White House in the shorter run. But add that stonewalling to Trump’s raging and what emerges is a political season where Americans are going to have to decide if they’re ready to hand more power to people who want to upend many things in wholly untried and untested ways. Conservatives might say Bernie Sanders is also a bombthrower, but his remedies have substantial precedents in the 1930s New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt and 1960s Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson. Not so with these Republican “leaders” and a Trump-led GOP.

7. A nasty race will get nastier. Trump has singlehandedly brought a dirtier level of gutter politics to presidential politics, embracing every smear in sight and enjoying his taunts, bullying and strongman act. He’s already gone after Hillary Clinton for playing the “woman card,” being incompetent, being a terrible person, accomodating her cheating husband, and more. Despite these juvenile antics, Democrats know what it means if they lose the media narrative to a headline-provoking stuntman. They are also well aware that Hillary’s unfavorable ratings in national polls are akin to Trump’s.

The Democrats will hit back and hit hard, but the question is not just when and how, but who? There are reports that Democratic super PACs are buying multi-millions in TV ads before the Republican Convention to shape impressions—as if that was needed (and might backfire by playing into his hands as being a target). Nonetheless, if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, as many expect, will Bill step it up? Will the current president? Trump is not the only sharp-tongued politician in America.

But Don’t Worry, Be Happy 

Paul Manafort, an older Washington hand who was hired to be Trump’s Republican National Convention manager, told the Republican National Committee in its recent meetings in Florida that Trump has just been “playing” a part just to get the nomination and he will change once he starts campaigning for the fall.

Talking about saying anything that closes a deal! That’s like being told by the candidate himself to sit down, make yourself at home at one of his resorts, relax and have a drink, grab a meal, play some golf, grab a spa treatment and then get the super-sized bill.

It will be one thing to see Republicans pay the price for embracing Trump, and another for Americans who will be forced along for the upcoming ride. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the coming Trump candidacy is that while he may be taking all of the country and the GOP into the gutter with him, if the past is prologue, there’s a chance Trump and his party will be left in the gutter for years to come.

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-2016/7-ways-gop-about-become-national-freak-show-trump-their-nominee?akid=14225.123424.TpSJQx&rd=1&src=newsletter1055895&t=2

Trump Embraces Blunt Sexism: His Supporters Love the Absurd Idea That Even the Smartest Woman Isn’t as Good as a Man

His constant slams on women works with his ardent backers—but it will destroy him in November.

chasdarwin1 Comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: Amanda Marcotte/Salon

Emphasis Mine

Donald Trump never met a preposterous statement he wasn’t willing to stand by, and so it is with his apparent belief that women are unfairly advantaged over men in our society. On Fox News on Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Trump why he would say that Hillary Clinton is a talentless hack who is coasting on the “woman card,” i.e. the unearned privilege he believes women enjoy over men, and Trump defended himself by pulling his P.C.-police-suppress-the-truth card.

“Well, I’m my own strategist and I like that—what I said and it’s true,” Trump said. “I only tell the truth and that’s why people voted for me.”

The audacity of it is stunning, of course. If he hadn’t been born a white man in a wealthy family, Trump would be a used car salesman in Des Moines who spends his weekends on desultory Match. com dates with divorcees who never call him again. Meanwhile, a huge amount of Clinton’s appeal is that she’s a smart and talented woman who has overcome a huge amount of sexist abuse in order to get as far as she has.

But Trump’s bleating about the “woman card” epitomizes the appeal he has to his supporters, even as he manages to alienate everyone else in the country. There’s a certain logic to his argument if you believe, as most conservatives do, that sexism is a thing of the past and that feminists are just making up stories to “play the victim” and earn the sweet, sweet cash they supposedly get from saying sexism still exists.

The problem with the “sexism is over” argument is that women in this country are still not equal. There’s a persistent pay gap. Women are underrepresented in congress and no woman has ever been the president. While women graduate from college at greater rates than men, they are less likely to get plum jobs and promotions.

Looking over the statistics, there’s really only two ways to explain the inequities: Either women are being treated unfairly or women are simply inferior to men. Feminists stand by the first argument, pointing out multiple studies that show that sexist beliefs about women and systematic discrimination holds women back.

Conservatives, however, reject the notion that sexism is still a thing, forcing them to argue that women fall behind because they’re simply not as good as men. There are a lot of euphemisms for this argument—they usually say it’s because of women’s “choices” instead of bluntly claiming that women are inferior—but the gist is there: It’s not sexism, it’s that women aren’t good/smart/ambitious enough.

Once you buy into the argument that women’s inequality is due to women’s inferiority, it’s not much of a leap to start assuming that any woman who does go far must be getting some unfair advantage. For Trump and the sexist men who support him, it’s easier to believe that Clinton’s success is due to a feminist conspiracy to promote women over more deserving men than to admit that there are women out there that are smarter and more capable than they are. It’s the same mentality that led Trump and the folks who support him to embrace “birther” theories about Barack Obama. It was easier to believe he was installed by a shadowy cabal than accept the possibility that an African-American man could be a legitimately elected official.

Trump’s simplistic sexism has become déclassé in mainstream conservative circles. Instead, the trend has been to accept some women into leadership positions, as long as they remain firmly in the minority and don’t ever rise to the tippy-top positions reserved for men. This simultaneously props up the argument that conservatives aren’t sexist while maintaining a belief in female inferiority. The gist of things is that while a small handful of exceptional women are good enough to compete with men, most are not. And even those who are smart enough will never be quite as good as the men at the top.

Ted Cruz’s selection of Carly Fiorina as his running mate is a perfect illustration of the delicate dance that conservatives are performing with gender politics. On one hand, he’s trying to show off how non-sexist he supposedly is by picking a woman. On the other hand, he went out of his way to pick someone who isn’t as smart as he is, as evidenced by her long history of professional and political failures. The pick allows him to appear to respect women while reinforcing conservative beliefs that women aren’t quite as capable as men. If anything, by picking someone who isn’t very good, Cruz is subtly reaffirming the belief that women in leadership are incompetents who get a leg up not because of talent but because of “political correctness.”

John McCain did the same thing in 2008 with his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Now there is a hack who only got as far as she did because powerful men wanted to be seen as the kind of people who promote women. She was a bad pick for his campaign, but a good pick for pushing the belief that women aren’t as smart as men and can only really get far because of their supposed female privilege.

Under the circumstances, it’s easy to see why so many voters prefer Trump. He doesn’t play these complicated games of pretending to respect women while rejecting the possibility that women really can be equal to men. His belief systems are far more straightforward: He doesn’t think women are smart and any woman’s success that challenges him will be waved away as a gimme handed to her because of “political correctness.” For those who are sick of pretending to believe things they don’t want to believe, such as in the possibility that women can be smart, the Trump method is far more appealing than the elaborate systems of B.S. that other conservatives have built.

That, plus it’s always thrilling to misogynists to hear that, simply by virtue of being male, they are better than a woman who was her class valedictorian, an accomplished lawyer, a senator and the secretary of state. But odds are low Trump will get far with the general electorate by suggesting that even the smartest woman somehow pales in comparison to a mediocre man.

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte. 

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-embraces-blunt-sexism-his-supporters-love-absurd-idea-even-smartest-woman-isnt?akid=14217.123424.vApA3m&rd=1&src=newsletter1055746&t=8

Today Is Our Day

This May Day, we should celebrate the historic triumphs of the labor movement and the struggles to come.

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Source:RSN

Author:Jonah Walters, Jacobin

Emphasis Mine

The first May Day was celebrated in 1886, with a general strike of three hundred thousand workers at thirteen thousand businesses across the United States. It was a tremendous show of force for the American labor movement, which was among the most militant in the world.

Many of the striking workers — who numbered forty thousand in Chicago alone — rallied under the banners of anarchist and socialist organizations. Trade unionists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds — many of them recent immigrants — marched shoulder-to-shoulder, making a unified demand for the eight-hour day.

The movement to limit the workday posed a significant threat to American industrialists, who were accustomed to demanding much longer hours from their workers.

In the late nineteenth century, successive waves of immigration brought millions of immigrants to the United States, many of whom sought work in factories. Because unemployment was so high, employers could easily replace any worker who demanded better conditions or sufficient wages — so long as that worker acted alone. As individuals, workers were in no position to oppose the dehumanizing work their bosses expected of them.

But when workers acted together, they could exercise tremendous power over their employers and over society as a whole. Working-class radicals understood the unique power of collective action, fighting to ensure that the aggression of employers was often met by a groundswell of workers’ resistance.

For the last decades of the nineteenth century, industrial titans like Andrew Carnegie and George Pullman could get no peace. Periodic explosions of working-class activity provided a check on their power and prestige. But industrialists and their allies in government often responded with brutal force, quelling waves of worker militancy that demanded a fundamentally different kind of American prosperity, one in which the poor and downtrodden were included.

The movement for the eight-hour day was one such mass struggle. On May 1, 1886, workers all over the country took to the streets to demand a better life and a more just economy. The demonstrations lasted for days. 

But this surge of working-class resistance ended in tragedy. In Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a police massacre claimed the lives of several workers after someone — likely a provocateur working for one of the city’s industrial barons — tossed a homemade bomb into the crowd. The Chicago authorities took the bombing as an opportunity to arrest and execute four of the movement’s most prominent leaders — including the anarchist and trade unionist August Spies.

It was a severe setback to the workers’ movement. But the repression wasn’t enough to douse the struggle for good. As August Spies said during his trial:

[I]f you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement — the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery, the wage slaves, expect salvation — if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there and behind you, and in front of you, and everywhere the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.

These words would prove prophetic. The next May Day, and every May Day since, workers across the world took to the streets to contest the terms of capitalist prosperity and gesture towards a fundamentally different world — a world in which production is motivated not by profit, but by human need.

Today, the power of the American labor movement is at a low. Many of its most important gains — including the right to the eight-hour day — have been dismantled by the anti-labor neoliberal consensus. But May Day still looms as a lasting legacy of the international movement for working-class liberation.

Obviously, a great deal has changed since those explosive decades at the end of the nineteenth century. The defeats suffered by the American workers’ movement may seem so profound that it can be tempting to regard the militancy that once rattled tycoons and presidents alike as a nothing more than a piece of history.

But we don’t have to gaze so far into the past for inspiring examples of struggle. Far more recent May Days provide glimpses at the transformative potential of worker movements.

Just ten years ago, in 2006, immigrant workers across the country stood up to restrictive immigration laws and abusive labor practices, organizing a massive movement of undocumented laborers that culminated in the so-called Great American Boycott (El Gran Paro Estadounidense). On May Day of that year, immigrant organizations and some labor unions came together to organize a one-day withdrawal of immigrant labor — dubbed “A Day Without Immigrants” — to demonstrate the essential role of immigrant workers in American industry.

Protests began in March and continued for eight weeks. The numbers are staggering — 100,000 marchers in Chicago kicked off the wave of demonstrations, followed by half a million marchers in Los Angeles a few weeks later, and then a coordinated day of action on April 10, which saw demonstrations in 102 cities across the country, including a march of between 350,000 and 500,000 protesters in Dallas.

By May Day, the movement had gained momentum, winning popular support all over the United States and around the world. On May 1 of that year, more than a million took to the streets in Los Angeles, joined by 700,000 marchers in Chicago, 200,000 in New York, 70,000 in Milwaukee, and thousands more in cities across the country. In solidarity with Latin American immigrants in the United States, labor unions around the world celebrated “Nothing Gringo Day,” a one day boycott of all American products.

Ever since, May Day has been recognized as a day of solidarity with undocumented immigrants — a fitting reminder of May Day’s origins in a movement that saw native-born and immigrant workers standing together to defend their common interests.

And this year, May Day presents us with more opportunities to mobilize support around an American labor movement showing signs of revitalization — this May Day, workers and activists across the country will stand in solidarity with the almost forty thousand striking Verizon workers, whose  intransigent managers have thus far refused to bargain with the union in good faith.

This May Day we follow in the footsteps of generations of labor radicals. These radicals saw in capitalism the horrors of an unjust economy, but dared to dream of something different — a reimagined economy in which the fruits of prosperity could be shared equally, among all people, in a just and democratic society.

Despite the setbacks of the labor movement — at home and worldwide — that dream is still living. The struggle continues.

Happy May Day. Take to the streets.

See:http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36627-today-is-our-day

How the United States Whitewashes May Day

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Source: Daily Kos

Author: Paul Hogarth

Emphasis Mine

When I was an 11-year-old kid in Chicago, my 5th Grade Class was assigned to do a School Assembly for the month of May.  As my teacher brainstormed what holidays are in May, I innocently suggested May Day.  “No, Paul,” she replied sternly.  “May Day is only celebrated in Communist countries – we can’t do a play about a Communist holiday.”  see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day

Of course, Miss Barth was wrong – May Day is celebrated in almost every country in the world, except the United States.  Even though the holiday commemorates the Haymarket Riot of 1886, which happened – of all places – in Chicago.  But for years, the United States has intentionally whitewashed May Day from our culture and our consciousness.

Even in Chicago, it’s almost impossible to find Haymarket Square where the riot occurred – because it basically no longer exists.  As Occupy protesters plan to wage massive May Day rallies today across the country, they will have a basic problem – outside a circle of left-wing activists, most Americans have never heard of May Day.  People may be drawn to protest because of their economic woes or Wall Street greed, but not because of some holiday that they never learned about in school.

When I suggested May Day to my 5th Grade teacher for our school play, I was not a very precocious 11-year-old – or even a red-diaper baby.  I had just vaguely heard about May Day, as the holiday of fertility where you make flower baskets to celebrate the coming of spring.  Any association that May Day has to workers rights – or left-wing causes – was foreign to me.  But we should have learned about it in school, because the Haymarket Riot happened in Chicago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day

On May 4, 1886, as part of a national effort by labor unions to pass an eight-hour workday, activists held a peaceful rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.  At around 10:30 p.m., a dynamite bomb exploded in the crowd – killing seven police officers and four civilians.  No one knows who threw the bomb, but the Police suspected and arrested eight anarchists.  They were tried and convicted in what everyone admits was a sham trial – and four of them were executed (one committed suicide in jail.)

The Haymarket Riot and its aftermath outraged working people and their allies across the world, and they started May Day to remember its martyrs and celebrate the struggles of working people.  Today, May Day is a national holiday in over eighty countries across the world.  While celebrated in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, it is also a holiday in countries like the United Kingdom and Spain.  After South Africa had its first free elections in 1994, May Day became a holiday.

In these countries, workers typically get the day off – and mass rallies are held to celebrate the struggle of working people for fair wages and an eight-hour workday.  My father now lives in Barcelona, Spain (after teaching at the University of Chicago for twenty years) – and only first learned about May Day because of its rallies there.

But May Day never took hold in the United States.  In 1894, after the Pullman Strike (which also happened in Chicago), President Grover Cleveland made Labor Day – the first Monday in September – a national holiday.  Labor Day was chosen to intentionally co-opt May Day, because they feared commemorating the Haymarket Riot would build support for communism and other radical causes.  In 1958 during the McCarthy Era, President Dwight Eisenhower took it even further by signing a law making May 1st Loyalty Day.  And in the 1980’s, President Ronald Reagan enacted May 1st as “Law Day.”

Unless you were a red-diaper baby, Americans don’t grow up learning about May Day.  We did not get the day off in school, and we certainly didn’t do a 5th Grade play about it.  But when I was in the Chicago Public Schools, we got a three-day weekend in early March for Casimir Pulaski Day – because of Chicago’s large Polish-American community.  Even the first grade class at Lincoln Elementary School did a play about Pulaski Day.

Haymarket Square?  I lived in Chicago for 18 years, and only discovered its location while researching this article.  There isn’t much left of it, frankly.  What used to be Haymarket Square is a block of West Randolph Street – between the Loop & the Kennedy Expressway.  But we all knew Mrs. O’Leary’s barn where her cow kicked the lantern, because the Chicago Fire Department now has a Training Academy there.  Even though 20 years after the Great Chicago Fire, a reporter admitted he made it all up just to sell papers.

Which is why the Occupy Movement’s goal of a “General Strike” with thousands of people in the streets on May Day is a little tone-deaf.  Yes, May Day 2006 was a huge success – when thousands of Latino immigrant families marched in cities across the country.  But they were not marching to commemorate the Haymarket Riot – they were protesting mass deportations and the right-wing anti-immigrant hysteria.

What made the May Day 2006 rallies so powerful and influential was it rounded upmore than the usual suspects.  Spanish radio stations, churches and groups with deep ties in the Latino community spent weeks mobilizing people – so that folks who you would never expect to be political suddenly got involved.  Here in San Francisco, we’re used to seeing a left-wing political protest every week with the same crowd.  But the sight of immigrant moms marching down Market Street with baby strollers – and kids waving Mexican and American flags – was a sight to see.

Can the Occupy Movement generate a huge turnout of families being foreclosed on by the Wall Street banks, or young college graduates struggling for a job while under crushing debt?  Sure, but you won’t get the masses to turn out because it’s May Day.  And yet, all the flyers I’ve seen cater to the same left-wing crowd.  If you want to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge (which Occupy organizers now admit they can’t do), you need to expand your movement beyond the usual suspects – i.e., people who don’t know about May Day.

My 5th Grade Class at Lincoln Elementary School never did a school assembly about May Day – in fact, Miss Barth could never find a good holiday in May to do instead.  So we did a humorous play about a school cafeteria.  I played the mashed potatoes, who none of the children ate because they all wanted French fries.  Despite living in Chicago, it would be over a decade before I would learn the significance of May Day.

I often like to imagine what might have been if I were in Miss Barth’s shoes.  As the 5th Grade teacher, I would have had the kids do a play about May Day – where they re-enact the Haymarket Riot, and the conviction of eight anarchists.  The kids would have learned about Chicago’s proud labor history, and that these militant struggles brought workers’ rights we take for granted today – like the eight-hour workday.

After the play, the kids would turn to the audience and sing “Solidarity Forever” and “The Internationale” – before concluding the assembly by enthusiastically shouting: “Workers of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chains!”  It would probably be at this point, where our School Principal – whose name (ironically) was Mr. May – would have walked up to me in the auditorium, and fired me on the spot.

Paul Hogarth is a writer and attorney living in San Francisco.  He is the Managing Editor of Beyond Chron, San Francisco’s Alternative Online Daily, where this piece was first published.

See:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/01/1087839/-How-the-United-States-Whitewashes-May-Day?detail=emailclassics&link_id=8&can_id=d57025b8908d671dcc8edc84e5855f8f&source=email-someone-finally-polled-the-1-and-its-not-pretty&email_referrer=someone-finally-polled-the-1-and-its-not-pretty&email_subject=someone-finally-polled-the-1-and-its-not-pretty

How Bernie Sanders Can Squander—or Expand—His Victory

Sanders has accomplished much more than what America expected, but he now stands at a precipice.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Joe Conason

Emphasis Mine

The time is coming when Bernie Sanders should declare victory—not because he is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee, but because he has already won so much.

Of course, Sanders knows very well that he cannot wrest the nomination from Hillary Clinton. He lags well behind her in pledged delegates, superdelegates and the popular vote, where he trails by well over three million.

Nobody should be surprised that he couldn’t beat Clinton, whose political durability is routinely underestimated by hostile media coverage. What did seem surprising, however briefly, was the mere possibility that a self-described Democratic socialist from a tiny New England state could win the nomination of a party he had never condescended to join.

Even more astonishing is how much this rumpled, sometimes cranky and formerly obscure politician has achieved during his meteoric flight to fame. Sanders has proved a concept many on the left have always cherished: Social democratic ideas, given a fair hearing, can appeal to a much broader segment of the American public than most political scientists ever imagined. No doubt most voters would still shun “socialism,” but millions this year have embraced social democracy, European style, with its emphasis on economic security, worker rights, environmental quality and gender equality.

He has pushed both Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and her party well to the left of where they were when he entered the race. Although she can point to much evidence of her own progressive inclinations, his challenge has provoked her to speak up forcefully on income inequality, paid family leave, infrastructure spending and financial reform. Substantive differences remain between them, but their disagreements are narrow compared with the gulf between the two parties—or between them and the likely Republican nominee.

And he has led a remarkable mobilization of young activists, from every background, now widely seen as representing the future of the Democratic Party. If they remain active, there will be senators, representatives and perhaps even a president who remember Bernie as their inspiration.

For now, as an “independent” sitting in the Senate Democratic caucus, Sanders can still look ahead to a very productive future. But he must choose a way forward that advances rather than squanders this year’s achievements. Already he has taken several steps in the wrong direction.

The relentless personal assault he mounted against Clinton has contradicted his proud assertion that “I’ve never run a negative ad in my life.” Over the past few months he has spent millions of dollars on harshly negative advertising, which has caused real damage to her.

Now he seems to be contemplating a strategy that blatantly violates his own democratic instincts, by persuading superdelegates to switch their allegiance to him. This doomsday scheme would be troubling even if Sanders’ supporters hadn’t gathered nearly half a million petition signatures already, demanding that the superdelegates support the candidate with the most pledged delegates and highest vote total. To pursue it would deepen party divisions and forfeit any claim to the moral high ground.

That doesn’t mean Sanders ought to quit, not until he has seized every last opportunity to deliver his message. As he continues, however, he must consider carefully what path best serves him, his movement and his country.

More than a few of his angry supporters sound as if they intend to punish Hillary Clinton by refusing to vote for her in November, even against Donald Trump. They seem to hope that Sanders will withhold his full support from her, too. They evidently don’t realize that Clinton herself will be fine either way.

But a Democratic defeat would badly injure millions of other Americans—and losing to the Republicans would permanently diminish Sanders.

If the Democrats can mobilize enough voters for a big victory, their party may well regain control of the Senate. That shift would give Sanders the chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee, with substantial influence over taxes, spending and the fiscal priorities of the next White House. His new position would amplify that now familiar voice, speaking up on the issues that matter most to him. And as the new administration begins, he would have in hand the necessary tools to hold Clinton to her progressive campaign promises.

Yet if the Democrats lose because the Vermont senator and his supporters refuse to unite with Clinton, he will remain muted in the minority and his uplifting campaign will be seen as the prelude to a national disaster.

This is not a hard choice.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Joe Conason is the editor of the National Memo and writes a column for creators.com

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-bernie-sanders-can-squander-or-expand-his-victory?akid=14211.123424.bQEziR&rd=1&src=newsletter1055591&t=2