Author: Dave LIndorff

FLASH! The Los Angeles Times, actually a Hillary Clinton backer, reports that not just under 3.5 million votes, as reported on election night, but 8.5 million votes were actually cast in the California Democratic primary — a turnout of 47%. According to the LA Times article, the Secretary of State of California, Alex Padilla, concedes that 2.5 million of those votes, mostly mail-in ballots from young people and hispanic voters, or Bernie’s strongpoint, have been counted, and another 2 million have yet to be counted by local county officials.

But Padilla has also suspiciously not reported on what the results were of those other millions of votes that have been counted thus far since election day. (This even though his office did report the count of early mail-in votes on election day before people had even finished voting.)

All the votes are legitimate and need to be counted — by hand. As long as a ballot was received by the end of the day Friday, June 10, and were postmarked by election day, they are valid.

The LA Times said that people should prepare to see the vote totals of not just the presidential race, but also down-ticket races, change dramatically.

A tsunami of 5 million mailed-in and provisional ballots could reverse the result of Californi's Democratic Primary
 

The problem is that the Secretary of State by law has 30 days to certify the votes and declare winners. That would be July 8! So far, most reporting on the uncounted votes has been limited to the alternative media. The NY Times and the big TV and radio news organizations haven’t said a word about it. The Washington Post did mention the uncounted votes, buy scoffed at the notion that they could change the results, making the bogus argument that Clinton had won among early mail-in voters by 58-44% — but of course she was way ahead in the polls then before Sanders really began campaigning in California, and the uncounted votes are also last-minute voters when Sanders was tied or ahead in the polls.

Don’t just take my word for it. Check it out at the Los Angeles Times.

Clearly, Sanders, who met with a group of key advisors and friends at his home in Burlington, VT Sunday evening, came out to announce that he was continuing his campaign for the Democratic nomination, probably right through to the July 25 convention. No doubt, he has the continuing California vote count in mind, as well as the potential for either a Justice Department indictment of Clinton in for violating national security law and FOIA through her use of a private email server as Secretary of State, or a scathing report on the FBI’s investigation of that issue, combined with her poor polling performance against Donald Trump. While he didn’t say what his plans going forward are, he has not rejected or so far even commented on an offer by Green Party activists, including presumptive Green presidential nominee Jill Stein, for him to accept that party’s nomination to be its candidate in the general election.

Hear Lindorff and Green activist and former 2004 Ralph Nader presidential campaign press spokesman Kevin Zeese discuss the political implications of a possible Sanders general election campaign for president as the Green Party’s candidate, To play this interview, which took place on Wednesday afternoon on the Progressive Radio Network’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” program, click HERE
 

You ran a great race, achieving something that most of us thought would be impossible, running as an “avowed” socialist in today’s United States of America, against one of the most hardened and tested political machines in the country, the Clintons, and winning 22 primaries and caucuses with a total of over 12 million votes. And while Hillary and her minions threw everything they had at you, including voter suppression efforts, lies about your voting record in the Senate, unfair assistance from the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic officials, and manipulation of the media, you came excruciatingly close to knocking her off and winning the nomination.

Okay, you didn’t make it to the finish line.

Now the pressure is on you, from the corporate media that originally ignored you, then attacked you and finally resorted to outright corruption the night before the June 7 primary by prematurely calling the race for Clinton in hopes of depressing your turnout in the last six primaries, and now to a meeting tomorrow with President Obama, who will try and convince you to give up, and to endorse Hillary Clinton.

But while it’s true that way back at the start of your seemingly Quixotic campaign, you did promise to endorse her if you lost, that campaign has since evolved beyond even your imagination into a powerful movement for “political revolution,” with millions of people behind it. Also over the intervening months, you have both seen how unprincipled your opponent can be, and have also done a masterful job of highlighting just how corrupted she has become as a person and politician. You’ve pointed out how she has been bought by the too-big-to-fail bankers, who have paid her legal bribes totaling millions of dollars, euphemistically calling them “speaking fees.” You’ve denounced her acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars of legal bribes in the form of campaign contributions from key industries like the drug companies, the military contractors, the oil giants and even the for-profit prison industry. While you graciously declined early on and waited, in my view, way too long to go after Hillary for her improper and illegal use, for years, of a private email server during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, late in the primary battle you finally did point out that she was acting in an illegal way (one that now has her as the first presumptive presidential candidate in memory running while being actively investigated by the FBI). You also intimated — correctly in my humble view as an investigative reporter — that this move of hers to avoid the Freedom of Information Act was linked to her efforts to peddle influence to US corporate executives and foreign leaders in return for cash going into the Clinton Foundation coffers — a sordid arrangement reeking of corruption and self-dealing.

You’ve been right in all of this campaign criticism, and you have successfully exposed Hillary Clinton as the bought-and-paid candidate of big money, a woman who will say whatever she thinks it takes to get herself elected but who, in the end, will be serving the interests of those who paid for her election, not of the American people.

How could you now even think about turning around and doing what you originally said you would do and endorsing her? How could you, after exposing Clinton as the candidate of big banks, big pharma, big military and rich people, ask your millions of supporters — including people who dropped their hard-earned $27 into your campaign, often multiple times, to the tune, I believe, of over $200 million — suddenly turn around and ask them to back her in the general election?

If you were to endorse Hillary Clinton at this point, you would be destroying everything you have accomplished in this amazing campaign. Many people — especially the young people for whom your movement may have been a first-ever experience at political action — would surely become cynical about politics. Others would just write you off as just another self-serving politician accepting a deal. Most would ignore any call for unity anyhow, making it doubly pointless and destructive for you to make it. So what would you accomplish then, except perhaps to be repaid for your submission with some offer of a plum post on an important Senate Committee (assuming that the Republicans, in a race against Clinton, don’t end up staying in control of the Senate, making such a promised plum into a prune)?

Fortunately there is another path, and I’m sure you’ve been at least thinking about it. That is to run in the general election, this time going up against both Hillary and Trump (as well as the Libertarians and the Conservatives, who will be vying with Trump for the country’s right-leaning voters).

A Sanders/Stein Green Party presidential ticket could win, and could institutionalize Bernie’s ‘political revolution’
 

Philadelphia — Reading the papers and listening to radio reports about the Democratic primary race, which is reaching its climax Tuesday in California, New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota, I’m having a powerful sense of deja vu harking back to my years living and working as a journalist in China during the mid-1990s.

These news reports all feel like the regurgitation of a party line, with Associated Press not even waiting for June 7 to announce in a bold headline that “Clinton has Delegates to Win Democratic Nomination”. As the usually cautious news agency wrote late on June 6 in a report datelined Los Angeles and immediately picked up and aired uncritically by ABC’s, NBC.s and CNN’s national news desks:
 

Striding into history, Hillary Clinton will become the first woman to top the presidential ticket of a major U.S. political party, capturing commitments Monday from the number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.

Clinton’s rise to presumptive nominee arrived nearly eight years to the day after she conceded her first White House campaign to Barack Obama. Back then, she famously noted her inability to ‘shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling.’

…The former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady reached the 2,383 delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday with a decisive weekend victory in Puerto Rico and a burst of last-minute support from superdelegates. Those are party officials and officeholders, many of them eager to wrap up the primary amid preference polls showing her in a tightening race with presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.

“Clinton has 1,812 pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses. She also has the support of 571 superdelegates, according to an Associated Press count.”
 

So there you have it. California, the largest state in the nation, with nine percent of the nation’s population and a demographic that closely mirrors the nation’s, could vote on Tuesday to reject the Democratic Party’s “presumptive” nominee, along with five other states, perhaps bringing Bernie Sanders to within less than 200 pledged delegate votes of Hillary Clinton’s total, but because of the 400 super delegates who said way back 10 months before the first primary vote was cast that they would back Clinton — all of them unelected, and many actually lobbyists who have their delegate positions because they bought them — and a hundred more, most of whom were bought by the Clinton campaign, Hillary Clinton according to this party-line corporate media, will still become the party’s nominee for president.

And this is supposed to be a democratic process in a democratic country!

What a sad joke.

What's wrong with this NY Times story? (Hint: Hillary Clinton still hasn't won the Democratic nomination and could still lose it)
 

When it comes to Hillary Clinton’s State Department email scandal, reporters — and even her right-wing critics in the Republican Party — are asking the wrong question.

Sure, doing all her official business on an unprotected, unscrambled private server in her own home and on an unsecured private Blackberry phone device means that any two-bit spy outfit, not to mention sophisticated ones like those of Russia, Iran, Israel or China, could easily hack it and read secret State Department and other agency communications. But really, those entities have ways of getting that kind of secret stuff anyhow.

The real question is what kind of private conversations Clinton, in her role as Secretary of State, was having with powerful people both at home and abroad that may have involved cash donations to the Clinton Foundation and to her and Bill’s personal enrichment or her future campaign for president.

Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and while she’s slippery, she’s no dummy. She may have played dumb when asked earlier by reporters about her server’s hard drive being wiped clean of data before she turned it over to the FBI, saying, “What, like with a cloth or something? I don’t know how it works at all,” but she surely was involved in the deletion of her private emails — over 30,000 of which were reportedly erased.

And those erasures were made without any involvement of State Department security or legal officials. The decision, according to Clinton, on which emails were “private communications,” was made by her personal attorney, whose interest, by definition, was her and not the public or even national security for that matter.

As the Washington Post has reported, the Clintons went from being, as Hillary Clinton has said, “dead broke” upon leaving the White House in January 2000, to earning some $230 million by this year — a staggering sum of money even in a new Gilded Age of obscene wealth. Most of this money has been little more than influence buying by corporations and wealthy people trying to curry favor with a woman who was already Secretary of State, perhaps the second-most powerful position in the US government and whom many expected to become the next president after Obama.

As hard drive erasures and o secrecy obsession make Clinton’s email scandal increasingly Nixonian, Sanders needs to stop being polite and start asking hard questions about her motives
 

UPDATE: Jill Stein, the likely Green Party candidate for president, who ran in 2012 for president as a Green once already, has sent an open letter to Bernie Sanders urging him to “cooperate” with the Greens and to consider making a third party run for president if he cannot win the Democratic nomination.

ThisCantBeHappening!’s radio program of the same name, “This Can’t Be Happening!, which runs every Wednesday afternoon on Progressive Radio, today features Greg Haddock, a spokesperson for the growing #BernieOrBust movement that is working to convince Sanders supporters to publicly pledge their commitment not to back Hillary Clinton if she succeeds in winning — or stealing — the Democratic nomination in July.

Haddock, who lives in Germany, and show host Dave Lindorff also talk about the the importance of having hundreds of thousands of Sanders backers descend on the city of Philadelphia this July 25 for the Democratic Convention to push Sanders’ cause, and to pressure him to go over to the Green Party and run as their candidate if he doesn’t get the Democratic nomination, and not to endorse Hillary Clinton.

You can hear the whole hour-long interview by clicking here or by clicking on the image below.

Getting Sanders to run as the Green candidate and not to endorse Hillary if he doesn't get the Democratic nomination

A 72-year-old college professor named Alexander van der Bellen, running for president as the candidate of the leftist Austrian Green Party, a fringe party that had never been considered a serious contender in post-war Austrian politics, just won a narrow 50.3/49.7 percent victory over Norbert Hofer, a right-wing candidate of the neo-fascist Freedom Party who had been favored to win.

The run-off, held on Sunday, but not decided until today when some 750,000 mail-in ballots were finally counted, was held after an initial presidential election contest on April 24 in which no candidate won a majority of the vote. In that first contest, voters humiliated the candidates of Austria’s two establishment parties, the center-right Austrian People’s Party, and the center left Austrian Socialist Party, who came in fourth and fifth with 11% each behind Hofer (35%) and van der Bellen (21%) as well as an independent candidate who won 18.5% of the vote.

In the two-person run-off, most Socialist Party voters, many independents, as well as some People’s Party conservatives, apparently voted for van der Bellen, so as to ensure that the Freedom Party’s Hofer not become the first European head of state since the fall of Nazi Germany to hail from the far right.

Two crusty old socialists: Austrian President-elect Alexander van der Bellen and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders
 

For an American looking at this (and I was actually in Vienna for much of last week during the final days of the run-off campaign), there was a distinct sense that I was looking at a possible scenario for the upcoming US general election.

After all, we too have a crusty 70-something socialist, always considered a fringe political figure, running for president and he is proving to be surprisingly popular.

Vienna — As an American visiting Krakow, Poland, where I was last week, it felt weird to read about the inane latest chapter of the so-called culture wars being fought back home over whether states and localities should have the right to bar transgender people from using a public lavatory appropriate to their psychological identity, forcing them instead to use the one that accords with how many X chromosomes they have by birth in their cell nuclei.

After all, in Poland, except for the tonier tourist restaurants and hotels catering to well-heeled American tourists, bathrooms tend to be unisex: men and women enter such a toaleta through a single door into an anteroom, where they find a few stalls each containing a single commode. In some such facilities, there are also urinals along a wall in the anteroom, allowing men to relieve their bladders while not unnecessarily denying one of the limited number of stalls to any woman in similar need of relief. Meanwhile, women and men, without a blush, wash their hands side by side in the available sinks in the common anteroom.

Poland is a very conservative Catholic country, quite fundamentalist in its own way, yet somehow this system works there, and without any reported incidents of the indecency or sexual abuse that America’s squeamishly fundamentalist Christian folk apparently fear. (Then again, maybe I’m being unfair to Christian fundamentalists. After all, the irony of this whole bathroom discrimination brouhaha in the US is that it is being whipped up by Republican politicians, yet all the prominent cases of bathroom sex crimes in recent years have involved…you guessed it: Republican politicians! So maybe the simple solution would be to just require separate bathrooms for them.)

Now I’m not trying to suggest that Poles are necessarily better or saner than Americans. They do, after all, have a not terribly remote history of having largely supported the slaughter, by occupying Nazis, of the Jews who had lived in their midst for centuries. Indeed Krakow itself was the scene of one such particularly brutal and bloody extermination campaign (it was where the German conman Oskar Schindler set up his slave-labor factory, which allowed him to gain fame for eventually coming around to saving many Jews from a mass grave). And anti-semitism (along with other forms of xenophobia) is still alive and well in the country. But at least the Poles aren’t freaking out about transgendered people sneaking into the wrong loo.

While sanity regarding public restroom facility use in Europe comes as a welcome relief (the French too have a casual attitude towards sexual privacy in their public facilities, with women frequently stationed near the men’s pissoire where they collect tips for their janitorial services while men pee against a wall right beside them), other political storms in Europe can display a certain familiarity to a visiting American. In Poland a right-wing nationalist leader was recently elected and the country has distinguished itself from most of its European Union neighbors by simply closing its border to and refusing to admit refugees — Middle Eastern or otherwise (even as its own surplus workers avail themselves of their visa-free right to move to the UK to find work).

This past Sunday, Austrians chose between a 'crypto-fascist' and a radical left Green candidate for president: Freedom Party leader Norbert Hofer and Green Party leader Alexander van der Bellen
 

Philadelphia — You wouldn’t know it from reading or watching or listening to the corporate media, or even, incredibly, to most of the alternative media, but a huge grass-roots campaign has sprung up promoting a mass four-day demonstration in Philadelphia during the July 25-28 Democratic Convention. The promoters of this campaign so reminiscent of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are backers of Bernie Sanders who totally reject the idea of seeing their candidate, Bernie Sanders — or themselves — just rolling over at the end of this year-long effort and endorsing Hilllary Clinton.

Sanders has won nearly ten million votes in the primaries so far including his latest strong come-from-behind win in Indiana, and that is only a fraction of his national base of support, given that many states have closed primaries where independents — his strongest backers — have been barred from voting.

If only one in 10 or one in 20 of those backers were to make their way to Philadelphia, the scene here could end up making the Pope’s recent visit look like an ordinary rush hour, or maybe a Mummer’s Parade.

What Sanders has been saying lately — that he wants to give the Democrats the “most progressive platform in history” — is a joke. Sanders knows it, and so do all his backers. The party and its candidates never pay any thought to platforms, which have always served as simply a sop to keep disgruntled progressives on the plantation.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of Sanders backers plan to descent on Philadelphia in July to push Sanders not to endorse Hillary Clinton and to run as an independent or Green candidate for president in the general election
 

Philadelphia — Bernie Sanders, to the consternation of critics in the Democratic Party, pundits in the corporate media, and purists on the hard left, has accomplished an amazing thing. Up against Hillary Clinton, surely the biggest, best-funded corporate-backed candidate the Democratic leadership has run since Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984 over three decades ago, the once obscure independent Vermont senator has battled Clinton to almost a draw, down by only some 319 delegates with nearly 900 to go (not counting the corrupt “super delegates” chosen for their fealty to party leaders, not by primary or caucus voting.)

By doing this well, as a proudly declared “democratic socialist” who on the stump has been denouncing the corruption of both the US political and economic systems, and as a candidate who has refused to take corporate money or money from big, powerful donors, instead successfully funding his campaign with only small two and three-digit donations from his supporters, Sanders has exposed not just his opponent, Hillary Clinton, but the entire Democratic Party leadership and most of its elected officials as nothing but hired corporate tools posing as progressive advocates of the people.

A Sanders-Stein Green Party dream ticket or just a dream? Sanders and Green activists are trying to make it happen.
 

But now Sanders faces a truly momentous choice. Defeated by the combined assault of a pro-corporate mass media and by the machinations of the Democratic Party leadership — machinations both long-established with the intent of defeating upstarts and outsiders, like front-loading conservative southern states in the primary schedule, and current, like scheduling only a few early candidate debates and then slotting them at times (like opposite the Super Bowl) when few would be watching them — Sanders knows that barring some major surprise like a federal indictment of Clinton, a market collapse, or perhaps a leak of the transcripts of Clinton’s highly-paid but still secret speeches to some of the nation’s biggest banks, he is not going to win the Democratic nomination.

So does he, after spending months hammering home the reality that Clinton is the bought-and-paid candidate of the the banks, the arms industry, the oil industry and the medical-industrial complex, and after enduring endless lies about his own record spouted by Clinton and her surrogates, go ahead and endorse her as the party’s standard bearer for the general election? Does he walk away and return quietly to Vermont? Or does he instead continue to fight for his “political revolution” by another route?

We know from site-monitoring stats that ThisCantBeHappening.net has developed a devoted regular following of several tens of thousands of daily readers who visit our site regularly to get news and opinions they can’t find elsewhere. On that basis, we a few months ago kicked of a fund-raiser on Indiegogo aimed at raising $50,000 to support our work — specifically to fund the hard-hitting reporting we do here to get out the truth that the rest of the media ignore, cover-up, or misreport.

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Look, we shouldn’t have to explain this, but here’s how it works: We in the TCBH! collective don’t get paid for our work. We do this out of a sense of journalistic and political commitment, but because we all have families and have to make a living, we do it in our spare time, which limits what we can accomplish. If you value our work and value this site, we need you to make some kind of cash contribution, and we need you to promote our fund-raiser to everyone you know. If that happens, we should be able to raise enough money that we will be able to devote real time to the project, and not just spare moments.

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The TCBH! Collective: Linn Washington, John Grant, Dave Lindorff, Gary Lindorff, Jess Guh, Alfredo Lopez, Lori Spencer and the late but ever-present Charles M. Young