Author: Dave LIndorff

Editors’ Note: In the increasingly tight and bitter contest for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, candidate Bernie Sanders has gained critical and enthusiastic support from young people in part because of his stirring call for free public college education — no surprise given that student college debt has passed the $1.3-trillion mark. Critics, including Sanders’ opponent Hillary Clinton, say he is proposing an unaffordable fantasy, though his plan sensibly calls for funding the idea with a tax on speculative stock and bond trading. In reality though, Sanders’ idea of free college (which is offered in most of Europe) is hardly a new idea in the US. Indeed, it’s the way things used to be here as recently as the 1960s — a point voters in upcoming primaries like the ones to be held in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware next Tuesday should bear in mind. Robert M. Nelson (CCNY ’66), a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, recalls in the following article, free college was actually taken away by the country’s ruling elite not that long ago. As Nelson writes:
 

In 1837, a remarkable politician, Horace Mann, became Massachusetts’ Secretary of Education. He argued successfully that universal, public, nonsectarian education in culturally diverse common schools was imperative for our new nation. Mann’s idea spread like wildfire. The free common school concept was adopted in every state in the union.

After the Civil War, the free tuition principle was expanded to include higher education. It worked brilliantly for a century for millions of Americans, including me. 

A Pathway for Immigrant and Working Class Children

In 1966 I finished college. I joined my sister as the first generation of our family to cross the divide. My father was an immigrant; my mother was the daughter of immigrants. The family had little wealth to show despite their life of hard work.  

How could low-paid immigrant families and ordinary dirt-poor working-class families send their kids to college? It was simple. I graduated from the City College of New York. My sister graduated from Brooklyn College. Both schools were tuition-free. It’s easy to forget in today’s America where the “free market” is the national religion that it’s the way things still were a just half a century ago. 

CCNY was founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847. Its mission was to provide the sons of immigrants and the poor with access to college education. In 1870, Hunter College was founded for New York’s young women. In 1930, Brooklyn College became New York’s third tuition-free college.

CCNY students at a 1968 protest against tuition charges at New York's oldest public, and once free, university
 

For more than a century the taxpayers of New York provided free higher education to all who qualified. Graduates of that system include a child of immigrants from Jamaica, Secretary of State Colin Powell (CCNY ’58), the daughter of an immigrant from Austria, Sen. Barbara Boxer (Brooklyn College ’62), and former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, (CCNY ’62).

US news reports on an incident Tuesday in which two Russian jet fighters buzzed very close to a US destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, in the Baltic Sea, make it sound like a serious threat in which the US might have been justified in defending itself against a simulated attack on the high seas.

Nowhere in the reports in the US was it mentioned that the Cook was itself engaging in provocative behavior.

The Baltic Sea is an international waterway, bordering the countries of Denmark, Germany, Poland, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, and as such, if the US wants to sail a military ship there, it has every right to do so. But honest reporting on this incident should have included that the Cook wasn’t just sailing around innocently in the open waters of the Baltic. It had moved to within a 70-mile radius of the Russian port enclave of Kaliningrad — an isolated and thus sensitive part of Russian territory located on the Baltic coast that is bounded by Lithuania and Poland and thus is separated from the rest of Russia. Kaliningrad is the site of a major Russian naval base, and is also home to 500,000 Russian people.

Here’s a map of Kaliningrad showing the 70-mile radius within which the USS Cook had positioned itself at the time of the multiple flybys by two Russian Su-24s (and where it was engaging in landing and takeoff exercises with Polish military helicopters.

The US reporting on this whole incident has been hysterical.

CNN’s Pentagon reporter said the jets were “demonstrating a simulated strafing run” and implied that it was dangerous because “if it had been a real strafing run, we wouldn’t have known it until it was too late.” Of course, Russia and the US are not at war, so why would Russia have strafed a US destroyer? The reporter didn’t say. Instead, he said the ship’s commander deserved “kudos” for keeping his cool and not loosing the ships anti-aircraft defenses on the two jets.

Bernie Sanders remains behind Hillary Clinton in the number of pledged delegates he has amassed over the course of just under two and a half months of primaries and caucuses. But her advantage in pledged delegates has fallen over the last month and a half from a high point of well over 300 to a current 213. (His actual gap may even be below 200 now, because or a miscount belatedly acknowledged by the Colorado Democratic Party there, and because while Washington state’s delegates have not yet all been allocated following the initial caucus, it is clear that the majority of unallocated ones will end up going to Sanders based on the initial caucus results.)

And that’s with 1646 pledged delegates yet to be chosen in future primaries and caucuses, a process which will begin this coming Tuesday in New York (247 pledged delegates on the line) and end on June 7 (when a total of 714 pledged delegates will be up for grabs in six states and the District of Columbia).

As Sanders’ campaign has repeatedly said, he has a reasonable chance of closing that gap and winning a majority of the pledged delegates.

Many critics — including people who aren’t even Sanders’ supporters — have denounced the devious and biased way major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and most of the major television networks, have followed the Clinton campaign’s lead in including so-called Superdelegates in the totals (Clinton has over 400 of these unelected delegates, whose positions are allocated to the various states and other primary jurisdictions, and who are mostly elected officials, party officials and lobbyists supportive of the Democratic Party leadership, and Sanders has just 38). This distorted count has been used for months now to insist, falsely, that Clinton “has a lock” on the nomination. But this has always been deceptive counting, because those delegates, while claimed by Clinton and to a far lesser lesser extent Sanders, are not pledged at all but are free to change their minds.

They might, for instance, do that if they felt that Clinton was unelectable (a not unreasonable assumption, particularly if between now and the July convention she were to be indicted by the US Justice Department for violating federal law in keeping her emails as Secretary of State on a private hackable server).

But the big issue not discussed at all is that all of Clinton’s margin of pledged delegates were picked up by her in a string of early primaries in the deep South states, just as planned in “reforms” of the primary process made by the neo-liberal DNC leadership in the years following the near success of insurgent peace candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and the successful nomination of insurgent anti-war candidate Sen. George McGovern four years later in 1972. McGovern’s successful march through the primaries terrified establishment Democrats, and so, by the 1990s, Super Tuesday in the South had been established, followed by a move of several other southern states including Texas to earlier dates. The idea was that the more conservative southern Democrats would not support any radical candidates outside of the mainstream, and that by killing such candidacies off early in the South, they would end up starved of funding and would see their campaigns wither away.

The strategy worked marvelously in prior years and this year for Clinton. Remember, in late February and early March Sanders was largely unknown outside of New England. The Democratic party is marginalized in the by now uniformly Republican-run Deep South, and black voters are disproportionately its backers — people who understandably view it as critical to their survival to keep Republicans from also controlling the federal government. And even among those few black voters who knew of Sanders and of his strong history of Civil Rights Movement activism and of his consistent support for minority issues and for the nation’s poor as a member of Congress, he was deemed at primary time to be a long shot to win in any general election. Clinton was thus the overwhelming victor in those early primaries, particularly among black voters. In fact, just between Feb. 27 (South Carolina) and March 8 (Mississippi), she picked up 378 more delegates than Sanders, largely because of the fiction promoted by her campaign and touted in the corporate media that she would be “more electable” than Sanders in the general election.

Clinton is ahead in pledged delegates but the truth is she's been losing ground to Sanders since after May 8
 

Bernie Sanders had a shining moment last week at a massive rally in Philadelphia at the Temple University Liacouras Sports Center. The high point came when he mentioned that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had implied that he was “not qualified” to be president — a charge that she has continued to make in a tense campaign for the April 19 Democratic primary in New York state.

As 10,000 people in the stadium erupted in an enthusiastic chorus of boos, Sanders declared that in his view it is Clinton who’s “not qualified” for the presidency. He cited her $15 million in “donations” from Wall Street banks, her vote to support the Iraq War, and her support for “almost every trade agreement” sent to Congress during her years in Washington.

If Sanders had at that point said, “Well I’m nonetheless going to endorse her for president if she ends up winning the nomination in this primary campaign,” I am certain he would have been shouted down. He didn’t though. Instead, he made that submissive statement two days later in a CBS interview with the execrable Charlie Rose, who pressed him and pressed him (but who has not pressed Clinton similarly) to renounce his claim that Clinton is “not qualified” for the White House.

Sanders caved, and said “of course” he would endorse her candidacy if she were the Democratic nominee.

Right there in that moment, Sanders lost half his support — at least the die-hard support from people who were ready to stand in freezing rain if need be on April 19 in New York or April 26 in Philadelphia to vote for him, and to come to Philadelphia in sweltering July to take the streets and demand that he get the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Those fighters are not going to go to the mat for a guy who, if he has the nomination stolen away — which is what is happening — just gives his blessing to a candidate he has rightly described as a craven shill for the nation’s corporate elite, including the criminal elite who run the Wall Street banks, and walks away from the primaries.

If being owned by corporations and the rich is a qualification for the presidency, who's qualified: Bernie or Hillary?
 

People on the hard left have claimed from the beginning that the Sanders campaign is just a scam — a plan to “sheep-dog” progressive Democratic and independent voters into voting for someone — Hillary Clinton — who no progressive in her or his right mind would support: a serial war-monger, a former board member of Walmart, an ardent backer of her husband’s tough-on-crime legislation that made the US into the incarceration capital of the world, and a supporter of globalization and the trade treaties that have gutted jobs in the US. I don’t think this was a conspiracy on Sanders’ part. If it were, he would not have called her out as unqualified last Wednesday in Philadelphia (twice actually, at the Temple U. rally and later at a press conference with leaders of national unions that had endorsed him) for being a corporate tool. But I do believe that if he is serious about his campaign being all about promoting a “political revolution” to get money out of US politics, he cannot support Clinton — a candidate who’s all about sucking up to corporate power in hopes of getting corporate money. (Of course, it could be that Sanders is in a kind of box. If he says outright that he will not endorse Clinton if she wins the nomination, then if he goes on to win, many angry Clinton backers won’t support him. Perhaps he feels it’s better to fudge on that if and until the issue really has to be addressed.)

Philadelphia — Something “YUGE” is happening in the Democratic presidential campaign, and perhaps in the broader American body politic. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but like that feeling of your neck hairs rising off your skin as a big thunderstorm approaches, you know it’s big and it’s coming.

For me it was going with my wife and a friend to join a line of people waiting to get into Temple University’s 10,000-seat basketball arena for a hastily planned address by Democratic candidate for president Bernie Sanders.

When we got to the campus early yesterday, there was already a crowd of young people camped out by the entrance to the Liacouras Center. They told me they had been there since 6:30 am for an event that was scheduled to start at 8 pm, with doors opening at 5 pm. Already a line stretched back to the corner of Broad Street, around the corner and halfway down the block on Montgomery. Most of those in the line were students from Temple or from one or another of Philadelphia’s many other universities. They were white, black, latino and Asian, with a smattering of older folks. I went off to do some work, with plans for our little band to join the line around 4:30.

Big mistake! By the time we headed out to get in line, it was winding around the huge sports complex, snaking up and down several alleys and back to Broad, and then down Broad for another six blocks — about half a mile of people in all with more piling on all the time. At many places this line of people was eight to 10 across, and fairly densely packed, as people tried to shelter each other from a biting cold wind.

What was astonishing in all this was that there had been no long build-up to the event. No advance news reports, no posters, no organizations arriving with buses. It all seemed to have come together via social media in a day’s time.

By the time the line back where we were blocks from the arena finally began to move it was about 7 pm, and it took over an hour for us to get close to the entrance. At that point volunteer organizers were advising us that the arena was about full, and that we’d have a better chance of hearing the candidate in person if we abandoned the line and moved to a smaller 7,000-seat practice basketball arena in an adjacent building, where we were told Sanders would speak briefly before going to the main hall. A huge part of the line broke away behind us and began sprinting to the overflow venue. We chose to gamble and wait in the main line hoping we’d make the cut-off. Eventually, we managed to get in.

Inside, the seated crowd, which now included a fair percentage of adults, was really pumped. When Sanders, his trademark unkempt white hair flying, and his wife Jane O’Meara Sanders were spotted making their way towards the catwalk to the podium through a tunnel under the seats, a roar erupted from the crowd and became a thunderous chant of “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!”

A movement in the making?: Bernie Sanders greets supporters at a rally of 17,000 at Temple University in Philadelphia
 

Sanders took it from there, with a powerful speech that riffed through every issue of the campaign. But there was a new edge to this address. Fresh off of his landslide 14%-margin win over Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, Sanders ripped into his opponent, who had just that day (citing a cheap-shot sandbagging interview of him by editors at the New York Daily News that news organizations from the Washington Post to CNN had been shamelessly misquoting and partially quoting) called Sanders unqualified for the White House.

Sanders Hits Clinton Hard as Being ‘Unqualified for President’

Sanders, who until that point has been restrained in his attacks on Clinton, continuing to suggest that he would support her if she were to win the nomination, in a blistering counter-attack, told the wildly cheering crowd at the Liacouras Center, “She has been saying lately that she thinks I am quote, unquote ‘not qualified’ to be president. I don’t believe that she is qualified … if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interests funds.”

What on earth was the CIA doing putting plastic high explosive charges on schoolbuses and in hidden places in a Virginia public school in a “test” of K-9 dogs reportedly belonging to the Agency itself?

The story of the secret “test” broke because an alert mechanic doing a routine check on one of the Loudon County School District’s schoolbuses found a package of what turned out to be plastic explosive, packed in a plastic wrapper, jammed down in among some of the rubber hoses and electric wires around the engine. It had allegedly “fallen” from where it had originally been placed, was missed by the dogs and their handlers, and remained where it was stuck for two days, while the bus was unwittingly used to deliver some 26 young children to and from school on eight separate bus runs totaling 145 miles of driving.

I called the CIA’s “public information” office on Friday to ask for clarification as to why the CIA, which does not have a domestic policing function, would be operating, and testing, a K-9 bomb-detecting unit, given that such tasks in the US would normally be handled either by state and local police agencies, or by the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). The office, though it was mid-day, was not answering its phones, and only had a voice mail recording, on which I identified myself as a reporter, left my contact information and requested a response on deadline. No surprise: I was not called back with an answer, and do not anticipate receiving one from an agency that is infamous for its secrecy. (The standard CIA response in my experience, when I’ve received one at all, is: “We have no response to that question.”)

Still, even for a notoriously opaque and obtuse government agency, this is a truly bizarre incident that cries out for answers.

Alert Virginia school district mechanic found C-4 explosive package planted on school bus in CIA "test"
 

If the goal is testing the ability of dogs to detect hidden explosives, there is no need to run that test in a real school and in the engine compartments of real buses that transport real children, or to place such charges, as the CIA also reportedly did, in hidden locations inside a real school building. (Actually, since what’s being tested is the dogs’ smelling ability, real C-4 wasn’t needed either — only objects that had been in placed in contact with the compound, or wrappers from the charges that would have carried the odor on them.) People may benefit in training exercises when the tests are tricked out to appear more real-life, but dogs don’t need that kind of reality-theater environment to hone or test their skills. Any old bus, or for that matter a rental truck, could have been used for the job. The engine compartment for a truck is exactly the same as for a bus, and dogs don’t care whether the body color of a vehicle being searched is yellow or not (they’re color-blind after all!), or whether it has a big box behind the cab, or two rows of seats. Ditto to using a functioning school building. Any building, including one of the CIA’s own buildings at its Langley headquarters, or on “The Farm” where agents are trained, would serve as well as a hiding place for explosive charges.

Philadelphia — You wouldn’t know it to read the corporate media coverage of Bernie Sanders’ blow-out 50%-margin wins Saturday, March 26 in the three states of Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. While purported “news” organizations like the New York Times and CNN are propagandistically reporting Sanders having won just 25 delegates in Washington, and on that basis are claiming that he only gained some 30 or so delegates on Hillary Clinton, the truth is that he won 72 of Washington state’s delegates along with 17 in Hawaii and 13 in Alaska, for a total of 102 new pledged delegates, compared to just 39 for Clinton, and that as things stand today, the tally stands like this at Clinton: 1266 pledged delegates, Sanders: 1038 pledged delegates. The difference between the two? Clinton is down from a high at one point of some 330 to just a 228-delegate lead, with 1638 pledged delegates yet to be chosen in coming primaries and caucuses.

While Sanders, who has to win the remaining primary contests by an average of 60%, still has to be considered a long-shot, the fact that he has won the last five of six contests by scoring in the 70-80% range, in some cases reducing Clinton to percentages in the teens, shows this is doable. Plus, his recent big wins actually brought his performance requirement for winning the nomination down from an earlier need to win remaining contests by an average of 68% to “just” 56% of the vote.

What this means is that if Sanders can manage to win by a significant amount in New York and Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other eastern and central states, as well as in Oregon, in April and May, this campaign could come down to California on June 7, when 475 pledged delegates are at stake.

What we’re seeing as the national race tightens is Sanders starting to take a much more combative stance against Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership, in response to dirty tricks, Clinton lies, and a rigged election cycle. We’re also, according to exit polling, learning that the more Clinton campaigns, the more votes she is losing, while the more Sanders campaigns, the higher his poll numbers go, and the more he wins by in primaries and caucuses. (the latest national poll, by Bloomberg, taken two days before the March 29 caucuses, has Sanders leading Clinton among all voters by 49-48%). Most of the states Clinton has won, she’s won because of early voting that was done by mail before Sanders and his campaign had begun their publicity in earnest in each state. This is critical because, since his campaign was largely blacked out until he stunningly tied in Iowa and won in New Hampshire in early February and since most mainstream media coverage of him since then has been negative, he has had to rely on rallies and alternative media to get his story out.

A small bird that landed on Sanders' lectern in a Portland stadium is seen by some as a favorable sign for his campaign (click on image to view video of the surprise visitation)
 

But his campaign strategy — hitting the issue of a rigged economy and a bought-and-paid political system — has been gaining traction with primary voters over time, and the money is pouring into his campaign in small donations from millions of backers (he’s raised over $140 million so far with no corporate funding and no PACs), giving Sanders the funding needed to compete in advertising to get his positions out, and, increasingly, to make his case against Clinton and her corporate backers.

It sure looks like there was some electoral fraud committed in the Democratic primary in Arizona on Tuesday.

The race ended up officially with Hillary Clinton getting 58% of the votes, a total of 235,667. Bernie Sanders got 40% and a total of 163,368. Half of that vote total came from the state’s overwhelmingly biggest city, Phoenix, pop. 1.5 million. In Maricopa County, which is where Phoenix is situated, the vote was Clinton 127,000, Sanders 87,000 — exactly the same 58%/40% split as the statewide vote. (This compares to neighboring Utah, and to Idaho, where on the same day, Sanders beat Clinton 80% to 20% in two caucuses.)

But Phoenix, a Democratic city in a Republican county, like most places, has a Democratic machine that is working in lock-step with the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So it is disturbing to learn that numerous types of voter disenfranchisement occurred in the Arizona vote, across the state and especially in Phoenix.

According to a publication called The Horn, published in Arizona, many registered Democratic voters came to their polling station, only to be told that they were listed as independent, not as Democrat, and thus could not vote, as Arizona has a closed primary for both parties. Those who complained were given provisional ballots, but there has been no report on how many of those provisional ballots, if any, were counted in arriving at last night’s result of a Hillary 14% win. The decision on whether to count provisional ballots is made by local voter registrars.

Why’s Hilllary Clinton winking?
 

But that’s not all. A news site called AZCentral.com reported that before the primary, a decision was made to cut the metro area’s usual 200 polling stations down to just 60, allegedly as a “cost-saving” measure and because a flood of advance mail ballots had led voting election officials to guess that the number of physical voters using polling stations would be down (an odd assumption, since higher than usual advance balloting by mail is usually a sign of increased voter interest in an election). Phoenix itself ended up with only 12 working polling stations, with the other 48 spread out around the metro area’s various municipalities, usually two polling stations per city.

By way of comparison, in the 2012 primary, Maricopa County had 200 polling places for 300,000 voters. This year it had 60 polling places for an estimated 800,000 voters.

I won’t be voting for Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic Party nomination for president, and I won’t heed Bernie Sanders if, as he has vowed to do, he calls on his supporters to “come together” after the convention, should he lose, to support Clinton and prevent Donald Trump or another Republican from becoming president.

Here’s why:

Hillary Clinton on her best of days is still a serious menace to both the earth’s continuance as a habitable planet, and to peace. A committed neoliberal who has pursued, both as a senator and as a secretary of state, a policy of economic and military destabilization of sovereign governments, with no regard for the aftermath of such criminality (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Venezuela, Libya, Ukraine and Honduras, but especially Libya, Ukraine and Honduras, which were very much her doing in her last public position as secretary of state), Clinton has made it clear even on the campaign trail that she considers Russia to be an enemy. If elected, she has also made it clear she’ll continue a dangerous policy of brinksmanship, pushing for NATO membership of more nations bordering Russia, and moving offensive weapons and troops there too. The stated neoliberal (and neoconservative) goal is to ultimately destabilize Russia so that a) President Putin is removed, and b) so that Russia further fragments into smaller nation-states. This is a mad recipe for World War III, and Clinton, as a new president out to prove her toughness, is a good bet to push things to a point where that war could become a reality.

She would, as president, also continue the long-time US policy of destabilization of elected governments in Latin America, and, in the Middle East, the abject and unqualified support of the virtually fascist government in Israel, as well as of the islamo-fascist arab regimes like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — all of which she supported as a senator, and helped facilitate as Obama’s first secretary of state.

A supporter of fracking and of oil exploration, and even of the coal industry, all of which industries are funding her campaign, she will not take any consequential action to combat global warming that would threaten those industries. If she took the issue seriously, why would so many of the top “bundlers” of PAC contributions to her campaign be lobbyists from the energy industry?

If the rule is, judge a woman by who her friends are, let’s look at Clinton’s friends. So how about this rogue’s gallery: Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest US war criminals of the post-WWII era, arch-neocon Richard Kagan, a co-founder of the notorious Project for a New American Century (the playbook for the Bush/Cheney administration’s invasion of Iraq and demonization of Syria and Iran), and even G.W. Bush VP Dick Cheney, have all praised Clinton and she herself bragged about praise from Kissinger for her work as Secretary of State.
Hillary and Donald, no degree of separation? Deciding who is the worse candidate is a tough call.
 

Bernie Sanders’ brash campaign to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president took a “Yu-u-u-u-ge” hit on Tuesday, not only losing big as expected in Florida and North Carolina, but also in Ohio, and narrowly losing too in Illinois and Missouri.

But the good news is that at a big rally in Phoenix, Arizona, held (but blacked out by the corporate media) on the night of the ballot counting in those elections in a state that will be holding its Democratic primary next Tuesday, Sanders announced that his now longer-shot campaign for the nomination will continue.

Sanders, early in his campaign, had said that at the end of the day, if Hillary Clinton were to win the nomination, he would support her.

But the reality is that by not conceding at this point in the campaign, with two and a half months of primaries still to go, including in such big states as California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Sanders will continue (as he did in Phoenix) to shame and embarrass his opponent Clinton, calling out her reliance on millions of dollars in corrupt and corrupting campaign contributions from Wall Street banks and hedge funds, military contractors, pharmaceutical companies and oil companies.

Then too, while the corporate media are treating Sanders as if his effort is now quixotic, the other reality is that he can still win. Clinton has run through all the states that she had any real advantage in and Sanders has come painfully close to winning others, like Illinois and Missouri. Now the the focus of the primaries moves west, where Sanders should be at his strongest. He needs to win the rest of the races by 58%. That’s a high bar, but consider that he’s already done that in Kansas, Vermont, Minnesota and New Hampshire, and came close to that landslide figure in Nebraska, it’s doable. The Sanders goal is to win big going forward, and if Clinton starts losing badly in those contests, to then work at prying loose both Super and pledged delegates worried that Clinton will lose against Trump or whoever the Republicans end up nominating.

Late Tuesday night, Sanders continued his campaign with a rally in Phoenix, where he denounced Clinton for her taking of corporate bribes (click on image to go to the actual speech)
 

He will continue to denounce the job-killing trade agreements, from NAFTA to the latest one, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (sic) currently being pushed by President Obama, and promoted by Clinton while she was Secretary of State.

He will continue to call for a country that uses diplomacy, not war, as its default foreign policy approach.

And he will continue to denounce the corrupt and racist justice system and the militarized policing in the US that have together made this country the incarceration capital of the world, and a nation that is more of a domestic war zone than a civilized society.

In continuing his campaign in this manner, Sanders will be undermining Clinton, particularly among the key portions of the electorate that are normally the most supportive of Democratic candidates — progressives, young people, African Americans and Latinos, and working-class people of all colors.