Author: Dave LIndorff

Bernie Sanders, whose campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is on a roll following a stunning if narrow win in last Tuesday’s Michigan primary, where he embarrassed pollsters who were predicting a double-digit rout by Hillary Clinton only a day before the voting, has famously said he’s “not interested” in the issue of his opponent’s exclusive use, during her five years as Obama’s Secretary of State, of a private, instead of government email account and server.

He should be. But forget about the right-wing charges of leaked diplomatic cables — the big issue is what kind of diplomatic favors she was selling, and to whom.

Clinton’s achilles’ heel is the widespread feeling even among many of those Democrats voting for her, that she is basically “not trustworthy.” People have good reason to feel that way, and it’s not just the way she changes her tune, her positions, and her accounts of her prior positions faster than an octopus or chameleon changes its color to match its surroundings. She is, to put it bluntly, a serial liar. (In fact, a recent poll shows Hillary is the least trusted candidate for president, Democratic or Republican, and that Sanders is the most trusted.)

Take Clinton’s claim that she opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership, a new NAFTA-like trade pact being pushed by the Obama administration and most members of Congress, which threatens to essentially gut the right of the US and other signatory nations to enforce or even enact worker safety, environmental protection and other laws. The TPP would accomplish this abrogation of national sovereignty by allowing corporations — even foreign subsidiaries of US corporations — to sue over such laws and claiming massive damages, on the grounds that they violate the terms of the TPP. The treaty even allows them to bring their cases to non-governmental arbitration panels, which could overrule national courts. Clinton may claim on the campaign trail that she’s against this horrific treaty, but as Secretary of State, when her office was helping to negotiate it, she was calling it “the gold standard” of trade treaties. Or take her initial claim, when Sanders began calling her out for giving speeches to Goldman Sachs and other mega-banks for which she was paid as much as $225,000 a pop. Initially she made the absurd excuse that these paid speeches were delivered “before I had decided to run for president.” (That’s about as credible as her assertion in one early debate with Sanders that the enormous speaking fees she received from the banks were simply “what they offered me,” and not amounts that were negotiated for her by her agent.)

Actually, she gave three of those speeches, for a total of $675,000, to Goldman Sachs in late 2013, after she had left the Obama State Department precisely in order to prepare for her presidential run. Even the suggestion that she wasn’t planning to run earlier than that is an insult to the intelligence of the voter, but it was in any event widely known that her departure from State was so she could start working — and building up a campaign war chest — for a 2016 presidential campaign. In fact, that’s what she was doing: negotiating and gathering in those fat speaking fees (though because she had not formally announced yet as a candidate, neither she nor the banks had to report the money as campaign swill).

Hillary Clinton has an integrity issue, and it starts at the Clinton Foundation, a $2-billion money-laundering fund-raising machine she was in a position feed as Secretary of State
 

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR BOOMERS “OF A CERTAIN AGE”
 

We don’t usually write about money on this site, but this is important.

Last November, as has become standard Washington politics, the Republican party held the federal budget submitted by President Obama and the Democrats hostage, demanding all sorts of non-budgetary concessions and cuts in social spending. Ultimately, the president and the Democrats caved in to get the budget passed. One of the things they did was agree to some cuts in Social Security benefits.

One of those cuts was to eliminate a measure that for years has allowed married couples who both reach 66 (or someone who had divorced a spouse of more than 10 years, but more on that later) to collect some money as a “spousal benefit” without either spouse actually starting to collect their own benefits. The advantage of this arrangement was that if both spouses could continue to hold off on collecting benefits on their own accounts, waiting four more years until reaching 70, their ultimate benefit checks would be 32% greater for life in real dollars than if they started collecting benefits at age 66.

The process was called “file-and-suspend,” and here’s how it works. The higher-earning spouse on reaching 66, goes into a local Social Security office and asks to make a “restricted application” for Social Security benefits, filing for those benefits but then immediately at the same time saying he or she doesn’t want to receive any checks until age 70 (this cannot be done on line — only in person). The lower-earning spouse, also 66, then files for spousal benefits on the first spouse’s account, and immediately starts receiving monthly checks equal to one-half of the benefit the first spouse would have received had that spouse not suspended benefits. Such spousal benefits can range from a low of around $6000/year to $14,500/year, or a total of $24,000 – $58,000 over four years!

The urgent news is that although this benefit was eliminated in the November budget deal, it is still available until the end of federal office hours at the Social Security office on April 30.

So if you and a spouse will be 66 by that date, you should immediately make that appointment (it can take as long as a month to get one because of cuts in Social Security office staffing, so don’t wait!), and go in to make that file-and-suspend and that spousal benefit request.

My wife and I were lucky enough to be able to take advantage of this option, getting in under the wire of the April deadline and I as the lower earner started receiving my spousal benefit check of $983.00 beginning this January. It will amount to a total of almost $40,000 for us by the time I reach 70 and switch over to receiving maximum benefits on my own account.

If you didn’t know about this option, you’re not alone. The Social Security Administration has long been barred by Congress from advertising and promoting its benefits and staff are not supposed to offer beneficiaries any advice or recommendations. They will answer whatever question you ask them (usually accurately), but they won’t offer advice or tell you if you’re making a bad decision. For example, if you turn 62 and immediately file for your Social Security benefits (as most Americans still do), nobody will say, “Um, you know, for each year you hold off on filing until you reach age 66, you’ll get a 7.5% higher benefit check for the rest of your life, and for each year you hold off between age 66 and 70, you’ll get an 8% higher benefit check.” And they won’t inform you about the availability of spousal benefits either.

Republicans & Democrats cut some Social Security benefits in a budget deal last fall — but if you’re 66+ you can still get one major benefit if you act before April 30
 

 Sen. Elizabeth Warren just had a chance to turn the tide in this rigged Democratic primary season last Tuesday, and she ran away from it.

As most people know, the Democratic Party leadership, decades ago following the primary victory of Sen. George McGovern that gave him the party’s 1972 nomination for president despite the opposition of the whole ruling party elite, tried to make such an upstart left candidate impossible in the future by front-running primaries and caucuses in a bunch of deeply conservative Southern states. The idea was to crush any liberal candidate in those states (where no Democrat would stand a chance in the general election), so their funding would dry up and their campaigns would die early in the primary season.

This ugly strategy worked like a charm for decades and it even worked this year to the extent that the Establishment’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, was able to win big in those Southern states. But her upstart opponent Bernie Sanders to some extent blunted the effort this year by winning handily in Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota and in his home state of Vermont — four of the five non-Southern states also holding primaries or caucuses on Super Tuesday. Sanders really would have actually defeated the DNC’s sabotage efforts though, had he won Massachusetts, a significantly larger state in terms of delegates, instead of just managing to come within 1.5% of doing so — and without any major endorsers backing him.

Imagine if Warren, the wildly popular senior senator from Massachusetts, in the days or weeks ahead of the primary, had endorsed Sanders, who after all is attacking the same corrupt big banks that Warren built her whole political career by denouncing. There’s no way having a popular anti-bankster, feminist senator endorsing Sanders wouldn’t have won him at least another 10% of the primary vote in Massachusetts — enough to have really damaged Clinton. Instead, Clinton was allowed to eke out a narrow victory there by picking up the support of identity-voting women who didn’t bother to examine her bogus feminism.

The Sanders campaign can still push forward in future primaries, because unlike prior liberal insurgents who were relying on big donors, his campaign is funded entirely by small donors, and those doners are proving to be resilient and energized, not easily demoralized, by evidence that the game is rigged (in February, the Sanders campaign took in a record $42 million in new small donations, and continues to build its campaign war-chest despite Clinton’s wins in the South on Tuesday). But how much better it would have been had he won Massachusetts.

A Warren endorsement would have made all the difference.

Now she stands exposed as a fraud posing as a radical reformer.

Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton share a joke. Is it on progressives?
 

Just as the media, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s landslide win in South Carolina’s Democratic primary Saturday, are predictably writing the obituary for Bernie Sanders’ upstart and uphill campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has handed him an opportunity to jolt the American people awake.

Announcing on “Meet the Press” that Americans need a real choice of commander-in-chief — one “who has foresight, who exercises good judgment,” she announced today her resignation as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee — an organization that has been actively working to promote Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

In a clear dig at Clinton, a neoliberal who has been at the forefront not just in backing President George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, but in pushing for both the illegal and disastrous overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and the current intervention to oust Syrian President Basher Al-Assad, Gabbard said, “There is a clear contrast between our two candidates with regard to my strong belief that we must end the interventionist, regime change policies that have cost us so much.” She added, “This is not just another ‘issue.’ This is the issue, and it’s deeply personal to me. This is why I’ve decided to resign as Vice Chair of the DNC so that I can support Bernie Sanders in his efforts to earn the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential race.”

Gabbard, while only a second-term member of the House, is no lightweight when it comes to US foreign and military policy. A major in the Hawaii National Guard who volunteered for two tours of duty in Iraq, she is one of only two female members of Congress to have served in a war zone. (While I couldn’t find a stat for how many male members of Congress have served in a war zone, given that only 25 were even in uniform in the period since 2001, and given that few of those 25 were in active war zones, and finally given that older vets like John McCain are few and far between, it’s a fair bet that there are not many.) She had the courage to introduce a bill in a Congress filled with war-besotted “chicken-hawks” to require the US to end its illegal intervention aimed at “regime change” in Syria.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) has resigned as DNC vice-chair and is endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders' run for the party's nomination, while denouncing Hillary Clinton’s militarism
 

I’ll be the first to admit I’m no pollster or even political scientist, but when I read that Bernie Sanders is going to be crushed by Hillary Clinton in Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, the state that fired the opening shots in the Civil War and that only last year took down a Confederate battle flag in front of the capitol building, I have to shake my head at the absurdity of it.

Yo! Pollsters! The reason Sanders is predicted to lose badly is because African Americans in that benighted state are telling your people that they favor Hillary Clinton by a margin variously calculated at 30-50%. Then you all put those numbers together with the fact that historically, 55% of the Democratic vote in South Carolina (where blacks represent 28 percent of the state population), are African American, and you say Bernie doesn’t have a chance. Then you go on to say that is going to hurt Sanders in next week’s Super Tuesday contests, which are all over the place, and on into the rest of the primaries.

But wait a minute. Why should Saturday’s primary results matter? South Carolina is, along with Mississippi and Alabama, one of the most solidly Republican states in the country. It’s not going to vote Democratic in November whoever wins the Democratic presidential primary.

Now if the black share of the vote in tomorrow’s primary were representative of the sentiments of black voters all across the country — urban, rural, southern, northern, eastern and western — I could see why maybe there’d be some reason to pay attention, but that is not the case. Hardley.

What we have in South Carolina is a population of black people who have been exiled or marginalized from the state’s political system since Reconstruction, or really since their ancestors were brought over in chains from Africa — a population that despite constituting more than a quarter of the state’s citizens has been living in what is effectively still an oppressive, crushing apartheid socio-political-econoomic system. That’s a far cry from in the north or the far west, where concentrated African-American populations — descendants of the great migration from the agrarian south — have achieved plurality or even majority status in many cities, and have been able to take on, ameliorate or even overcome some of the oppressive conditions under which they and their forebears have lived. They’ve elected black mayors and black councilmembers, integrated police departments, and opened up hiring in municipal jobs, for example. They’ve even elected blacks to Congress, and in significant numbers. In places like that, who wins the presidency becomes less important an issue. But in a backward racist place like South Carolina, where it isn’t even socially unacceptable for a white guy to admit he’s in the Klan in some communities, it can seem crucial — even a matter of survival.

In ’63, Bernie Sanders was busted for leading a protest against Chicago U's segregated housing, in ’64 Hillary Rodham Clinton was a ‘Goldwater Girl’ (while Clinton admits to this, there are no extant photos of her dressed as one, so we composed one here)
 

As Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination continues to strengthen, so do the attacks on him by the establishment corporate media, which are reflexively backing the status quo corporatocracy.

The latest smear comes from the New York Times, in the form of an almost laughable piece by Jackie Calmes run on Feb. 15 and headlined “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’s Plans.”

The so-called “left-leaning” economists quoted by her, however, included not one genuine left or even left-leaning economist. Rather, they were a bunch of mainstream economists who, while “not working for Hillary Clinton,” as Calmes notes, have in fact worked for either the administration of Barack Obama or of Bill Clinton (a point she largely fails to note). As media critic Doug Henwood of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed out in a blistering critique of the Times article, referring to the economists quoted in the piece, “So slight is their leftward lean that it would require very sensitive equipment to measure.”

Take source one, Austan Goolsbee, former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, who obligingly tells Calmes that Sander’s “numbers just don’t add up,” and claims that Sanders’ proposed measures on health care and job creation would add “$2 to $3 trillion” to the current $4-trillion federal budget. Just the vagueness of his estimate, which had a range of uncertainty of $1 trillion, should alert people to a certain, shall we say lack of rigor on Goolsbee’s part, rather unbecoming of a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Goolslbee, in fact, was the economist with the Obama campaign who famously rushed off to Ottawa to privately reassure that country’s right-wing Prime Minister Stephen Harper that candidate Obama wasn’t serious in his campaign rhetoric condemning the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The second supposedly “left-leaning” economist critic of Sanders cited by Calmes in her article was Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, who is now at what Calmes terms the “liberal” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — actually a haven for Clinton-era mainstream economic hacks pedaling the usual trickle-down theories. Bernstein is quoted criticizing UMass economist Gerald Friedman, who wrote an analysis backing Sander’s call for replacing Obamacare with a Medicare for All program. Friedman, in his analysis, demonstrates that such a switch to a single-payer system would save Americans an average of about $5000 per family, even after raising the Medicare tax by about $500 per family, because it would eliminate virtually all private insurance premiums and co-pays.

Bernstein argued that “several assumptions” in Friedman’s analysis were “wishful thinking.” In fact though, it’s Bernstein whose assumptions are flawed. For example he argues that Sanders and Friedman are “mistakenly” assuming that there would be minimum health care inflation under Sanders’ plan. Actually, it’s no mistake. With the government in a position as sole customer under a national single-payer plan to negotiate pricing with all segments of the delivery system — hospitals, doctors, drug companies, equipment makers, etc. — health inflation could be virtually halted in its tracks, and in many cases, costs would likely go down significantly.

Hillary Clinton at a campaign event in New Hampshire, with the supposedly “independent” and “left-leaning” economist Jared Bernstein (carrying young girl on shoulders) Note: this photo ran in the Times and so editors should have been aware of Bernstein’s close link to the Clinton campaign in editing Calmes’ article.
 

It’s appropriate that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died at a luxury resort while freeloading as the guest of wealthy sponsors as one of 40 participants at a private quail-hunting vacation party.

The resort where he died, Cibolo Ranch Resort, located on land stolen by its founder from the Apache and Comanche people in the Big Bend region of west Texas, is a posh retreat favored by the ultra rich, offering rooms priced from $350 to $800 a night — and the bed Scalia died in was the top-priced presidential suite, as he was the guest of honor. He needed no credit card to check in either, since he and the other guests at the gathering reportedly had their bills covered by the resort’s owner, John Poindexter, a mullti-millionaire real estate owner, rancher and former investment banker.

The acerbic, blunt-speaking Scalia made his name as a High Court judge accepting freebies from wealthy businesspeople and right-wing outfits like the Federalist Society, even accepting free trips and vacation junkets from the likes of the aptly-titled “Vice” President Dick Cheney back in 2004 when Cheney had a case pending before the court involving an effort to force the VP to disclose what oil company executives had attended a closed meeting in his office on energy policy early in the first term of the Bush-Cheney administration. (Scalia, notably, did not recuse himself from hearing that case.)

We don’t at this point know what Scalia’s final junket was about — Poindexter makes a point of saying it “wasn’t about politics or law” — but it’s no surprise he wasn’t there on his own dime. That wasn’t the way Scalia operated. Indeed, so egregious and frequent were Scalia’s junkets that in October 2015 the New York Times wrote an editorial condemning them and calling for a reform to make such legalized bribery illegal.

Supreme Court justices, unlike members of Congress, don’t need to report such things as who takes them on luxury hunting trips. They are simply required under a vague judicial ethics standard to recuse themselves when they themselves feel they have a conflict of interest. Scalia made it abundantly clear, during his record 30-year tenure on the Supreme Court bench, that he did not feel getting freebies from the wealthy, affect his his judicial judgement even when his benefactor had a case pending before him.

Now that Scalia is gone, it will be interesting to see what Justice Clarence Thomas will do. Thomas, who slavishly emulated his mentor Scalia both in his voting on almost all cases brought to the High Court during his 25 years on the bench, and in taking every advantage of free vacations offered by wealthy right-wing businesspeople like the Koch brothers and others. How will Thomas vote now on cases, without Scalia to guide him? Will he glom on to another surviving right-wing jurist — perhaps Samuel Alito?

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia takes his leave of the Supreme Court
 

Activist Alfredo Lopez discusses Bernie Sanders and how the left should respond to his campaign for president
 

Dave Lindorff, host of PRN FM’s “This Can’t Be Happening!” weekly radio program, talks with long time internet and Latino political activist Alfredo Lopez, about Tuesday night’s dramatic New Hampshire Democratic primary blowout win by Bernie Sanders, the independent and self-described democratic socialist junior senator from Vermont, who trounced opponent Hillary Sanders winning 60% of the vote to her 38% showing.

Lindorff and Lopez, both members of the ThisCantBeHappening! collective, discuss how the left should respond to Sanders’ surge in the polls (he’s now running neck-and-neck against Clinton nationally), and to the possibility that he could win the Democratic presidential nomination, and even the presidency in November. Sanders, they agree, is something new in modern US national politics — something not seen the early part of the 20th Century when Eugene Debs was running for president on the Socialist Party ticket. But because he’s running as a Democrat, they speculate about how he can be held, if elected, to his promise of a “political revolution,” and to the bold promises he is making.

To hear this conversation, click on the image, or go to the podcast at PRN.fm.

Even as Bernie Sanders’ insurgent “democratic socialist” campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is really starting to look like it might actually succeed, with polls now showing him ahead of Hillary Clinton in both the earliest primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, and with Republicans engaged in a circular firing squad where all the people with guns are nut-jobs of one kind or another, making a Sanders presidency even seem possible, we read that former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is contemplating running for the White House as an independent candidate.

Now while the idea of a mega-billionaire as president may be a sick joke, Bloomberg’s running for president on his own tab (he’s ready to spend $1 billion of his own money) is no joke at all. With Forbes magazine listing his current worth as $36.8 billion at the start of this year, he is the eighth richest man in America, just behind Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and just ahead of Jim Walton.

It is hard to think of a worse idea than having a smug, self-congratulatory billionaire – someone not just from the top 1% of the population but the top 0.01% — sitting at the top of government telling us all what to do, but I suppose in the interest of fairness we should tote up his pros and cons. So in memory of the departed but not forgotten TCBH! co-founder Chuck Young (see his 2010 article Where Mayor Mike Can Push His Poll), here’s my list of five good and five bad things about having Bloomberg join the race for president as an obscenely wealthy independent candidate:
 

5. Good: Donald Trump, the likely GOP candidate at this point, will no longer be able to boast about his supposed business acumen. Forbes says Trump, no a self-made man but rather a trust-fund baby who got staked $1 million by his old man, is now worth $4.5 billion, making him only the 72nd richest man in America. That might seem a decent sum, but it’s just lunch money for Bloomberg ,who added more than that amount to his assets just over the past year, according to Forbes. And Bloomberg, who hails from an ordinary working family, made all his money himself (or rather, his employees made it for him), first in the securities industry and then with his Bloomberg financial information network.

Bad: Bloomberg is a tight bastard. During his three terms as mayor of New York, he allowed the New York public school system to sink into a funding black hole, as he tried to squeeze teacher salaries and pensions and to both close some schools and convert others to charter schools. The worst year was the Great Recession year of 2010-11, when revenues from the city budget for the city’s schools fell by 10.4% and from the state government, by 24.1%. Federal aid to New York City public schools was boosted that year by 1%, leaving the schools system short by 17%, or about $4.5 billion. Now maybe it wouldn’t be fair to have expected private real estate magnate Trump to turn over his whole nest egg to get the schools in his hometown through that one-year crisis, but Bloomberg in 2012 was worth a cool $25 billion according to Forbes. He could have funded the schools for the mostly impoverished kids of his city fully that school year and wouldn’t have evennoticed the difference.

Former Mayor Bloomberg's police goons defend Wall Street's tycoons from Occupy Movement protesters
 

Someone should have warned tHillary Clinton and the goon squad at the Democratic National Committee that old-fashioned red-baiting isn’t going to cut it in today’s United States. It’s not the 1950s anymore and the Soviet Union and Comtern are ancient history.

With the latest batch of polls showing Bernie Sanders, in the wake of his feisty showing in Sunday’s debate against Clinton in Charleston, SC, gaining on her in both early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and nationally, the Clinton campaign and the leadership in the Democratic Party seem to have lost both their minds and whatever principles they may have had.

According to one poll, by CNN/WMUR, conducted just days after the debate, Sanders is now ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire by a blow-out 60% to 33%. That’s nearly triple the margin the prior CNN/WMUR poll found in December when the numbers were Sanders 50% and Clinton 40%.

Meanwhile, the latest CNN/ORC Iowa poll, just released Friday, shows Sanders leading Clinton among likely caucus-goers in that state by 8 percentage points 51% to 43%. That is a big turnaround from the same poll done in December, which showed Clinton ahead 54% to 36% for Sanders. Even if there are other polls showing Clinton still marginally ahead in Iowa, the trend has been clear of voters moving from Clinton to Sanders, especially over the past two weeks.

Hence the Clinton campaign’s panicky response, which has been to start having surrogates go out and paint Sanders as a “red.”

Her campaign in trouble in Iowa and New Hampshire, and her poll numbers falling nationally, Hillary has turned to Sen. McCarthy for inspiration (Joe, not Gene)
 

They don’t actually call him a commie, but they do the next closest thing, warning that if Sanders were to win the Democratic nomination, he would then be attacked by whoever is the Republican nominee, who would “surely” call him a communist.

How, actually, does this differ from Hillary herself just calling him a commie? Well, it doesn’t. Her campaign is calling him a red.