RSN: The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition, Modern-Day Slavery and Environmental Devastation Go Hand in Hand,

Reader Supported News | 21 January 16

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Glenn Greenwald | The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition

Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
Greenwald writes: "Evidence of a growing Sanders movement is unmistakable. Because of the broader trends driving it, this is clearly unsettling to establishment Democrats - as it should be."
READ MORE

he British political and media establishment incrementally lost its collective mind over the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the country’s Labour Party, and its unraveling and implosion show no signs of receding yet. Bernie Sanders is nowhere near as radical as Corbyn; they are not even in the same universe. But, especially on economic issues, Sanders is a more fundamental, systemic critic than the oligarchical power centers are willing to tolerate, and his rejection of corporate dominance over politics, and corporate support for his campaigns, is particularly menacing. He is thus regarded as America’s version of a far-left extremist, threatening establishment power.

For those who observed the unfolding of the British reaction to Corbyn’s victory, it’s been fascinating to watch the D.C./Democratic establishment’s reaction to Sanders’ emergence replicate that, reading from the same script. I personally think Clinton’s nomination is extremely likely, but evidence of a growing Sanders movement is unmistakable. Because of the broader trends driving it, this is clearly unsettling to establishment Democrats — as it should be.

A poll last week found that Sanders has a large lead with millennial voters, including young women; as Rolling Stone put it: “Young female voters support Bernie Sanders by an expansive margin.” The New York Times yesterday trumpeted that, in New Hampshire, Sanders “has jumped out to a 27 percentage point lead,” which is “stunning by New Hampshire standards.” The Wall Street Journal yesterday, in an editorial titled “Taking Sanders Seriously,” declared it is “no longer impossible to imagine the 74-year-old socialist as the Democratic nominee.”

Just as was true for Corbyn, there is a direct correlation between the strength of Sanders and the intensity of the bitter and ugly attacks unleashed at him by the D.C. and Democratic political and media establishment. There were, roughly speaking, seven stages to this establishment revolt in the U.K. against Corbyn, and the U.S. reaction to Sanders is closely following the same script:

STAGE 1: Polite condescension toward what is perceived to be harmless (we think it’s really wonderful that your views are being aired).

STAGE 2: Light, casual mockery as the self-belief among supporters grows (no, dears, a left-wing extremist will not win, but it’s nice to see you excited).

STAGE 3: Self-pity and angry etiquette lectures directed at supporters upon realization that they are not performing their duty of meek surrender, flavored with heavy doses of concern trolling (nobody but nobody is as rude and gauche online to journalists as these crusaders, and it’sunfortunately hurting their candidate’s cause!).

CLICK IN LINK TO VIEW

STAGE 4: Smear the candidate and his supporters with innuendos of sexism and racism by falsely claiming only white men support them (you like this candidate because he’s white and male like you, not because of ideology or policy or contempt for the party establishment’s corporatist, pro-war approach).

STAGE 5: Brazen invocation of right-wing attacks to marginalize and demonize, as polls prove the candidate is a credible threat (he’s weak on terrorism, will surrender to ISIS, has crazy associations, and is a clone of Mao and Stalin).

STAGE 6: Issuance of grave and hysterical warnings about the pending apocalypse if theestablishment candidate is rejected, as the possibility of losing becomes imminent (you aredestined for decades, perhaps even generations, of powerlessness if you disobey our decrees about who to select).

STAGE 7: Full-scale and unrestrained meltdown, panic, lashing-out, threats, recriminations, self-important foot-stomping, overt union with the Right, complete fury (I can no longer in good conscience support this party of misfits, terrorist-lovers, communists, and heathens).

Britain is well into Stage 7, and may even invent a whole new level (anonymous British military officials expressly threatened a “mutiny” if Corbyn were democratically elected as prime minister). The Democratic media and political establishment has been in the heart of Stage 5 for weeks and is now entering Stage 6. The arrival of Stage 7 is guaranteed if Sanders wins Iowa.

Headline covering Jeremy Corbyn. (photo: The Intercept)

Headline from The Daily Beast. (photo: The Intercept)

It’s both expected and legitimate in elections for the campaigns to harshly criticize one another. There’s nothing wrong with that; we should all want contrasts drawn, and it’s hardly surprising that this will be done with aggression and acrimony. People go to extremes to acquire power: That’s just human nature.

But that doesn’t mean one can’t find meaning in the specific attacks that are chosen, nor does it mean that the attacks invoked are immune from critique (the crass, cynical exploitation of gender issues by Clinton supporters to imply Sanders support is grounded in sexism was particularly slimy and dishonest given that the same left-wing factions that support Sanders spent months literally pleading with Elizabeth Warren to challenge Clinton, to say nothing of the large numbers of female Sanders supporters whose existence was nullified by those attacks).

People in both parties, and across the political spectrum, are disgusted by the bipartisan D.C. establishment. It’s hardly mysterious why large numbers of adults in the U.S. want to find an alternative to a candidate like Clinton who is drowning both politically and personally in Wall Street money, who seems unable to find a war she dislikes, and whose only political conviction seems to be that anything is justifiably said or done to secure her empowerment — just as it was hardly a mystery why adults in the U.K. were desperate to find an alternative to the craven, war-loving, left-hating Blairites who have enormous amounts of blood stained indelibly on their hands.

But the nature of “establishments” is that they cling desperately to power, and will attack anyone who defies or challenges that power with unrestrained fervor. That’s what we saw in the U.K. with the emergence of Corbyn, and what we’re seeing now with the threat posed by Sanders. It’s not surprising that the attacks in both cases are similar — the dynamic of establishment prerogative is the same — but it’s nonetheless striking how identical is the script used in both cases.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34744-the-seven-stages-of-establishment-backlash-corbynsanders-edition

The White House Asked Social Media Companies to Look for Terrorists. Here's Why They'd #Fail.
Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept
McLaughlin writes: "The White House asked internet companies during a counterterrorism summit earlier this month to consider using their technology to help 'detect and measure radicalization.'"
READ MORE

Wealth, Influence of Gates Foundation Distorting International Development
RT
Excerpt: "Enormous wealth and influence wielded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is distorting the direction of international development in a global vacuum of accountability, a new report claims."
READ MORE

US Congressional Committee Subpoenas Ex-Drug CEO Shkreli
Sarah N. Lynch and David Ingram, Reuters
Excerpt: "A U.S. congressional committee has demanded that former drug executive Martin Shkreli appear at a hearing on drug prices to testify about his former company's decision to raise the price of a lifesaving medicine by more than 5,000 percent, congressional aides said on Wednesday."
READ MORE

Parent: Fiorina 'Ambushed' Children With Anti-Abortion Rally
Bradford Richardson, The Hill
Richardson writes: "Republican primary candidate Carly Fiorina has been accused of ambushing a group of Iowa pre-schoolers, who were on a field trip to a botanical garden, with an anti-abortion rally."
READ MORE

Detroit's Teachers Are Holding a Massive 'Sickout' to Protest the Conditions in Their Schools
Casey Quinlan, ThinkProgress
Quinlan writes: "Detroit's public school teachers are staging mass 'sickouts' - which involves large groups of teachers across the city all calling in sick to work - to protest against what they call 'deplorable conditions,' such as mold, warped floors, and dead rats."
READ MORE

Modern-Day Slavery and Environmental Devastation Go Hand in Hand
Katie Herzog, Grist
Herzog writes: "Slavery didn't end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite slavery being illegal in every country on the planet, there are more enslaved people alive today than at any point in history."
READ MORE

Many of the workers who toil in slavery are in industries, which lead to large environmental 
destruction. (photo: Shutterstock)


lavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite slavery being illegal in every country on the planet, there are more enslaved people alive today than at any point in history. From fishing boats in Thailand to private homes in New York to diamond mines in Congo to rock quarries in India, there are an estimated 30 million people working in bondage right now. That’s right — 30 million.

Modern slavery is the subject of Blood and Earth, a new book by Kevin Bales, who cofounded Free the Slaves, an organization working to end slavery around the world. Bales spoke with Fresh Air’s Dave Davies, and he said that the devastation bondage causes isn’t limited to the lives of enslaved people themselves; it also has a devastating effect on both the planet and the climate. He said:

I was amazed to discover the role that slavery plays in CO2 emissions and in the simple and basic fact of how global warming takes place ….

When we calculated up, very conservatively, how much CO2 is coming from slavery, it worked out like this: That if slavery were a country it would have the population of Canada, but it would be the third-largest emitter of CO2 after China and the United States.

This is, in part, due to deforestation. Bales continued:

I can point to … the gigantic mangrove forests at the bottom of Bangladesh, India, Thailand, and Burma that’s called the Sundarbans forest, and it’s the largest carbon sink in Asia. In other words, [it’s] a place where carbon is taken out of the air and sequestered by the trees, both into the sea and into the trees themselves. So this is a very important forest for removing atmospheric carbon. This is also a place where slaveholders are using slaves to clear cut these mangrove forests, to put in shrimp farms, to put in rice paddies, to burn the wood, to do a lot of different things with it. But it’s almost all slave-based deforestation.

So what’s the consumer to do? How can we be sure the shrimp on our plates and the phones in our pockets aren’t the product of slave labor? Unfortunately, Bales says, there’s a lack of information out there for even informed consumers:

At the moment, if we were only able to use just the minerals or just the foodstuffs or materials that we know are absolutely clean, we would all be sort of short on cellphones and clothes and food, because a lot of it is still rather murky. I spend some time in the book walking through the supply chain that leads to our cellphones and our laptops and trying to point to who are the criminals and who are the accomplices and who are the people who are deeply and certainly responsible, and at what level that responsibility lies.

Of course, the ultimate responsibility on the ultimate end of the supply chain rests with us. And we’re responsible for what we buy and what we use, but we’re not as responsible as the people who sell it to us, and we’re certainly not as responsible as the people who make the phones, because this is their business, they should be clean about what they do.

Big business, however, isn’t exactly known for its transparency — or its responsibility. Besides, it’s not like there’s a label for “slavery-free,” like there is for free-range or organic. Even retailers like Whole Foods that advertise their commitment to social and environmental justice have been accused of selling food processed by enslaved people. But there are some things you can do, Bales says, like talking to the managers of the stores you frequent, looking at where your investments are, and getting involved with anti-slavery organizations. These may seem like small steps, but there are 30 million people — and one giant planet — that need you.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34738-modern-day-slavery-and-environmental-devastation-go-hand-in-hand

This & that....SLAVERY! And Rachel Ann Hogan

There is nothing worse than IGNORANCE.....Thanks Rachel Ann Hogan! 

another nominee for the Trump/Palin clueless award

Veronica Marché Jamison

· 

Today in Facebook - a woman bragging about how the slaves her 

family owned "loved" their masters. Happy MLK Day!

NPR offered this program to discuss Kevin Bales' new book about modern day slavery: 

BLOOD AND EARTH

Today's Slaves Often Work For Enterprises That Destroy The Environment

January 20, 2016

A child gold miner in Watsa, northeastern Congo. 2004

Marcus Bleasdale

A 2014 report by the United Nations estimates that tens of millions of people in the world are currently enslaved. Most of them are in the developing world, where they work in mines, quarries or shrimp farms for no money and without hope of escape.

"Slavery is the complete control of one person by another, and violence is used to maintain that control in all forms of slavery," author Kevin Bales explains to Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "The adults in that situation know that if they attempt to leave, they may be killed."

Bales is the co-founder and former president of the organization Free the Slaves. His new book, Blood and Earth, chronicles the lives of people living in bondage and the environmental devastation he says the practice of slavery causes.

From the mineral mines of eastern Congo to the tidal mangrove forests of Bangladesh and India, Bales says that slavery and environmental degradation are often linked. "Every place I was finding slaves I was finding them in situations in which the local environment ... been destroyed," he says.

It's kind of hard to describe how powerful job satisfaction can be when you know if you put in a good week some people have come out of slavery.

Kevin Bales

Bales spent seven years researching his book, during which time he visited slaves in a number of countries. He acknowledges that his work is often heart-wrenching but adds: "It's kind of hard to describe how powerful job satisfaction can be when you know if you put in a good week, some people have come out of slavery. That in a sense is the tonic, it's the balance, it's what allows me to keep going in those areas where I see the horror, but I also see the triumph of freedom and that's just worth it."

Interview Highlights

Blood and Earth

Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World

by Kevin Bales

Hardcover, 290 pages

purchase

On the generations of slaves who work in the quarries of northern India

They're in hereditary slavery, and that means the people in that quarry have never known freedom. They were born into slavery, and when you've never known freedom, when you've never been outside the quarry, you've never been to another village, you've never seen a school, you've never had a doctor's appointment, you've never seen a newspaper, all the lists of all the things we expect in freedom don't apply to these people. And they simply say, if you talk to them, "My family has always belonged to that family and this is where we are and this is what we do."

On why slavery still exists in the Congo

In the eastern part of Congo we've got two key problems: The first is that it's a war zone and one of the first casualties of war is always the rule of law. So to say "What is law doing about this?" when the rule of law is, in fact, absent or disintegrated, it answers its own question pretty well. But the second part ... is that the Congolese government [and] army has had its own problems with corruption and lawlessness. So it's very difficult at times to get any sort of enforcement. Now it is true that after the United States passed the Dodd-Frank Act and put embargoes on conflict minerals from Eastern Congo, the government had to step in and start working at the local level to stop government officials and Congolese army officials from taking bribes and enslaving people themselves. So there's been a diminution of the problem over the time, but that's a work in progress, I have to say.

On the slaves at Bisie, a mine in Eastern Congo that provides minerals for cellphones and other electronics

They do the washing and preparing of the minerals. A lot of them, as I say, are living and sleeping in tunnels, which they've been digging through the mountains and so forth, and then there are a few structures, but those structures are controlled by the armed gangs that control the mines and enslave all the people in the mines ....

The jobs that they're doing are divided up in two or three categories. One is simply the digging — digging into the side of mountain or digging down from the top — and you're just hammering away with hammers and chisels and shovels to pull these minerals out. Another job will be hauling those minerals on your back out of the tunnels and out of the holes to take them down to the river, where they'll be handed over to more women workers who will then wash the minerals to get a lot of the clay and other dirt off them. They just put them in giant tin cans with lots of holes poked in the can to shake around in the water and clean them up a little bit. Then there'll be people who put those [minerals] into bags and then those people who carry those bags and stack them up and store them. And then, ultimately, there will be people who are enslaved whose job it will be to put those bags on their back and walk for 20, 30, 40, 50 miles to get them out of there and into the supply chain that brings them to our cellphones.

On common diseases and injuries at Bisie in Congo

You can imagine that if you have people with no medical care and no opportunity to even bathe what happens when ... those people sleep together in big piles in tunnels. So there's all the types of injuries that you can get in mining, so broken bones and being smashed with hammers and shovels and picks and pikes and holes put in you. There's what happens when the tunnels collapse, which happens often because this isn't industrial mining with careful supports and hardhats or anything like that, so people are crushed to death or desperately injured or a big rock falls on your head. There are scabies and other infectious diseases that sweep through the camp. Occasionally something like cholera will break out and it means that there'll be a very intense spike of deaths from that cholera. And then there are the sexually transmitted diseases, because the women on the camp really have no control over their bodies whatsoever. Once they've come there, perhaps even hoping to find real work or honest work, they discover that they've been caught in a web of slavery as well, and really any member of the armed gang that controls that mine can take any woman and do anything he likes.

On the connection between modern slavery and environmental damage

This whole book for me is about exploring and illuminating that relationship between slavery, environmental destruction and climate change. ... I was amazed to discover the role that slavery plays in CO2 emissions and in the simple and basic fact of how global warming takes place ....

When we calculated up, very conservatively, how much CO2 is coming from slavery, it worked out like this: That if slavery were a country it would have the population of Canada, but it would be the third-largest emitter of CO2 after China and the United States ....

I can point to ... the gigantic mangrove forests at the bottom of Bangladesh, India, Thailand and Burma that's called the Sundarbans forest, and it's the largest carbon sink in Asia, in other words, a place where carbon is taken out of the air and sequestered by the trees, both into the sea and into the trees themselves, so this is a very important forest for removing atmospheric carbon. This is also a place where slaveholders are using slaves to clear cut these mangrove forests, to put in shrimp farms, to put in rice paddies, to burn the wood, to do a lot of different things with it, but it's almost all slave-based deforestation.

On slavery in the U.S.

You will find people in slavery in lots of places where you don't expect it in the United States. Sexual exploitation is probably the highest, but the second is domestic servants that we find particularly in the richer cities. After that, lots of people are enslaved in agriculture. Often these are migrants, whether legal or undocumented, but you can find people enslaved in hair-braiding studios and massage parlors, and it sort of goes on and on.

On how consumers can be more informed about the products they buy

i

Kevin Bales is a professor of contemporary slavery at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation in Yorkshire, England.

Kevin Ladden Photography/ Spiegel & Grau

At the moment, if we were only able to use just the minerals or just the foodstuffs or materials that we know are absolutely clean, we would all be sort of short on cellphones and clothes and food, because a lot of it is still rather murky. I spend some time in the book walking through the supply chain that leads to our cellphones and our laptops and trying to point to who are the criminals and who are the accomplices and who are the people who are deeply and certainly responsible, and at what level that responsibility lies.

Of course, the ultimate responsibility on the ultimate end of the supply chain rests with us. And we're responsible for what we buy and what we use, but we're not as responsible as the people who sell it to us, and we're certainly not as responsible as the people who make the phones, because this is their business, they should be clean about what they do.

LISTEN TO PROGRAM ON LINK: 

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/01/20/463600820/todays-slaves-often-work-for-enterprises-that-destroy-the-environment

THIS EDITION OF RSN INCLUDES AN ARTICLE ADDRESSING DIPLOMATS ENSLAVING WORKERS IN THE US AND THEIR PARTICIPATION IN HUMAN TRAFFICKING: 

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