RSN: I Am Angry and I'm Not Giving Up

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FOCUS: Scott Galindez | I Am Angry and I'm Not Giving Up 
 
Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News 
Galindez writes: "We need Greens, socialists, independents, and progressive Democrats to band together and, from the bottom up, take over the Democratic Party and change the rules of the game - then we can build multiple parties." 
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 don’t like many of the things that are happening and have happened in this election cycle. We have a rigged political system that favors the two major parties, and the establishment of those parties that know how to play the game. We have to change the system if we are going to bring the progressive change we need in this country.

I know that many of you, like me, have that passion for justice that Bernie talked about in Albany. I know that many of you have been fighting for a long time and are frustrated. We thought that this time we might finally win, only to see the rigged system keep us from crossing the finish line first.

Voter suppression is real in this country, and the establishment is good at it. They make the rules and they are happy if the rules favor the establishment candidate. We have exposed many problems with the current system, and we must fight to change them. We must work for open primaries and automatic voter registration and to abolish superdelegates, to name a few things. I am as angry as you are and I am going to stay in the movement we have created together and fight.

I am not going to unregister from the Democratic Party. That is like taking your marbles and going home because you’re not happy with how the game went. We did that in the 80s and let the “new Democrats” take over the party. If you stayed and fought, I thank you for hanging in there. This is not the time to give up.

This is time to press forward. Victory is in sight. It may take years of hard work, but the future is bright. We have won the hearts and minds of people under 45 years old. Bernie has united us and breathed new life into our movement. We were always here, we just were not united and we were preaching to the choir and not growing like we have over the last year.

Bernie Sanders is not the messiah. He will not perform miracles that will force the establishment to surrender and give up power overnight. The Democratic Party establishment is not going to just resign en masse and let us have control. We have to earn it. We have to do the work necessary to transform the Democratic Party.

I attended the first Green Party congress in West Virginia in 1990. I thought the decision was to build at the grassroots level and not try to focus on national politics until there was a strong enough base. A month later the Green Party was endorsing Ralph Nader and spending all of its energy on national politics. The thought was that a strong national figure would help us build faster. We should have learned that the roots were not ready to sustain that.

It has been over 25 years, and the progress is still very slow. The reason is that the system is rigged. We will not succeed in building a viable third party until one of the two major parties changes the system while they hold power. The only way that will happen is if we take over one of the parties.

We need Greens, socialists, independents, and progressive Democrats to band together and, from the bottom up, take over the Democratic Party and change the rules of the game – then we can build multiple parties.

We had setbacks in St. Louis. The establishment pushed back and rejected many of our proposals. The platform fight is not over – that was just the drafting committee. The committee as a whole meets in Orlando next week. We need to continue to fight for a plank against the TPP. We need to fight for language to ban fracking. We need to fight for single payer health care.

Bernie understands this and released the following statement on the platform process:

“I am glad that we have won some very important provisions in the platform drafting process so far, but much more needs to be done.

“There is very good language in the platform that calls for breaking up the largest Wall Street financial institutions and a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. I am glad that the platform drafting committee is on record to expand Social Security, to create millions of jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and to end the outrageous tax loopholes that enable the very rich and large profitable corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

“Unfortunately, however, the platform drafting committee voted down some very important provisions. Despite Secretary Clinton’s opposition, as a candidate for president, to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, her supporters in St. Louis voted down a proposal to keep the trade deal from coming up for a vote in Congress. The Clinton delegates also voted down definitive language to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Despite the growing crisis of climate change, they voted against a tax on carbon, against a ban on fracking and against a requirement for 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

“The platform drafted in St. Louis is a very good start, but there is no question that much more work remains to be done by the full Platform Committee when it meets in Orlando on July 8 and 9. We intend to do everything we can to rally support for our amendments in Orlando and if we fail there to take the fight to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia. It is imperative that this platform be not only the most progressive in the history of the Democratic Party, but includes a set of policies that will be fought for and implemented by Democratic elected officials.”

It is no longer about this election. We have to build a movement for the long haul. I went to a meeting of Iowa’s Citizens for Community Involvement this week. It was a meeting of their Fight for 15 campaign. I plan to go to the August Polk County Democratic Central Committee meeting. (The July meeting will take place while I am in Cleveland at the RNC.) I might consider a run for office. I will not walk away now – I am angry and I will stay in the fight.

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Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/37766-focus-i-am-angry-and-im-not-giving-up

RSN: How Hillary Tells Us She Won't Fight Wall Street

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FOCUS: Steve Weissman | How Hillary Tells Us She Won't Fight Wall Street

Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
Weissman writes: "Choosing Hillary comes down to giving the whole loaf to Wall Street while barely leaving crumbs for the rest of us. Except for the self-serving, where's the pragmatism in that?"
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illary Clinton has a stronger, more detailed plan to regulate Wall Street than does Bernie Sanders, says the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. But, adds journalist Ezra Klein, many are skeptical that she will do what she says.

“She has spoken out of both sides of her mouth on a number of issues,” agrees public banking campaigner Ellen Brown. “So it doesn’t seem like we can trust her.”

Between savants and skeptics, policy wonks and the politically wary, how can ordinary voters decide for themselves? It isn’t easy.

“Mr. Sanders has been focused on restoring Glass-Steagall, the rule that separated deposit-taking banks from riskier wheeling and dealing. And repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake,” Krugman wrote. “But it’s not what caused the financial crisis, which arose instead from ‘shadow banks’ like Lehman Brothers, which don’t take deposits but can nonetheless wreak havoc when they fail. Mrs. Clinton has laid out a plan to rein in shadow banks; so far, Mr. Sanders hasn’t.”

Krugman also finds that Wall Street prefers any Republican over either of the Democrats. Yet Wall Streeters are giving Hillary significant contributions, and their financial media does not view her as a major threat to their interests.

“As long as Hillary Clinton is in charge, they know that the Clintons historically have been enormously helpful to the banking industry,” explains former federal regulator William K. Black. “And in return the banking industry – not simply the banking industry, others as well – have made the Clintons very wealthy.”

No surprise, Hillary has little to say about her husband’s dealings with Wall Street, which will arguably define his place in history. I in no way hold Hillary accountable for the Big Dog’s transgressions, and certainly not for his carnal sins, which right-wingers delight in accusing her of enabling. But what does she think of his enabling Wall Street to bring the global economy to a thudding crash? How does she respond to Bill’s role in helping Wall Street gain such power and promote such glaring inequality?

Ask her. We need to know, and so far, her silence speaks volumes.

Remember that Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 as an economic populist on a platform created largely by Robert Reich, who became his Secretary of Labor. But Bill brought in Robert Rubin, co-chair of Goldman Sachs, to serve first as his chief economic advisor and then as Secretary of the Treasury. The soft-spoken Rubin persuaded Clinton to pay off the budget deficit left to him by George H.W. Bush, a move that won Wall Street’s blessing and helped fuel the boom-and-bust prosperity of the 1990s. The alternative, as many people now understand, would have been to rebuild our already failing bridges, transportation systems, waterworks, and electrical grids.

Rubin also convinced Clinton to push Wall Street’s neo-liberal economics and its Washington Consensus worldwide, while making the North American Free Trade Agreement a top priority, without providing any safety net for American workers whose jobs went abroad.

But, most telling, Rubin and his understudy Larry Summers prevailed on Clinton to restrain financial regulators within the administration from doing their job, regulators like Bill Black and Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. (See her story at PBS Frontline.)

Clinton then went along with Texas senator Phil Gramm and the Republican-led Congress to massively deregulate financial markets, just as Rubin and his Wall Street friends wanted. Clinton fought for and signed the repeal of most of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal’s already porous wall between commercial and investment banking. Even worse, he fought for and signed the Commodities Future Modernization Act, which removed most federal regulation of credit default swaps and other over-the-counter-derivatives, the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that shadow banks like Lehman Brothers misused to bring down the global economy in 2008.

Enabling Wall Street in this way was Bill Clinton’s mortal sin, making him an accomplice to the economic crime of the century. He was a well-paid accomplice at that, “earning” some $250 million from going to work for the Wall Street mob after he left the Oval Office. Having shared royally in the pay-off, Hillary has never confronted either the economic crime or Bill’s complicity in it. Since she’s too smart – and too experienced – not to have seen them both, she’s telling us that she would be likely to do much the same.

Krugman misses this. The choice in the Democratic primaries, as he sees it, is between Bernie Sanders’ whole-loaf idealism, which Krugman calls self-indulgent, and Hillary’s half-a-loaf pragmatism, which he prefers. In reality, choosing Hillary comes down to giving the whole loaf to Wall Street while barely leaving crumbs for the rest of us. Except for the self-serving, where’s the pragmatism in that?

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A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34811-focus-how-hillary-tells-us-she-wont-fight-wall-street

RSN: Exxon Knew of Climate Change in 1981, Email Says - But It Funded Deniers for 27 More Years, GOP Leaders Fear Damage to Party's Image as Donald Trump Doubles Down, Death, Lies, and Ghost Schools: A Look at the Amazing Failure of US-Funded Schools in Afghanistan

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Joseph Stiglitz | The US Must Save Greece 
 
Joseph Stiglitz, TIME 
Stiglitz writes: "As the Greek saga continues, many have marveled at Germany's chutzpah. It received, in real terms, one of the largest bailout and debt reduction in history and unconditional aid from the U.S. in the Marshall Plan. And yet it refuses even to discuss debt relief for Greece." 
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Sanders to Jeb Bush: Americans Need Better Wages Not Longer Hours 
Tim Devaney, The Hill 
Devaney writes: "Bernie Sanders says Americans already work longer hours than employees in most other countries and shouldn't be forced to 'work even longer hours than they currently do'" 
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GOP Leaders Fear Damage to Party's Image as Donald Trump Doubles Down 
Karen Tumulty, Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, The Washington Post 
Excerpt: "The head of the Republican National Committee, responding to demands from increasingly worried party leaders, spent nearly an hour Wednesday on the phone with Donald Trump, urging the presidential candidate to tone down his inflammatory comments about immigration that have infuriated a key election constituency." 
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Warren, McCain Introduce Bill to Bring Back 
Kevin Cirilli, The Hill 
Cirilli writes: "Elizabeth Warren and John McCain are reintroducing legislation to revive the Glass-Steagall Act, which would force big banks to split their investment and commercial banking practices." 
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All the Due Process Money Can Buy 
Mary Turck, Al Jazeera America 
Turck writes: "On June 8, California's Judicial Council, which governs the state's court system, ordered judges to stop requiring people to pay bail in order to contest minor traffic tickets." 
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Death, Lies, and Ghost Schools: A Look at the Amazing Failure of US-Funded Schools in Afghanistan 
Azmat Khan, BuzzFeed News 
Khan writes: "The United States trumpets education as one of its shining successes of the war in Afghanistan. But a BuzzFeed News investigation reveals U.S. claims were often outright lies, as the government peddled numbers it knew to be false and touted schools that have never seen a single student." 
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Exxon Knew of Climate Change in 1981, Email Says - But It Funded Deniers for 27 More Years 
Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian UK 
Goldenberg writes: ExxonMobil, the world's biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate change - seven years before it became a public issue, according to a newly discovered email from one of the firm's own scientists. Despite this the firm spent $30 million over the next 27 years to promote climate denial." 
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