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NEW CONTENT MOVED TO MIDDLEBORO REVIEW 2

Toyota

Since the Dilly, Dally, Delay & Stall Law Firms are adding their billable hours, the Toyota U.S.A. and Route 44 Toyota posts have been separated here:

Route 44 Toyota Sold Me A Lemon



Showing posts with label crumbling infrastructure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crumbling infrastructure. Show all posts

Friday, May 26, 2017

Progressive Breakfast: Preserving Public Lands in Montana and Beyond









MORNING MESSAGE

Bryce Oates
Preserving Public Lands in Montana and Beyond
Montana's Greg Gianforte and Ryan Zinke are among the Republican lawmakers who feel empowered by President Trump to go out and take public lands for private use. A growing number of Americans refuse to let them get away with it, and here's why.

Reap What You Sow

Reporter-punching Republican Gianforte wins Montana House race. WaPo: “The darker forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party. When GOP House candidate Greg Gianforte assaulted a reporter who had attempted to ask him a question Wednesday night in Montana, many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are “the enemy of the people.” Nonetheless, Gianforte won Thursday’s special election to fill a safe Republican seat. ‘Respectfully, I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,’ Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) said. ‘I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license.'”
Trump travel ban blocked, now heads to Supreme Court. Forbes:“The question for this Court, distilled to its essential form, is whether the Constitution… remains ‘a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace.’ And if so, whether it protects Plaintiffs’ right to challenge an Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” Those stern words were the opening lines in a ruling issued Thursday by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals blocking President Donald Trump’s latest travel ban from taking effect. The strident tone established in this opening stanza continued throughout the decision authored by Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory, marking it as one of the most condemnatory declarations issued by a court against a president in many years.

This Land Is Whose Land?

Trump wants to drill for oil in Alaska’s fragile wildlife refuge. CNN: “The 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been closed to oil exploration since 1980 due to concerns about the impact on the region’s caribou, polar bears and other animals. But Trump, who has promised to flex America’s energy muscles, wants to change that. The White House’s budget proposal put out this week calls for raising nearly $2 billion in revenue over the next decade by selling oil and gas leases in an oil-rich section of ANWR.”
House votes to undo pesticide protections for nation’s waterways. ThinkProgress:“The U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday to pass a bill that dismantles a pesticide permitting system. Opponents are calling the Republican-led legislation the ‘Poison Our Waters Act.’ Under the bill, anyone applying a pesticide that the Environmental Protection Agency has approved under the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act would no longer require a Clean Water Act ‘general permit.'”

Little Big Wall

Trump’s big wall is now just 74 miles long in his budget plan. NPR:“After making the need for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border a central campaign theme, President Trump has asked Congress for just $1.6 billion to start building 74 miles of barriers. Texas alone shares more than 1,200 miles of border with Mexico… The request is far less than the $21.6 billion the Homeland Security Department had estimated that wall construction would cost. Still, Trump’s request works out to $21.6 million a mile, or nearly $13,000 a yard — for what’s expected to be a steel and concrete barrier.”

Kicking the Can

Senate mulls health bill rewrite pushing Obamacare repeal past 2020. Bloomberg: “Senate Republicans are weighing a two-step process to replace Obamacare that would postpone a repeal until 2020, as they seek to draft a more modest version than a House plan that nonpartisan analysts said would undermine some insurance markets. Republicans – in the early stages of private talks on the Senate plan – say they may first take action to stabilize premium costs in Obamacare’s insurance-purchasing exchanges in 2018 and 2019.”
HUD Secretary Carson says poverty is largely “a state of mind.” CNN:“Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said in an interview Wednesday that having ‘the wrong mindset’ contributes to poverty. ‘I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind, the retired neurosurgeon said during an interview with SiriusXM… ‘You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there. And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you could give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.'”

More from OurFuture.org:

How Compassion Becomes Contempt in America. Sam Pizzigati:“Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration budget chief, desperately needs some serious lexicological support. That became obvious when Mulvaney stepped up before reporters to defend the new Trump budget for the federal fiscal year starts in October, by redefining ‘compassion’ in his own terms. We have too many people out there, he told reporters, ‘who don’t want to work. We don’t have enough money,’ he then added, ‘to take care of people who don’t need help.'”
There Is a Plan to Fix Infrastructure; It’s Not Trump’s. Liz Ryan Murray, Ben Ishibashi: “There’s broad agreement in our country, and across party lines, that we need more good jobs and to rebuild our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The good news is there is a plan to get us there, but it’s not the one Trump wants us to back.”

Progressive Breakfast is a daily morning email highlighting news stories of interest to activists. Progressive Breakfast and OurFuture.org are projects of People's Action.more »







Thursday, August 25, 2016

Progressive Breakfast CORRECTED LINK: John Oliver Slams Charter Schools and His Critics Totally Miss the Point




MORNING MESSAGE

Jeff Bryant
John Oliver Slams Charter Schools and His Critics Totally Miss the Point
Earlier this week, British comedian John Oliver devoted a “Back to School” segment on his HBO program "Last Week Tonight" to examining the rapidly growing charter school industry and what these schools are doing with our tax dollars. ... None of Oliver’s critics seriously refuted the crux of his argument that there might be something fundamentally wrong by design, rather than by implementation or intent, with the idea that a “free market” of privately operated and essentially unregulated schools is a surefire way to improve education opportunities for all students.
This post is updated with the correct link.

HILLARY CLINTON VS. THE 'ALT-RIGHT'


Hillary Clinton to put the focus on Donald Trump’s embrace of the “alt-right.”
From Reuters: “Aides said Clinton will link Trump’s statements about immigration and religion to the rise of a political fringe movement in the U.S. known as the “alternative right”, which opposes multiculturalism and immigration. … “Trump’s newly installed brain trust,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in a statement, “completes Donald Trump’s disturbing takeover of the Republican Party.””
“When Trump Met Mr. Brexit—the Alt-Right Coalition Goes Global.”From John Avlon at Slate: “Trade “Britain First” for “America First” and you get a clear sense of the continuity between conservative populists on both sides of the pond.”
The New Republic on “Hillary Clinton’s Alt-Right Dillemma”:“There’s a sensible adage online: “Do not feed the trolls.” Trolls live off attention, so if you respond to them, they get more energized. The problem is, if you leave trolls alone you run the risk of letting them poison public discourse unabated. Clinton has decided to take the issue head on.”

REALITY IN DONALD TRUMP'S EMPIRE

Time magazine probes “What Donald Trump Knew About Undocumented Workers at His Signature Tower.”“For 36 years, Trump has denied knowingly using undocumented workers to demolish the building that would be replaced with Trump Tower in 1980. … But thousands of pages of documents … contain testimony that Trump sought out the Polish workers when he saw them on another job, instigated the creation of the company that paid them and negotiated the hours they would work. The papers contain testimony that Trump repeatedly toured the site where the men were working, directly addressed them about pay problems and even promised to pay them himself, which he eventually did.”
Mother Jones examines Trump’s claim that he hired lots of women executives. His casino records say otherwise.“In filings from 1996 to 2008, we identified 59 executives (not including Trump himself). Of those, six were women—10 percent of the total. None of these six served on the THCR [Trump Hotel and Casino Resorts] or TER [Trump Entertainment Resorts] board of directors.”

BERNIE SANDERS KICKS OFF 'OUR REVOLUTION'

Bernie Sanders launches ‘Our Revolution’ with electoral targets.The Washington Post’s David Weigel and John Wagner reports: “For a full hour, Sanders told an audience in Burlington, Vt. — and tens of thousands of online viewers — that they had moved the center of American politics to the left, and could join him in backing “over a hundred candidates” and “seven key ballot initiatives” around America. But the announcement was preceded by two days of negative stories about how Our Revolution will actually work, and grumbling about how Sanders has spent his political capital.”

RACISM UNMASKED

Kansas family told “This neighborhood does not need any blacks in it.”“Nancy Wirths, 49, told NBC affiliate KSNW that she pulled an anonymous note from her mailbox Monday in northern Wichita from someone who claimed to be a disgruntled neighbor forced to flee his home. … ‘We have noticed that there are some black children at your residence. … This neighborhood does not need any blacks in it. There is a reason for the saying, ‘The other side of the tracks.’ That is where these people belong.'”
A senior United Nations official calls out ‘blunt discrimination’ by police and ‘crisis levels’ of racism.“Maina Kiai … is the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, and his trip last month was meant to examine how Americans handle protests. … “The focus of my mission was not race or discrimination,” he said in his statement, a prelude to a fuller report expected next year. “But it is impossible to discuss these rights without issues of racism pervading the discussions.””

CASE FOR PUBLIC SPENDING

Federal Reserve emphasizes need for more public spending.“The Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Yellen speaks on Friday, is due to focus on how to improve central banks’ “toolkit,” but the unanimous message from the Fed’s top policymakers is that those tools are not enough. … Fed vice chair Stanley Fischer said … it was up to the administration to invest more in infrastructure and education.”
Infrastructure spending needs to be coupled with an equity agenda, says director of the Partnership for Working Families.“In order to create an ambitious infrastructure program that rebuilds the country’s systems and provides opportunity, America’s next president will need to apply an equity frame to the entire program. That means critically considering the impact of projects on communities and getting their input early on in the process. That also means smart planning to ensure that the program creates good jobs and opportunities for those who need them the most.”

BREAKFAST SIDES

New York Times says Republicans are gaining in voter registrations in key states.“The gains made by Republicans since 2012 have been especially sharp in North Carolina and Florida. … [But the] number of registered Democrats and Republicans might not be a critical factor in this election. Since 2012, more voters have chosen not to register for either party.”
David Corn at Mother Jones tries to answer “The Question No One’s Asking About the Clinton Foundation.”“There may have been a need for a better firewall between Clinton and the foundation when Clinton was the nation’s top diplomat, but the AP article [that she met several dozen times with donors to the Clinton Foundation] focused on a small issue and skipped a bigger subject: assessing what the Clinton Foundation has accomplished. And there may be a good reason why much of the coverage of the foundation has zeroed in on side matters, because it’s darn hard to evaluate what the meganonprofit has done.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown to sign sweeping new climate legislation.“Environmental advocates and clean energy companies have pushed the proposals as a major step forward for California, which has been touted as an international example for tackling global warming. Oil companies and some manufacturers fought the legislation, warning of higher costs and out-of-control regulators.”
Progressive Breakfast is a daily morning email highlighting news stories of interest to activists. Progressive Breakfast is a project of the Campaign for America's Future.more »


Monday, July 4, 2016

Sanders: Party platform still needs work





Bernie Sanders' rally on left, Hillary Clinton rally on right. 





Sanders: Party platform still needs work






The Democratic Party platform drafted in St. Louis is an excellent start in bringing forth policies that will help end the 40-year decline of the American middle class. These initiatives, if implemented, will create millions of good-paying jobs, significantly improve health care, and reverse the dangerous trend in this country toward an oligarchic form of society. But, let us be clear, this is a document that needs to be significantly improved by the full Platform Committee meeting in Orlando on July 8 and 9.
Here are some very positive provisions in the platform as it stands today:
At a time when huge Wall Street financial institutions are bigger now than they were before the taxpayers of this country bailed them out, the platform calls for enacting a 21st-century Glass-Steagall Act and for breaking up too-big-to-fail banks.
The platform calls for a historic expansion of Social Security, closes loopholes that allow corporations to avoid paying taxes, creates millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, makes it easier for workers to join unions, takes on the greed of the pharmaceutical companies, ends disastrous deportation raids, bans private prisons and detention centers, abolishes the death penalty, moves to automatic voter registration and the public financing of elections, eliminates super PACs, and urges passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, among many other initiatives.
These are all major accomplishments that will begin to move this country in the right direction. I congratulate Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), chairman of the Platform Drafting Committee, and all 15 members of the panel for their hard work.
But, unfortunately, there were a number of vitally important proposals brought forth by the delegates from our campaign that were not adopted. My hope is that a grassroots movement of working people, environmentalists, and human-rights advocates will work with us to demand that the Democratic Party include these initiatives in the platform to be adopted by the full committee in Orlando.
We need to have very clear language that raises the minimum wage to $15 an hour, ensures that the promised pensions of millions of Americans will not be cut, establishes a tax on carbon, and creates a ban on fracking. These and other amendments will be offered in Florida.
Further, one of the most important amendments that we will offer is to make it clear that the Democratic Party is strongly opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
In my view, the Democratic Party must go on record in opposition to holding a vote on this disastrous, unfettered free-trade agreement during the lame-duck session of Congress and beyond.
Frankly, I do not understand why the amendment our delegates offered on this issue in St. Louis was defeated with all of Hillary Clinton's committee members voting against it. I don't understand that because Clinton, during the campaign, made it very clear that she did not want to see the TPP appear on the floor during the lame-duck session.
If both Clinton and I agree that the TPP should not get to the floor of Congress this year, it's hard to understand why an amendment saying so would not be overwhelmingly passed.
Let's be clear: The trade agreement is opposed by virtually the entire grassroots base of the Democratic Party.
Every trade union in this country is strongly opposed to the pact. They understand that this agreement will make it easier for corporations to throw American workers out on the street and move factories to Vietnam, where workers are paid 65 cents an hour.
Virtually every major environmental group is opposed to the TPP because they understand that it will make it easier for the biggest polluters in the world to continue despoiling our planet.
Major religious groups are opposed because they understand that it will reward some of the biggest human-rights violators in the world.
Doctors Without Borders is strongly opposed to this agreement because its members understand that it would increase prescription-drug prices for some of the most desperate people in the world by making it harder to access generic drugs.
This agreement also threatens our democracy. We cannot give multinational corporations the ability to challenge our nation's labor and environmental laws simply because they might reduce expected future profits through the very flawed Investor State Dispute Settlement system. That would undermine the democratic values that our country was founded on.
During the coming days and weeks our campaign will be reaching out to grassroots America to do all that we can to oppose the TPP and make sure that it doesn't get passed.
@BernieSanders




Sunday, May 22, 2016

This & that..... Bernie Sanders Out Fundraises Clinton As Donations Keep Pouring In!




GQ Ranks Hillary Its 5th Worst Person Of 2015, Just Ahead Of Bill Cosby And Jared Fogle


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/23/gq-ranks-hillary-its-5th-worst-person-of-2015-just-ahead-of-bill-cosby-and-jared-fogle/#ixzz49RFjiK4J




Bernie Sanders Out Fundraises Clinton As Donations Keep Pouring In! Donate: http://BernieSanders.com/Donate/
More than 7.6 million contributions with more than 2.4 million individual donors. Sanders’ campaign raised more than $212 million since the start of the campaign. Sanders raised more than $26.9 million in April, out-raising Secretary Clinton for the fourth month in a row. The average contribution to the senator’s campaign is around $27. Only 5 percent of Sanders’ total came from donors who have given the maximum $2,700 an individual may donate to a candidate. Almost half of Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign committee money comes from maxed-out donors.
Give $27 to Bernie http://BernieSanders.com/27
This is revolutionary. Bernie had originally hoped to raise a TOTAL of $40 million for the entire campaign up to the Democratic National Convention in July. Rejecting billionaire money and not forming a SuperPAC, few thought even that goal was possible. Today, Bernie has raised over FIVE TIMES that amount thanks to millions of small donors, like you.
Help ‪#‎FuelTheBern‬ by asking 5 new people to donate to Bernie this weekend. Even if they are not doing so well, a donation of $5 or even one dollar really helps. Contribute your vacuum pennies to Bernie!http://BernieSanders.com/pennies
‪#‎AmericaNeedsBernie‬ ‪#‎NotForSale‬ ‪#‎WeAreBernie‬ ‪#‎BernieorBastille‬‪#‎TeamSecondWave‬ ‪#‎50statesANDaConvention‬
‪#‎PRcaucus‬ ‪#‎CAprimary‬ ‪#‎NMprimary‬ ‪#‎MTprimary‬ ‪#‎NDcaucus‬‪#‎SDprimary‬ ‪#‎NJprimary‬ ‪#‎FeelTheBern‬ ‪#‎Bernie2016‬‪#‎AFutureToBelieveIn‬ ‪#‎TheRealDeal‬


All Bernie signs were stolen on our block yesterday. frown emoticon
My response to the haters...

Keri K Voss's photo.
I agree with this man.
I can't afford to buy a politician, but I can afford to send $20.00 to one that can't be bought!
 
I could care less about a party like the Dems have become. The Klingons made it their own personal trough,only to enrich themselves and their lackeys...
just so we're clear to them
Not Me Us
I could care less about a party like the Dems have become. The Klingons 
made it their own personal trough,only to enrich themselves and their 
lackeys...
just so we're clear to them


A LIE? OMG no! She wouldn't tell a lie, would she??!! ROFLMAO Her life is riddled with lies, bribes and crime! She is NOT presidential material -- unless you are talking about LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED!!

Hillary Clinton finds herself embroiled in a fresh controversy after 
it was revealed that an anti-Sanders op-ed column attributed to 
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed was…
INQUISITR.COM

Welfare reform. NAFTA. The crime bill. Prisons. Aides wondered if Bill 
knew who he was. His legacy is sadly clear
SALON.COM|BY THOMAS FRANK


Bill Clinton’s odious presidency: Thomas Frank on the real history of the ’90s

Welfare reform. NAFTA. The crime bill. Prisons. Aides wondered if Bill knew who he was. His legacy is sadly clear


Everyone remembers the years of the Bill Clinton presidency as good times. The economy was booming, the stock market was ascending, and the mood was infectious. You felt good about it even if you didn’t own a single share.
And yet: What did Clinton actually do in his eight years on Pennsylvania Avenue? While writing this book, I would periodically ask my liberal friends if they could recall the progressive laws he got passed, the high-minded policies he fought for—you know, the good things Bill Clinton got done while he was president. Why was it, I wondered, that we were supposed to think so highly of him—apart from his obvious personal charm, I mean?
It proved difficult for my libs. People mentioned the obvious things: Clinton once raised the minimum wage and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit. He balanced the budget. He secured a modest tax increase on the rich. And he did propose a national health program, although it didn’t get very far and was in fact so poorly designed it could be a model of how not to do big policy initiatives.
Other than that, not much. No one could think of any great but hopeless Clintonian stands on principle; after all, this is the guy who once took a poll to decide where to go on vacation. His presidency was all about campaign donations, not personal bravery—he basically rented out the Lincoln Bedroom, for chrissake, and at the end of his time in office he even appeared to sell a presidential pardon.
It’s easy to remember the official, consensus reasons why we’re supposed to admire Bill Clinton—the achievements which the inevitable Spielberg bio-pic will no doubt illustrate with poignant and whimsical personal glimpses. First was the economy, which did really well while he was in office. So well, in fact, that we had something close to full employment for several years while the Dow hit 10,000 and the Nasdaq stock index went effing vertical—flush times that are almost inconceivable from our present-day vantage point. Yes, the bubble burst soon after he left office, but so what? Surely those glory years of Wall Street trump everything.
The other great source of the Clinton myth is the insane vendetta against him launched by the Republicans—what his former aide Sidney Blumenthal has called the “Clinton Wars.” The attacks began soon after Clinton took office—the Whitewater pseudoscandal actually made page one of The New York Times in 1992—and the Clinton Wars were so outrageously unfair that you couldn’t help but stand behind their victim. Clinton’s enemies spent millions trawling Arkansas for his old paramours. Congress actually impeached the guy for lying about a blowjob.
For many of the authors who have examined the Clinton presidency, the Clinton Wars eclipse everything else. For instance, take Carl Bernstein, the eminent journalist who wrote a meticulously researched biography of Hillary Clinton, Bill’s wife and “co-president.” So many of the pages Bernstein allots to the couple’s White House years are filled with details about Vince Foster and the Travel Office and the Independent Counsels and the Grand Juries and the missing billing records that Bernstein ultimately relegates Bill Clinton’s actual achievements as president to a few desultory paragraphs here and there.
The Clinton Wars were what politics was all about, and Bill Clinton won those wars. The priggish, boorish, pharisaical right raged against him, and he soldiered on. He defied the Republicans and got himself reelected even as his party lost control of Congress. He outmaneuvered the GOP during the budget wars of 1995 and ’96 and convinced the public to blame his rivals for the government shutdown.
Good economic times and victory in the Clinton Wars: These two are enough to secure the man a spot among the immortals. In fact, before the Crash of 2008, my fellow Washingtonians tended to regard the Clinton administration as an obvious triumph. This was what a successful Democratic presidency looked like. This was the model. To do as Clinton did was to follow the clearly marked path of wisdom.
Evaluating Clinton’s presidency as heroic is no longer a given, however. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the corporate scandals of the Enron period, and the collapse of the real estate racket, our view of the prosperous Nineties has changed quite a bit. Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton’s administration that deregulated derivatives, that deregulated telecom, and that put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave. He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him. If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious.
*
Some believe it is unfair to criticize President Clinton for these deeds. At the time of his actions, they recall, each of the initiatives I just mentioned were matters of almost universal assent. In the tight little group of credentialed professionals who dominated his administration as well as the city they worked in, almost everyone agreed on these things. Over each one of them there hovered a feeling of inevitability and even of obviousness, as though they were the uncontroversial policy demands of history itself. Globalization wanted these things to happen. Technology wanted them to happen. The Future wanted them to happen. Naturally the professional class wanted them to happen, too.
The term Clinton liked to use to summarize this sense of inevitability was “change.” This word is, obviously, a longstanding favorite of politicians of the left; what it means is that We the People have the power to shape the world around us. It is a hopeful word. But when Clinton said in a speech about free trade in 1993 that
“Change is upon us. We can do nothing about that.”
he was enshrining the opposite idea as the progressive creed. Change was an external force we could neither escape nor control; it was a reality that limited what we could do politically and that had in fact made most of our political choices for us already. The role of We the People was not to make change but to submit to its dominion. Naturally, Clinton thought to describe this majestic thing, this “change,” by referencing a force of nature: “a new global economy of constant innovation and instant communication is cutting through our world like a new river, providing both power and disruption to the people and nations who live along its course.”
Clinton spoke of change the way other politicians would talk about God or Providence; we could succeed economically, he once announced, “if we make change our friend.” Change was fickle and inscrutable, an unmoved mover doing this or that as only it saw fit. Our task—or, more accurately, your task, middle-class citizen—was to conform to its wishes, to “adjust to change,” as the president put it when talking about NAFTA.
The first time I myself tuned in and noticed some version of this inevitability-speak was in 1993, during that fight over NAFTA. The deal had been negotiated by the departed president, George H. W. Bush, but the Democratic majority in Congress had balked at the original version of the treaty, forcing the parties back to the table. As with so many of the achievements of the Clinton era, it eventually took a Democratic president, working with Republican members of Congress, to pass this landmark of neoliberalism.
According to the president himself, what the agreement was about was simple: “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers,” he said when signing it. “It will create the world’s largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone.” The stationery of an outfit that lobbied for the treaty was emblazoned with the argument: “North American Free Trade Agreement—Exports. Better Jobs. Better Wages.”
But it wasn’t reason that sold NAFTA; it was a simulacrum of reason, by which I mean the great god inevitability, invoked in the language of professional-class self-assurance. “We cannot stop global change,” Clinton said in his signing speech.
The phrase that best expressed the feeling was this: “It’s a no brainer.” Lee Iacocca uttered it in a pro-NAFTA TV commercial, and before long everyone was saying it. The phrase struck exactly the right notes of simplicity combined with utter obviousness. Globalization was irresistible, the argument went, and free trade was always and in all situations a good thing. So good, it didn’t even really need to be explained. Everyone knew this. Everyone agreed.
Yet there were people who opposed NAFTA, like labor unions, for example, and Ross Perot, and the majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives. The agreement was not a simple or straightforward thing: it was some 2,000 pages long, and according to reporters who actually read it, the aim was less to remove tariffs than to make it safe for American firms to invest in Mexico—meaning, to move factories and jobs there without fear of expropriation and then to import those factories’ products back into the U.S.
One reason the treaty required no brains at all from its supporters is because NAFTA was as close to a straight-up class issue as we will ever see in this country. It “boils down to the oldest division of all,” Dirk Johnson wrote in The New York Times in 1993: “the haves versus the have-nots, or more precisely, those who have only a little.” The lefty economist Jeff Faux has even told how a NAFTA lobbyist tried to bring him around by reminding him that Carlos Salinas, then the president of Mexico, had “been to Harvard. He’s one of us.”  
That appeal to class unity gives a hint of what Clintonism was all about. To owners and shareholders, who would see labor costs go down as they took advantage of unorganized Mexican labor and lax Mexican environmental enforcement, NAFTA held fantastic promise. To American workers, it threatened to send their power, and hence their wages, straight down the chute. To the mass of the professional-managerial class, people who weren’t directly threatened by the treaty, holding an opinion on NAFTA was a matter of deferring to the correct experts—economists in this case, 283 of whom had signed a statement declaring the treaty “will be a net positive for the United States, both in terms of employment creation and overall economic growth.”
The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty. And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other: employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers organize. A surprisingly large number of them—far more than in the pre-NAFTA days—have actually made good on the threat.
Mexico has not fared much better. In the decades before NAFTA, its economy often grew rapidly; since NAFTA was enacted, Mexico has experienced some of the feeblest growth of any country in Latin America, despite all the stuff it now makes and exports to the U.S. The country’s poverty rate has not changed much at all while every other country in the region has made considerable progress. One reason for all this is the predictably destructive effect that free trade with American agribusiness has had on the fortunes of millions of Mexican family farmers.

These results have never really shaken the self-assured “no-brainer” consensus. Instead, the phrase returns whenever new trade deals are on the table. During the 1997 debate over “fast track,” restricting the input of Congress in trade negotiations, Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, declared confidently that “supporting fast track is a no-brainer.” For some, free-trade treaties are so clearly good that supporting them doesn’t require knowledge of their actual contents. The influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for example, still thought so when the debate was over an altogether different treaty. “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative,” he told Tim Russert in 2006. “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.”
Twenty years later, the broader class divide over the subject persists as well. According to a 2014 survey of attitudes toward NAFTA after two decades, public opinion remains split. But among people with professional degrees—which is to say, the liberal class—the positive view remains the default. Knowing that free-trade treaties are always for the best—even when they empirically are not—seems to have become for the well-graduated a badge of belonging.
*
One of the strangest dramas of the Clinton literature, in retrospect, was the supposed mystery of Bill’s developing political identity. Like a searching teenager in a coming-of-age movie, boy president Bill roams hither and yon, trying out this policy and that, until he finally learns to be true to himself and to worship at the shrine of consensus orthodoxy. He campaigned as a populist, he tried to lift the ban on gays in the military, then all of a sudden he’s pushing free trade and deregulating telecom. Who was this guy, really?
How the question used to vex the president’s friends and advisers! There was “a struggle for the soul of Bill Clinton,” said his aide David Gergen just after the Republicans took Congress in 1994. A month later, Clinton’s press people (to quote the hilarious deadpan of the Washington Post) were actually forced to deny “that Clinton lacks a sense of who he is as president and where he wants to go.”
Clinton’s wandering political identity absorbed both his admirers and biographers, many of whom chose to explain it as a quest: Bill Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. He had to grow into presidential maturity. And the way he had to do it was by damaging or somehow insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party’s tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was truly dead. Then we could be sure.
This was such a cherished idea among New Democrats that they had a catchphrase for it: Clinton’s campaign team called it “counter-scheduling.” During the 1992 race, as though to compensate for his friend-of-the-little-guy economic theme, Clinton would confront and deliberately antagonize certain elements of the Democratic Party’s traditional base in order to assure voters that “interest groups” would have no say in a New Democrat White House. As for those interest groups themselves, he knew he could insult them with impunity. They had nowhere else to go, in the cherished logic of Democratic centrism.
The most famous target of Clinton’s counter-scheduling strategy was the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, the nemesis of the party’s centrists and the living embodiment of the politics the Democratic Leadership Council had set out to extinguish. At a 1992 meeting of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, with Jackson sitting to his left, Clinton went out of his way to criticize a controversial rapper called Sister Souljah who had addressed the conference on the previous day. The exact circumstances of Clinton’s insult have long been forgotten, but the fact of it has gone down in the annals of politicking as a stroke of genius, an example of the sort of thing that New Democrats should always be doing in order to discipline their party’s base.
Once Clinton was in the White House, counter-scheduling mutated from a campaign tactic to a philosophy of governance. At a retreat in the administration’s early days, Bill’s chief political adviser, Hillary Clinton, instructed White House officials how it was going to be done. As Carl Bernstein describes the scene, Hillary announced that the public must be made to understand that Bill was taking them on a “journey” and that he had a “vision” for what the administration was doing, a “story” that distinguished good from evil. The way to dramatize this story, the first lady continued (in Bernstein’s telling), was to pick a fight with supporters.
You show people what you’re willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends—by which, in this context, she clearly meant, When you make them your enemy.
NAFTA would become the first great test of this theory of the presidency, with Clinton defying not only organized labor but much of his own party in Congress. In one sense, it achieved the desired results. For New Democrats and for much of the press, NAFTA was Clinton’s “finest hour,” his “boldest action,” a deed befitting a real he-man of a president who showed he could stand up to labor and thereby assure the world that he was not a captive of traditional Democratic interests.
But there was also an important difference. NAFTA was not symbolism. With this act, Clinton was not merely insulting an important constituency, as he had done with Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah. With NAFTA he connived in that constituency’s ruin. He assisted in the destruction of its economic power. He did his part to undermine his party’s greatest ally, to ensure that labor would be too weak to organize workers from that point forward. Clinton made the problems of working people materially worse.
It is possible to regard this deed as fine or brave, as so many New Democrats did, if you understand the struggles of workers as a Depression-era cliché you’ve grown sick of hearing. However, if you understand those workers as humans—humans who contributed to Bill Clinton’s election—NAFTA starts to appear like a betrayal on a grand scale. To this day, for working people, the lesson of NAFTA glares like the headlight of an oncoming locomotive: These affluent Democrats do not give a damn about inequality except as an election-year slogan.
Workers were the first casualties of Bill Clinton’s quest for his New Democratic self. But the journey went on. The next great milestones were his big, first-term legislative accomplishments: the great crime crackdown of 1994 and the welfare reform measure of 1996. Both were intended to swipe traditional Republican issues and to demonstrate Clinton’s independence from the so-called special interests.
Back in 1992 Clinton had briefly departed the campaign trail to return to Arkansas and be visibly present while his state went about executing one Ricky Ray Rector, a convicted killer who was so mentally damaged he had no idea what was happening to him or why. Clinton’s design was to signal his toughness and thus avoid the fate of Michael Dukakis, whose presidential run had been done in by TV commercials suggesting he was too much of a wuss to keep dangerous black men behind bars. In the precise words of Christopher Hitchens, Rector was a “human sacrifice” for Clinton’s presidential ambition.
The reasoning that led Clinton to turn the Rector execution into a ritual appeasement of the electoral gods brought him, in 1994, to call for and then sign his name to the most sweeping police-state bill that postwar America has seen. Among other things, the measure provided for the construction of countless new prisons, it established over a hundred new mandatory minimum sentences, it allowed prosecutors to charge thirteen-year-olds as adults in some cases, and it coerced the states into minimizing parole. It also increased the number of federal death penalties from three to sixty, including some for nonlethal offenses—and this from a political party that in 1972 had called for the abolition of capital punishment in its platform.
This was the age of “three strikes,” of “truth in sentencing,” of “zero tolerance,” and Clinton’s aides referred to their bid for mass imprisonment as “upping the ante,” as though it were a poker game with the Republicans. Winning that game was the subject of boasting for Democrats. Said Joe Biden, then a Democratic senator from Delaware, during the debate on the bill:
The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties.  . . . The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new State prison cells.
None of this happened because of an increase in crime, by the way—violent crime had actually crested several years before—but rather to demonstrate Clinton’s hard-heartedness. “The one way Bill Clinton defined himself as a different Democrat was his tough position on crime,” said Senator Joe Lieberman on the occasion of the bill’s passage. “And he has redeemed that promise.”
In an ugly coda that was delayed by about a year, the ’94 law also allowed President Clinton personally to decide the fate of the infamous 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.  The former drug was thought to be the scourge of the planet—and 88 percent of the people arrested for it were black—while the latter, even though it was essentially the same thing, was regarded as just another harmless yuppie crime. Handing down prison sentences of many decades for one drug but not the other was both racist and insanely cruel. But Clinton went out of his way to ensure that this practice continued. The number of young black citizens who, in this manner, lost years of their lives to advance Bill Clinton’s journey to political manhood will probably never be known. Let a thousand Ricky Ray Rectors burn, but please God, get this man reelected.
Unfortunately for Bill Clinton, building the greatest gulag in the world was not enough to demonstrate his disregard for the lives of the poor. The right actually mocked the 94 crime bill as a kind of government handout to the poor. He would have to do more.
*
Historians of the Clinton presidency generally skip over the punishment craze into which he led the country in the mid-Nineties. It is hard to account for if the framework you’re applying to those years is one in which Clinton was the victim of right-wing persecution. Those who do acknowledge Clinton’s part in the Big Clampdown either depict it as a great success in the fight against crime—which it was not—or else describe it in superficial Washington terms: He got a great big law passed through Congress, thus proving that he could be an effective bipartisan leader.
Besides, in rhetorical terms, Bill Clinton has always been a steadfast opponent of mass incarceration. In 1991, he said he thought it was awful that “we are now the number one nation in the world in the percentage of people we put in prison.” In 1995, just two weeks before he signed the crack/powder cocaine law, he declared that
blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong . . . when there are more African American men in our correction system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men in their twenties are either in jail, on parole or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal system.  
In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2000, Clinton said, “the disparities are unconscionable between crack and powdered cocaine. I tried to change that.” In 2008, he said he was sorry for the crack/powder cocaine law. And then, when every presidential candidate began talking up prison reform in 2015, he apologized again, this time saying that the 1994 crime bill was “overdone” and thus implying that he hadn’t really meant to throw so many people in prison.
And maybe that’s what really matters. Maybe that will suffice to get Clinton off the hook on the day when some future Truth and Reconciliation Commission finally starts parceling out the blame for the generation-destroying policies of those years.
But I doubt it. Someday we will understand that the punitive hysteria of the mid-1990s was not an accident; it was essential to Clintonism. Taken as a whole with NAFTA, with welfare reform, with his plan for privatizing Social Security and, of course, with Clinton’s celebrated lifting of the rules governing banks and telecoms, it all fits perfectly within the new, class-based framework of liberalism. Clinton simply treated different groups of Americans in radically different ways—crushing some in the iron fist of the state, exposing others to ruinous corporate power, while showering the favored stratum with bailouts, deregulation, and a frolicking celebration of Think Different business innovation.
Some got bailouts, others got “zero tolerance.” There was really no contradiction between these things. Lenience and forgiveness and joyous creativity for Wall Street bankers while another group gets a biblical-style beatdown—these things actually fit together quite nicely. Indeed, the ascendance of the first group requires that the second be lowered gradually into hell. When you take Clintonism all together, it makes sense, and the sense it makes has to do with social class. What the poor get is discipline; what the professionals get is endless indulgence.
Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include "What's The Matter With Kansas," "Pity the Billionaire" and "One Market Under God." He is the founding editor of The Baffler magazine.
REPUBLICANS HAVE REFUSED TO FUND CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE!
Fix U.S. Infrastructure
U.S. infrastructure is in shambles. A report from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimated that from 2016 to 2025, there will be a funding gap of over $1.4 trillion for things like surface transportation, water, electricity, airports, and waterways and ports. If this gap isn’t addressed, ASCE estimated that each U.S. household would lose $3,400 in disposable income each year during that time period. This cost comes from things like inefficient roadways, congested airports, and electricity grids and water systems that won’t be able to keep up with demand.
In February, Obama included a $35 billion per year clean transportation plan in his budget request, to be funded by a $10 per barrel tax on oil and phased in over five years. It was shot down immediately by the Republican-controlled Congress — which is now pushing forward a bill that will likely increase military spending in 2017.
http://readersupportednews.org/…/36998-the-republicans-mili… 
Elizabeth Burns's post.

I am NOT surprised! Oklahoma LOVED AND RULED BY REPUKES!! This is how our entire country is looking!! I CALL BULLSHIT!! DOWN WITH THE WALL $TREETWALKER! (She IS an R!) ‪#‎bernieorbust‬
What happens when we neglect our infrastructure!!!

Truck trapped after northbound side of the N. May Avenue bridge collapsed onto Northwest Expressway, authorities said
CBSNEWS.COM



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/overpass-collapses-onto-oklahoma-city-highway/








 Alex Buzzard's photo.

Alex Buzzard
I live in the UK but I just wanted to remind everyone fighting for Bernie that there are progressive people all over the world who support you. If we are to change the world we all need to pull together.
Alex Buzzard to Bernie Sanders is my HERO

I live in the UK but I just wanted to remind everyone fighting for 
Bernie that there are progressive people all over the world who 
support you. If we are to change the world we all need to pull 
together.



Marianne Kelly Hillary Clinton is no friend to women, children, families, veterans, active military and their families, college students, working people, poor people, gay people, senior citizens, people of color, young people, or anyone not in her "set." In a world comprised of givers and takers, Hillary is definitely a champion taker. She recently added her daughter to her cadre of liars.

In her insanely corrupt and soul shriveled world, money and votes matter. People? Not so much. I hope people finally are seeing how much harm she and her husband have inflicted on the quality of their lives, listen to Bernie...then get out and vote for him.

Knowing she can't possibly win in a fair contest, she supports and celebrates rigging elections, going so far as to pay $1 million dollars for her minions to try to destroy Bernie. All that does is strengthen our resolve to put him in the WH.

Look at her record. She knows she can't run on it, so she parrots Bernie every step of the way thinking Americans are stupid enough to not to recognize her sleazy tactics.

We have a very rare opportunity here. This is the dawn of a new century and with our votes we will choose to leave the next generation a country of inclusion, hope, opportunity, optimism, and a chance for future generations to pursue their dreams without going into crippling debt or worse. This is Bernie's agenda.

We can create this kind of legacy or leave them a legacy of corruption, frustration, struggle, hopelessness, wars and mediocrity. This is Hilary's and the republican agenda. Which do you choose?

I truly believe we must all do what we can, no matter how much or how little to put Bernie in the White House. Every bit matters and in our world, every one matters.

A sleeping giant called “We the People” has finally awakened and regardless of what happens in November, is unlikely to fall into another collective coma.

This is our moment...this is our time...this is our country! Let's get Bernie to the White House and "We the People" back in congress!

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