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Bernie Sanders Wins West Virginia Democratic Primary
Sanders' latest win, though, will do little to keep the nomination from Hillary Clinton
The result in the West Virginia Democratic primary underscored the awkward position Clinton and the party’s establishment face as they attempt to turn their focus to the general election. Clinton is just 155 delegates short of the 2,383 she needs to secure the nomination. To win them, she needs just 17 percent of the delegates at stake in the remaining contests.
That means she could lose all the states left to vote by a landslide and still emerge as the nominee, so long as all of her supporters among the party insiders known as superdelegates continue to back her.
Still, Sanders is vowing to fight on. He campaigned in California on Tuesday for the state’s June 7 primary, and his victory in West Virginia highlighted anew Clinton’s struggles to win over white men and independents – weaknesses Trump wants to exploit in the fall campaign.
Among those voting in the state’s Democratic primary, about a third said they would support Trump over either Clinton or Sanders in November. An additional 2 in 10 said they wouldn’t vote for either candidate. But 4 in 10 also said they consider themselves to be independents or Republicans, and not Democrats, according to exit polls.
Our Awful Elites Gutted America. Now They Dare Ring Alarms about Trump, Sanders — and Cast Themselves as Saviors
Both parties ignored workers, spewed hate, enriched themselves, hollowed out democracy. Now the problem's populism?
. . . the danger is the elites, who have made such a joke of the democratic process, who have so perverted and rotted it from within, that the entire edifice is crumbling (to the consternation of the elites).
Both parties are in terminal decline after forty years of ignoring the travails of the average worker (the Republicans admit they’re in the intensive care unit, while the Democrats calling for Sanders to quit already have yet to come around to admitting that they might have the flu), and voters on both right and left have at last — and this is a breath of relief — stopped caring about the cultural distractions that have kept the elites in power. No, they want their jobs back, even if it means building a wall, keeping Muslims out, deporting the illegals, and starting trade wars with China and Japan — because what else did the elites give them, they’re still opposing a living wage!
(Andrew) Sullivan comes right out and says it: it’s all because of too much democracy, the same bugbear elites on both sides have been offended by since the “crisis of excess democracy” in the mid-1970s, the same lament that Sullivan’s masters in the ivory tower, Samuel P. Huntington and others, have been leveling ever since they made it their job to put the exuberance of the late sixties and early seventies to rest once and for all. So they engineered the neoliberal revolution, where the “qualified” elites are firmly in charge, and the only way to get ahead is not democratic (or individualist) unpredictability — and who is a greater exemplar of unpredictability than Trump? — but elite planning, a certain cold-hearted “rationality” that is as efficient as any totalitarian system ever was in sidelining those who do not have what it takes to succeed.
. . . The natural conclusion of these ideas is the literal wall, but Trump didn’t start it, he’s only putting the finishing touches on the discourse that you elites, on both sides, have inflamed for twenty-plus years. Bill Clinton started the demonization of immigrants — legal immigrants were made ineligible for benefits — for the first time since the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. Bill Clinton ended welfare, tapping into racist discourse about African Americans, and permanently unmoored millions of people from the social safety net. No, Trump didn’t start any of it, Paul Begala and Karl Rove, representing both parties, and the elite interests they represent, poisoned the discourse.
. . . The worst offenders of all are the American left’s cultural warriors, who daily wage some new battle over some imagined cultural offense, which has nothing to do with the lives of normal people but only the highly tuned sensibilities of those in the academic, publishing, and media ecospheres.
. . . The Hillary supporters have the authoritarian mentality of small property owners. They are the mirror image of the “realist” Trump supporters, the difference being that the Trump supporters fall below the median income level, and are distressed and insecure, while the Hillary supporters stand above the median income level, and are prosperous but still insecure.
To manipulate them, the Democratic and Republican elites have both played a double game for forty years and have gotten away with it. They have incrementally yet quite comprehensively seized all economic and political power for themselves. They have perverted free media and even such basics of the democratic process as voting and accountability in elections.
Elites on both sides have collaborated to engineer a revolution of economic decline for the working person, until the situation has reached unbearable proportions. The stock market may be doing well, and unemployment may theoretically be low, but people can’t afford housing and food, they can’t pay back student loans and other debts, their lives, wherever they live in this transformed country, are full of such misery that there is not a single word that an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush says that makes sense to them.
This time, I truly believe, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. When they did have a difference to choose from — i.e., the clear progressive choice, Bernie over Hillary, who consistently demonstrates beating Trump by double the margins Hillary does — the elites went for Hillary, even though she poses the greater risk of inaugurating Trump as president. And now you want us to listen to your panic alarms?
The game, for the elites, is over. This is true no matter what happens with the Sanders campaign. The Republican party as we have known it since the Reagan consensus (dating back to 1976) is over. The Democratic party doesn’t know it yet, but Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism (and what followed in his wake with complicity with Bush junior, and the continuation of Bush junior’s imperialist policies with Barack Obama) is also over, or well on its way to being over. The elites are in a cataclysmic state of panic, they don’t know whether to look right or left, they have no idea what to do with Trump, they don’t know what to do with the Bernie diehards, they have no idea how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
And these same elites, both liberal and conservative, these same journalists and celebrities, became quite comfortable with Bush once the war on terror was on. They’ll get used to Trump too, his level of fascist escalation will soon be presented by "The Times" and other institutions as something our democracy can handle, just as they continually assured us during those eight years of gloom that our democracy could easily take care of Bush. We, the citizens, don’t need to get our hands dirty with implementing checks and balances, the elites will do it on our behalf. Soon, once he starts talking to the elites, you won’t even be that afraid of Trump. Wait, he’s the one who wants to make America great again, and what’s so wrong with that?
The election of Trump would end the Republican party as we know it, but more refreshingly it would also end the Democratic party as we know it. The limits of the academic left’s distracting cultural discourse in keeping economic dissatisfaction in check would be fully exposed. Trump threatens the stability of the fearmongering discourse of Sullivan and his like. The threat to their monopoly of discourse is the real reason for the panic.
Oh, and Hillary, good luck fighting Trump with your poll-tested reactions. Your calculated “offenses” against his offensiveness against women or minorities or Muslims are going to be as successful as the sixteen Republicans who’ve already tried it. You won’t be able to take on Trump because you do not speak the truth, you speak only elite mumbo-jumbo. Trump doesn’t speak the truth either, but he’s responding to something in the air that has an element of truth, and you don’t even go that far, you speak to a state of affairs — a meritocratic, democratic, pluralist America — that doesn’t even exist.
Both Clinton and Trump seem to be dodging massive national problems that can only be solved by the adoption of a yuuuge part of Sanders' plan, and they seem to have no comprehension of the enthusiasm of the voters for the ideas that Sanders' so-far successful candidacy have advocated.
No matter how much they scream, cry and expensively advertise what winners they always will be, the voters are not fooled, and they continue down a path that may lead to ruinous exposure.
Initial Exit Polling Is a Check on Stolen Elections – Or Why, In Any Other Country, the U.S. Government Would Have Blown the Whistle on the New York primary…
. . . In addition, Hillary has not done well in the debates. According to figures from “unscientific” polls, the results are 80%-20% or better in favor of Bernie. This polling is ignored on CNN panels “discussing” the debate. Clinton and Deborah Wasserman-Schultz of the Democratic National Committee, scheduled the fewest possible debates for Saturday night or other odd times…
But the results of these “unscientific polls” are, of course, consistent with Sanders” coming from 60 points down in pre-election polling to beat Clinton in many states and drawing even in recent national polls. They are consistent with the fact that when many Democrats and independents, knowing the world-famous Hillary Clinton, get to see Bernie Sanders, they prefer him.
How Donald Trump Is Winning Over the White Working Class
Last week, Donald Trump became the leader of the Republican Party. He thrashed his way to this summit by understanding what many intelligent people utterly failed to see: the decline of American institutions and mores, from Wall Street and the Senate to cable news and the Twitterverse, made the candidacy of a celebrity proto-fascist with no impulse control not just possible but in some ways inevitable.
It shouldn’t have been such a surprise. An early tremor came in 2008, in the person of Sarah Palin, who endorsed Trump before almost any other top Republican. In her contempt for qualifications, her blithe ignorance, she was an avatar for Trump. A lot of Republicans, many of them female, saw in the small-town common woman an image of themselves; many men see in the say - anything billionaire an image of their aspirations. Palin showboated her way from politics to reality TV, while Trump swaggered in the opposite direction. Together, they wore a path that is already almost normal.
Trump also grasped what Republican élites are still struggling to fathom: the ideology that has gripped their Party since the late nineteen-seventies—anti-government, pro-business, nominally pious — has little appeal for millions of ordinary Republicans. The base of the Party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign. Conservative orthodoxy, already weakened by its own extremism — the latest, least appealing standard-bearer was Ted Cruz — has suffered a stunning defeat from within. And Trump has replaced it with something more dangerous: white identity politics.
Republican Presidential candidates received majorities of the white vote in every election after 1964. In 2012, Barack Obama won about forty per cent of it, average for Democrats in the past half century. But no Republican candidate — not even Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan — made as specific an appeal to the economic anxieties and social resentments of white Americans as Trump has. When he vows to “make America great again,” he is talking about and to white America, especially the less well off.
The ugliness of the pitch will drive some more moderate and perhaps more affluent Republicans to sit out the fall election, or even to vote for Hillary Clinton, the nearly certain Democratic nominee. #NeverTrump and #ImWithHer are trending on select Republican Twitter feeds. Trump’s toxicity, combined with a decline in the white electorate — which, since 1976, has dropped from eighty-nine per cent of the American voting public to seventy-two per cent — might make this a year of Democratic routs.
How One State Ended Its 'Rigged' Superdelegate System Once And For All
North Carolina Produces Flawed Study to Dismiss Cancer-Cluster Fears Near Duke Energy Coal Plants
ALEC Appoints New Chair to Climate Denial Task Force
Will the Trans-Pacific Partnership Turn Silicon Valley Into Detroit?
Hemp Oil Versus CBD Oil: What’s The Difference?_ _ _ _ _ _ _
The Collapse of the Middle-Class Job -
Nader’s 2000 campaign has once again been raised because pundits, who support the Democratic Party establishment, contend Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination is analogous. His supporters may “spoil” the election by refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election.
What is remarkable is how this tired, old, and erroneous argument against Nader is surfacing in April. It is well before the time one typically reads commentary scolding voters daring to vote their conscience for a Green Party, Libertarian Party or independent presidential candidate. Usually, “spoiler” arguments do not make the rounds in an election cycle until September or October.
The invocation of Nader by a coterie of liberal and establishment Democrats matters because it constrains the possible in America’s democratic republic. It stifles advocacy for changes to ballot access law, instant run-off voting, open debates, and even campaign finance reform. It marginalizes the idealists, who break from the failed and disastrous political pragmatism of the Democratic Party because they believe the records of Democratic candidates are just as, if not more, significant than the speculative fears of what a Republican presidential administration may or may not do.
According to pundits, voters must anoint Hillary Clinton the next President of the United States because “votes cast for the fantasy of Ralph Nader were enough to cost [Al] Gore the presidency.” (Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone).
Nader “delayed action against global warming, brought the unspeakable carnage and ongoing quagmire in Iraq, and helped set the stage for a financial crisis unmatched since the Great Depression.” (Paul Fanlund, The Capital Times) John Roberts and Samuel Alito were confirmed to the Supreme Court, and the Afghanistan War was launched. (Charles Blow, "New York Times)"
The former Ohio political director for the Democratic National Committee in 2000, Edward Joseph, blames Nader for the Iraq War, the financial crisis, and “other disastrous consequences of the Bush presidency.”
Following this logic, Nader isn’t just responsible for the Iraq War and the economic collapse. He is also responsible for the September 11th attacks.
Also, Sanders is McGovern.
Ask anyone in the DLC.
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I don't know about you, but I don't think that Sy Hersh doesn't know why people lie.
That would be hard to believe.
And after you have fully comprehended that the slaughter of Yemen was funded by Saudi oil interests not democracy, ISIS was created by the West to defeat Hezbollah, Israel's U.S. lobby's agenda is to attack free speech, call anyone who disagrees an Anti-Zionist or just anti-semitic and criminalize their behavior, nothing much is as hard to believe as rationally created "foreign policy."
Of course, it all could be just a coincidence that ISIS and Israel's agendas have so much in common, and you might even believe in the "invisible hand in world affairs."*
And you wondered what they talked about at all those international conferences (Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome, CFR. (Yes, the food and champagne was magnificent! Royally so.)
Or we could just believe that the 28 missing pages from the 9/11 Report were redacted because they were just full of wrong, wrong, wrong information.
Also wrong: those screaming "Trump for President!"
All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money — hundreds of billions of dollars — is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury.
The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.
Guess who?
But on to Sy's latest expose:
Seymour Hersh: Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin to Syrian Rebels
Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Serymour Hersh, said "Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period". This has actually been the case not only since the Party that Assad leads, the Ba’ath Party, was the subject of a shelved CIA coup-plot in 1957 to overthrow and replace it; but, actually, the CIA’s first coup had been not just planned but was carried out in 1949 in Syria, overthrowing there a democratically elected leader, in order to enable a pipeline for the Sauds’ oil to become built through Syria into the largest oil market, Europe; and, construction of the pipeline started the following year.
Strategic Culture Foundation
April 29, 2016
In an interview with Alternet.org, the independent investigative reporter Seymour Hersh was asked about Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi Libya consulate’s operation to collect sarin from Libyan stockpiles and send it through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to ‘justify’ the US invading Syria, as it had invaded Libya.
He said: «That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel».
This was, in fact, the Syrian part of the State Department’s Libyan operation, Obama’s operation to set up an excuse for the US doing in Syria what they had already done in Libya.
The interviewer then asked: «In the book [Hersh’s The Killing of Osama bin Laden, just out] you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets [for the planned US invasion of Syria] provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only – nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure. What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House’s proposed strike had been carried out?»
Hersh responded by saying that the US tradition in that regard has long been to ignore civilian casualties; i.e., collateral damage of US attacks is okay or even desired (so as to terrorize the population into surrender) – not an ‘issue’, except, perhaps, for the PR people.
The interviewer asked why Obama is so obsessed to replace Assad in Syria, since «The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups»; and Hersh replied that not only he, but (including) the Joint Chiefs of Staff, «nobody could figure out why».
He said, «Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period». This has actually been the case not only since the Party that Assad leads, the Ba’ath Party, was the subject of a shelved CIA coup-plot in 1957 to overthrow and replace it; but, actually, the CIA’s first coup had been not just planned but was carried out in 1949 in Syria, overthrowing there a democratically elected leader, in order to enable a pipeline for the Sauds’ oil to become built through Syria into the largest oil market, Europe; and, construction of the pipeline started the following year.
But, there were then a succession of Syrian coups (domestic instead of by foreign powers – 1954, 1963, 1966, and, finally, in 1970), concluding in the accession to power of Hafez al-Assad during the 1970 coup. And, the Sauds’ long-planned Trans-Arabia Pipeline has still not been built. The Saudi royal family, who own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, don’t want to wait any longer.
Obama is the first US President to have seriously tried to carry out their long-desired «regime change» in Syria, so as to enable not only the Sauds’ Trans-Arabian Pipeline to be built, but also to build through Syria the Qatar-Turkey Gas Pipeline that the Thani royal family (friends of the Sauds) who own Qatar want also to be built there.
The US is allied with the Saud family (and with their friends, the royal families of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman). Russia is allied with the leaders of Syria – as Russia had earlier been allied with Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and Yanukovych in Ukraine (all of whom except Syria’s Ba’ath Party, the US has successfully overthrown).
Hersh was wrong to say that «nobody could figure out why» Obama is obsessed with overthrowing Assad and his Ba’ath Party, even if nobody that he spoke with was willing to say why. They have all been hired to do a job, which didn’t change even when the Soviet Union ended and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded; and, anyone who has been at this job for as long as those people have, can pretty well figure out what the job actually is – even if Hersh can’t.
Hersh then said that Obama wanted to fill Syria with foreign jihadists to serve as the necessary ground forces for his planned aerial bombardment there, and, «if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’ So, they actually pushed a lot of people [jihadists] to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas».
However, it’s not actually part of America’s deal with its allies the fundamentalist-Sunni Arabic royal families and the fundamentalist Sunni Erdogan of Turkey, for the US to supply the salaries (to be «paying for them,» as Hersh put it there) to those fundamentalist Sunni jihadists – that’s instead the function of the Sauds and of their friends, the other Arab royals, and their friends, to do. (Those are the people who finance the terrorists to perpetrate attacks in the US, Europe, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, India, Nigeria, etc. – i.e., anywhere except in their own countries.)
And, Erdogan in Turkey mainly gives their jihadists just safe passage into Syria, and he takes part of the proceeds from the jihadists’ sales of stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil. But, they all work together as a team (with the jihadists sometimes killing each other in the process – that’s even part of the plan) – though each national leader has PR problems at home in order to fool his respective public into thinking that they’re against terrorists, and that only the ‘enemy’ is to blame. (Meanwhile, the aristocrats who supply the «salaries» of the jihadists, walk off with all the money.)
This way, US oil and gas companies will refine, and pipeline into Europe, the Sauds’ oil and the Thanis’ gas, and not only will Russia’s major oil-and-gas market become squeezed away by that, but Obama’s economic sanctions against Russia, plus the yet-further isolation of Russia (as well as of China and the rest of the BRICS countries) by excluding them from Obama’s three mega-trade-deals (TTIP, TPP & TISA), will place the US aristocracy firmly in control of the world, to dominate the 21st Century, as it has dominated ever since the end of WW II.
Then, came this question from Hersh: «Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let’s work together?» His interviewer immediately seconded that by repeating it, «So why don’t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational». Hersh replied simply: «I don’t know». He didn’t venture so much as a guess – not even an educated one.
But, when journalists who are as knowledgeable as he, don’t present some credible explanation, to challenge the obvious lies (which make no sense that accords with the blatantly contrary evidence those journalists know of against those lies) that come from people such as Barack Obama, aren’t they thereby – though passively – participating in the fraud, instead of contradicting and challenging it?
Or, is the underlying assumption there: The general public is going to be as deeply immersed in the background information here as I am, so that they don’t need me to bring it all together for them into a coherent (and fully documented) whole, which does make sense? Is that the underlying assumption? Because: if it is, it’s false.
Hersh’s journalism is among the best (after all: he went so far as to say, of Christopher Stephens, regarding Hillary Clinton, «there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel»), but it’s certainly not good enough. However, it’s too good to be published any longer in places like the "New Yorker." And the reporting by Christopher Lehmann was better, and it was issued even earlier than Hersh’s; and it is good enough, because it named names, and it explained motivations, in an honest and forthright way, which is why Lehmann’s piece was published only on a Montenegrin site, and only online, not in a Western print medium, such as the "New Yorker."
The sites that are owned by members of the Western aristocracy don’t issue reports like that – journalism that’s "good enough." They won’t inform the public when a US Secretary of State, and her boss the US President, are the persons actually behind a sarin gas attack they’re blaming on a foreign leader (whom) the US aristocrats and their allied foreign aristocrats are determined to topple and replace.
Is this really a democracy?
(This article originally appeared on the Strategic Culture Foundation.)
Thus, the TPP, TTIP, TISAs . . . .
Beware USA! USA! USA! . . . the French (bless their little hearts) have caught on.
Anyway, FiveThirtyEight says Bernie might WIN BIG in West Virginny, but they were bonecrushingly wrong last week about the Indiana Primary, so they have tonight to redeem themselves and become our polling nerd boyfriends again. Until then, we are still #OnABreak.
Bernie won West Virginia and is projected to win most of the rest of the primaries, although he will not be permitted to be chosen by real citizens for President.
Instead he will go down in history as the candidate chosen by most of the real voters in most of the states, who was denied the victory by the superdelegate fake votes.
Kind of like Al Gore getting the most counted votes in 2000.
But different.
“He Is Running a Scam on Conservatives:” These Republicans Can’t Stand Donald Trump
The Utter Truthlessness of Donald Trump
Who Will Control Access to Internet News?
t's now evident, fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, that Obama’s foreign policy has maintained many of the core elements of the global war on terror initiated by his predecessor — assassinations, drone attacks, heavy reliance on special forces, covert operations, and, in the case of Afghanistan, the continued use of American ground forces in combat. And, as in the years of Bush and Cheney, there has been no progress, let alone victory, in the fight against terrorism. The Islamic State has succeeded Al Qaeda as the United States’ most feared terrorist enemy, one that now reaches deep into Africa and sends shockwaves into Western Europe and America. Obama still views Russia, a nation with the same international terrorist enemies as Washington, as an evil empire that must be confronted rather than as an ally. 
