Steve's Politics Blog

Now that I am working to promote the Jill Stein/Ajamu Baraka campaign for the Presidency, I think I see some lessons to be learned.

I started on the Bernie Sanders campaign before May, 2015. I know that date, because that is when I started to go to meetings of the “We Want Bernie – Worcester” group.

The Jill Stein campaign, with less than two months to go until the election, is at about the same place as the Sanders’ campaign was 15 months ago. How did this happen?

My conjecture is that there was not such a tough primary contest in the Green Party to cause Jill Stein to gear up back then the way Bernie Sanders did. Moreover, Bernie was getting so much attention, that he sucked all the air out of whatever efforts the Green Party and Jill Stein could have mustered.

Of course, had Bernie not run, there wouldn’t have been 13 million votes cast for him and his platform. So, without Bernie, there would not be any where near as much interest in the platform as there is now.

Here is where we can see some strategic flaws in what Bernie Sanders did. In order to get credibility with Democratic Party voters, he made a promise that he would support the nominee of the party in November no matter who that turned out to be. Without that promise, he undoubtedly felt that he could not be trusted to be an actual Democrat after his years of being an independent who caucused with the Democrats.

Was there another strategy he could have chosen, and how do we know it would have been successful had he chosen it? Donald Trump showed that there was a better strategy, although you could not have known that in advance. Donald Trump made threats of going the third party route if the Republican party did not treat him well. There were efforts from high ranking party members to thwart him, but not the rampant vote rigging, voter suppression, and other shenanigans deployed against Bernie Sanders by the Democratic Party. We now know that Donald Trump actually became the Republican nominee whereas Bernie Sanders failed to get the Democratic nomination. Maybe the Democratic Party “leaders” would have shown some restraint with respect to Bernie Sanders if there were a threat of a third party run hanging over them.

OK, so we see that there probably was a better strategy for Bernie Sanders to have chosen at the outset. However, given that he made the choices that he did, we need to look at the ramifications.

Since Bernie Sanders did not create an escape hatch for himself, and being a man of his word, he has no other choice but to strongly support the Hillary Clinton candidacy. His initial promise prevents him from even hinting that he is not enthusiastic or suggesting his former backers should be switching their support to Jill Stein.

Had Bernie been able to switch his support to a Jill Stein ticket, or perhaps even joined the ticket, or perhaps even headed that ticket (all of which were opportunities that were presented to him), the effort to build a Progressive movement would be light-years ahead of where it is today.

Jill Stein has just announced that she thinks that upping her ground game is very important. She has just hired three people for the entire country to “explode” the size of her ground game less than two months before the election. We former Bernie supporters can see how far behind the curve that this effort is. We can see what the campaign should have been doing for the last 15 months which we were doing when we were on the other team. We can see why this effort didn’t happen.

Some of us were warned by Green Party supporters of past years how hopeless the effort would be when we switched over. I felt there was a certain amount of irony in that these people were deserting the party just at the moment when it had its greatest chance of success.

The lesson is not that they were right, and we were wrong. The lesson to be learned is what we have to continue to do up to November and beyond. We need to infuse the Green Party with the experience of what it takes to attract huge numbers of voters. We need to build the size of the party as much as we can for this election, so that we have some momentum going forward to future elections. We have to try to make sure that this wasn’t the greatest opportunity the party ever had that was muffed because of certain decisions that seemed right under the circumstances.

Naked Capitalism has reposted Bill Moyers: We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People: Saving the Soul of Democracy.

Taking a cue from what Moyers wrote, the ideas are best summed up by quoting the preamble to our constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

There seems to be very little of that idealism in what passes for our political system of today. Bill Moyers explores where it went and why we need it back.

The Real News Network has a recent interview Sen. Bob Graham: FBI Covered Up Role of Bandar and Saudis in 9/11 Attacks.

If there was such a cover up as described above, and there is continuing effort to get this information ouf of the FBI, CIA, and other agencies, then it must be that under Obama’s direction this cover up continues. If Obama vetoes the legislation that has passed Congress to let Americans sue Saudi Arabia over 9/11, then he must know reasons for this that the Congress does not know. In other words, continuing obstruction of information being given to the American public. If Obama knows, you can bet Hillary Clinton knows. And we are expected to vote for a continuation of the cover-up.

Think Progress has the article Obama Expected To Veto 9/11 Bill Because It Sets A Dangerous Precedent.

Obama said in April he would veto the bill. The White House says that the bill’s enactment could put American officials overseas in danger.

By opening up the prospect of victims suing governments (or states), the United States could be opening itself up to law suits from individuals who feel that the country has committed crimes in their nation — like victims of drones in Pakistan, or civilians killed by the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition in Yemen.

I think the above video hints at much more likely reasons why Obama wants to veto that bill.

The article goes on further to state:

The bill passed on Friday despite the release of the notorious 28 pages — a missing section of the congressional 9/11 report. The 28 pages that were released in July did not provide the evidence that some suspected would tie the financing of the 9/11 attacks to the Saudi royal family.

From the video we know what utter hogwash it is for even Think Progress to publish claims tof such failure to make links.

Vote for Jill Stein to get the to bottom of the cover up.

The deletion of this conversation thread by the group moderator is what made me decide to leave the Bernie Sanders Activists group on Facebook.

Just got an update to the Jetpack software in WordPress for use on this web site.

One of the features is called Beautiful Math. Here is an example of what it can do.

$latex i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left|\Psi(t)\right>=H\left|\Psi(t)\right>$

I am sure this will come in handy whenever I want to discuss the politics of physics. 🙂

I found the perfect video/audio to demonstrate the trouble we are gong to have educating the public.

The video below is a good analogy to the conversations I get into when I try to explain to people that the Federal Reserve Bank is not a private bank, but that it is an independent entity of the Federal Government.

I point them to my blog article Who owns the Federal Reserve?, but they are so sure that they know what they know, that they refuse to believe what the Federal Reserve Banks says about who owns it.

Now for the perfect illustration.

Truthout has an the article A Turning Point for the Charter School Movement.

Republican Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts poses for a selfie with supporters of his effort to lift the state’s cap on charter schools. Charters are facing formidable opposition this election season: Democrats passed a resolution this month opposing the proposed charter school expansion in Massachusetts, and residents will vote on the proposal in November. (Photo: Charlie Baker / Flickr)

It’s been almost 30 years since Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, introduced the idea of charter schools as a way to better serve the highest need students. He envisioned a unionized workforce, empowered teachers and diverse student bodies. The best examples of charters today may adhere to Shanker’s vision, but most don’t — only around 12 percent are unionized, a quarter of teachers leave their schools each year (twice the rate of public school teachers) and they’re more likely to be “intensely segregated” than public schools.

Because the problem of educational inequity remains so entrenched, some families still seek out charters as the best option for their children. But the structural solution to inequality will never be a separate-but-sometimes-equal system.

This is particularly appropriate for our friends who consider themselves to be Democrats and who think that raising the cap on charter schools is something that we can do to help under-served school aged children.

The charter school movement is nothing more than an attempt by the oligarchs to privatize more government services to rob the poor and give to the rich. The motive is well hidden by deceptive rhetoric to make the people being robbed think that they are being helped.

Naked Capitalism has the article Is ‘Our Revolution’ the Way To Build Transformative Politics? by Lambert Strether.

Lambert Strether points us to the following interview on The Real News Network.

Bill Curry and Paul Jay discuss the objectives and controversy around the launch of Bernie Sanders, ‘Our Revolution’

Lambert Strether says about Our Revolution:

In fact, I consider the emergence of independent, stand-alone, and big left entities more important than which presidential candidate gets elected; “elections come and go,” as Sanders says. So, naturally, I fit “Our Revolution” into that picture, and I feel a good deal of hope for it. It’s pretty rare for me to be hopeful about politics!

After watching the interview, I come away with the opposite feeling.

When Paul Jay can tamp down his own view and let the interviewee speak, we get to learn some important lessons. Paul Jay wanted too strongly to suppress the idea of the importance of educating the public. I only wish they had gotten into a deeper discussion of what the successful movements did to accomplish the education of the public.

For a long time I have been saying that organizations that I have belonged to need to spend more time in the off season to educate the public. Trying to do it when an election is imminent is too late. Over the last 40 or more years, this seems to be the lesson that the Republicans, conservatives, and oligarchs have learned well. I only wish I knew how to help do it for progressives. I keep looking for experiences that will teach me how I can help educate.

Ironically, The Real News Network is all about educating the public in between elections. That works for people like me who are always looking for discussions of issues and has the time to read and watch. I want to know how to spread that knowledge to a much wider audience. Curry mentions a number of progressive movements that were successful at the grass roots level, which is where I live.

The oligarchs are always touting how well the economy is doing by, for instance, talking about the run-up in the stock market.

There is a government program to which we can apply the same logic and standards. Look at the government run lotteries. Have you read about all the people who have won $100s of millions of dollars with a single ticket. The government doesn’t even incur any debt nor take any taxes for this miracle to happen. These lotteries even lower the deficit. The government puts out a product at a very cheap price, and the buyers come running of their own free choice.

You don’t hear much in the corporate press about any down side to this wonderful government program. It must be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I will let you suggest where I should have put the flags. You do realize that there was sarcasm here, don’t you?

YouTube has the video Steve Greenberg at the Jill Stein Open the Debates standout.

Who is this guy running around posing as me? 🙂