Kitchen Sink #2: "BernieSoWhite"

Now that Bernie Sanders has proven his cred with white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, the pundits are dutifully preparing us for his Great Fall in (Black) South Carolina and (Brown) Nevada. It seems that Hillary Clinton owns the African-American and Latino vote because she's been around awhile, and Bernie has had the bad taste to reside in lily-white Vermont for most of his life. Bad Bernie. Bad, bad Bernie.

For the best synopsis of Clintonian racist policies as opposed to Clintonian colorblind rhetoric, don't miss  Michelle ("The New Jim Crow") Alexander's piece in The Nation. It is scathing in its historical completeness.

It is so scathing that over at the pro-Clinton New York Times, columnist Charles Blow attempted to mitigate the damage by denigrating a new faction called the Bernie-splainers. (They appear to be closely related to those annoying Bernie Bros I hear so much about, but have never seen in the flesh, not even in my own lefty rowdy party college town.)

Blow begins: 

I cannot tell you the number of people who have commented to me on social media that they don’t understand this support. “Don’t black folks understand that Bernie best represents their interests?” the argument generally goes. But from there, it can lead to a comparison between Sanders and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; to an assertion that Sanders is the Barack Obama that we really wanted and needed; to an exasperated “black people are voting against their interests” stance.

That's right. He cannot, therefore does not, tell us the actual number of white people who wrote him such insulting messages. Not one direct quote among the whole alleged bunch. Blow presents no evidence that any of the Bernie-splainers are presenting Sanders as a kind of Great White Hope to all those ignorant black folk, or have been "talking down" to black people.

Blow goes on to explain that Hillary-style "functional pragmatism" has always worked better for black people. I guess he forgot about Martin Luther King's fierce urgency of now, and his brave stance against incremental change, and his marches through Chicago, Washington and Memphis, and the poor people's encampment that continued as planned after he was murdered.

Then Blow pivots back into the stale establishment talking points about Bernie possessing a "whiff of fancifulness," and how it's always been safer to vote for politicians you know (Clinton) than politicians you don't know (Sanders.) He does not explain that many voters don't know about Sanders precisely because the newspaper which employs him has made it its duty to make sure they don't. 

While I completely get Blow's pique about politicians pandering to different demographics for the sole purpose of garnering votes, I am pretty appalled that he has resorted to the same old straw man (sexist bigoted progressives) argument in order to passive-aggressively boost Hillary's candidacy.

My published comment: (lots of wonderful ones: read them all.)

 You know what irks me? The epidemic of pundit-splaining about Bernie Sanders. Despite the best efforts of the mainstream press to alternately ignore, silence and ridicule him, Bernie isn't going away. And since he isn't going away, the corporate media are moving on to Plan B: pit liberal voters against one another. Gaslight them. Explain to the teeming masses that democracy is really just a theory, and not to be actually practiced outside of voting for approved candidates every two or four years.

We're told to vote by our gender, skin color or ethnicity -- or else risk offending the members of our endangered group. Madeleine Albright warns women about a special place in hell. Paul Krugman tells Bernie-supporters that our "happy dreams" are an invitation to a Trump presidency. And those ephemeral Bernie Bros are lurking in alleys, ready to pounce on American maidenhood.

I participated in a Latino conference call for Bernie a couple of weeks ago. Nevada state Rep. Lucy Flores, who is running for Congress, made the salient point that we are not members of some monolithic voting bloc, ripe for being scared into co-optation.. We vote on the issues. We have our own agency. 

 Don't fall for the same old divide and conquer techniques that keep struggling people down and out, and the plutocracy entrenched in power.

People are realizing that Identity politics is harmful to our health. We're showing a lot more solidarity these days.

And that is scaring the elites to death.

No matter what happens in the primaries, what is imperative is that the revolutionary enthusiasm prevails. No matter what the outcome, the word "socialism" has been fully integrated into the great American lexicon. No matter who wins and who loses, the country is moving in a decidedly leftward, anti-oligarchial direction. Clintonism ran out of steam a long time ago.

I suspect, too, that the recent visit of Pope Francis and his popular message of inclusive social justice and solidarity went a long way in facilitating the rise of Bernie Sanders, who has openly expressed his own admiration for the Pope and Catholic social teaching in the vein of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.

***

Suggestions for further reading:

Rima Regas, regular Times commenter, also runs an excellent blog (listed on my "roll" under Blog # 42). Her latest entries, on Hillary and Israel, and the lack of ethics in media coverage of Bernie Sanders, are must-reads. Her graphic showing the lovable Paul Krugman at an elite Clinton rally is a hoot.   

Black Agenda Report's Bruce Dixon reports that the best outcome of the Democratic primaries would be a permanent split in the party and an end to "the rich man's duopoly." He still believes that Bernie is "sheepdogging" young voters into the Democratic fold, and that he is probably as surprised as anybody that his democratic socialist message is catching fire. Dixon agrees with Blow's observation, adding that even though black people have a long radical political tradition, they historically have not voted for radical candidates in national elections. They vote Democrat mainly to seek protection from the sadistic GOP -- which, let's face it, would just as soon that black people disappear. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, co-opting black churches, colleges, sororities, fraternities and civic groups, resembles nothing so much as a protection racket.

  Most scathing line from Dixon's piece: "The Democrats ooze like pus from every orifice of the Black body politic."

Ouch. 

Some members of what the Black Agenda Report writers have famously called the Black Misleadership Class were out in force today, endorsing Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept's Lee Fang reveals, however, the "Black Caucus Pac" putting their power and their money behind her are not to be confused with the congressional Black Caucus itself. The 20-member Pac is actually composed of about half elected officials and half lobbyists, one of whom works for the largest manufacturer of the highly addictive opioid, OxyContin. Others are representatives from tobacco companies, Walmart and student loan giant Navient. What a great group of people that Hillary should be proud to have on her side. I hope the Bernie people call her out on these endorsements when, say, she brags about wanting to remedy the drug addiction problem in America.

The cigarette lobby infiltrating Clinton World also kind of puts a damper  on the Obama/Biden cancer cure "moonshot" continuing past this year too, should Hillary win the White House. 

Hillary needs to be smoked out, and fast.  

What's the Matter With Iowa

I've been informed by such establishment outlets as the New York Times that Iowa is actually deciding the presidential election of 2016. If Trump wins this teensy-weensy caucus, he wins the GOP nomination. If Sanders loses Iowa, he loses the entire nation. Game over, people. Your votes, as ever, will not really count.

This is what they want you to think, of course. Iowa is just the convenient excuse for the ruling elite to get what they want. And let's face it, what they want is the downfall of democracy. By making it as hard as possible for "folks" to attend the caucuses, they ensure that very few people will have the energy, money, transportation and time to participate in the selection process. The "grassroots democracy" of the Iowa caucuses is overgrown with choking weeds. The only beneficiaries of this endless spectacle are the TV networks and the SuperPacs raking in the dough from the contrived, horse-race frenzy of it all.

Marty Kaplan of The Jewish Journal is right on the money (the really big money) when he writes:

What a dangerous distraction the Iowa spectacle has been from the dysfunction and unfairness of democracy as we now know it. No, worse, what a cynical celebration of it. Pitifully few Americans vote, and shockingly few of them are young or poor or people of color, yet we give wildly disproportionate influence to the white rural voters of one small state whose priorities, like subsidies for corn-based ethanol, are nationally marginal, and whose disposable time for caucus-going is unimaginable to parents working multiple shifts at multiple jobs.

At the same time, what a bonanza it’s been for the state’s TV and radio stations, which have raked in tens of millions of dollars in attack ads, and what a bordello it’s been for the billionaires and special interests who’ve anonymously funded those air wars.

What a misbegotten surrogate for civic seriousness this interminable campaign has become, with news networks getting in bed with parties to co-sponsor debates, selling national ad time for those debates at Super Bowl rates and polluting public discourse with bloviating “strategists” and accountability-free predictions.

And the excellent Paul Street, who knows whereof he speaks because he actually lives in Iowa, damns the state's caucuses as a classist slap in the face to democracy. People are expected to drop everything just after dinner to cast their votes. Shift-workers are denied the chance to have their voices heard. Aged and disabled people are expected to venture out in the ice and snow. Struggling parents have to find a few spare dollars for child care. 

  Many of these folks would seem to be precisely the sort of working class people one might expect to gain from the enactment of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ progressive domestic social agenda, including a significant increase in the federal minimum wage and single-payer (Medicare for All) health insurance. But most early evening workers can’t participate in the Iowa presidential Caucus pitting Sanders against the corporate Democrat Hillary Clinton next Monday night. There’s no federal or statewide Election Day law requiring employers to let those workers participate in the “beloved Iowa political ritual.” The prime-time workers who want to Caucus have to ask for special permission (so their bosses can find replacements) and give up lost wages to go sit and stand through hours of political deliberation.

Street goes to  describe what amounts to a classroom session from hell, in which boring professorial types run the show and have undue influence on the outcome of the D-Party "vote." Anybody who's ever been trapped in a company boardroom for the putative purpose of airing employee grievances knows just how this psychological warfare works. They'll wear you down, and wear you down, until your eyes bleed and you'll do anything, anything at all, to just escape and go home.

Amazingly enough, Street says, the Republican Iowa caucuses are actually more human-friendly than the Democratic variety. You simply write your choice down on a paper ballot and you're done. Voters with short attention spans are just what the right-wing doctor ordered.

Is it any wonder that the participation rate for the Iowa caucuses is only a measly 16 percent? This makes the recent, worst turnout-in-modern history Congressional midterm elections look like an overwhelming plebiscite in comparison, with a whopping one-quarter to one-half of eligible voters bothering to show up in a burst of enthusiasm.

 I'm treating Iowa the same way that the Oz Gatekeeper advised Dorothy to pay no attention to the little man operating the controls behind the curtain. The show is corny, and the directors are doing their unlevel best to rig the outcome. They'll try to convince us that what happens in Iowa won't stay in Iowa. Subsidized ethanol will escape the Heartland to melt the icy climes of New Hampshire before it chemically pivots to solidify the "Black Firewall" of South Carolina,  and then creeps its greasy way back west to Nevada. 

Unless, of course, Bernie Sanders ekes out a victory over Hillary Clinton. If that comes to pass, we'll be told that Iowa doesn't matter after all. What counts are the Super Delegates.

 So I, for one, plan to spend this evening watching the third installment of The X-Files. If the truth is anywhere out there, it's certainly not going to be coming from the prattle of CNN's Panel of Experts, or the New York Times' cracked-corn team of Live Bloggers.

Scully: "Any thoughts as to why anybody would be growing corn in the middle of the desert?"