Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Monday, July 20, 2015
About The Netroots Nation Town Hall Controversy...
By Karoli
First things first. Because I received complaints on my "real time" post about the Netroots Nation Town Hall on Saturday, I'm embedding the full videos of Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley in this post. When I wrote and posted my Saturday post, it was in real time while the Convention Center security employees were shooing me out of the hall. I was literally uploading video and walking at the same time.
So in the interests of fully airing the hour in dispute, videos are at your fingertips. Bernie above, O'Malley below.
This was a difficult moment for the conference organizers, the candidates, and yes, the attendees. For that hour, all of us had to choose to look beyond ourselves and consider whether or not the Black Lives Matter action was appropriate, whether the candidates responded appropriately, and whether there is space to understand the urgency these activists feel.
Opinions are divided. Deeply divided. So I offer you some opinions other than mine, which might better clarify what I was trying to say.
Dave Dayen:
If a candidate can't acknowledge his/her weaknesses and change them, you have a weak candidate who will grow weaker over time. (Yes, he incorporated some extra language in his stump speech, and that's good. But he still didn't listen at that time.)
Whatever I may think of Martin O'Malley (and my personal jury is out on him), his response was certainly better than crossing his arms and leaving angry. He screwed up, acknowledged he screwed up, and then engaged.
As for Sanders, he had an opportunity and completely missed it. That doesn't make him a bad person or a bad candidate or a bigot or anything else. It makes him a candidate who missed a golden opportunity to close the gap with people who aren't connecting with him or his message, regardless of whether he has been an advocate for the meta-issues which affect them.
As Dayen pointed out in his article, if you want directions for how to get from Phoenix to Oakland, you look at a map and get turn-by-turn directions. You don't just tell someone to drive north. See the difference?
The idea that the interruption was rude, disrespectful, and otherwise unwarranted ignores what these communities have experienced. It ignores the people who are dead. It ignores the systemic racism inside our communities that hinder policymakers and policy, and the Black Lives Matter people are simply calling for it to stop, to be noticed, to say their names.
At one point during the call and response moments, the shout was "If I die at the hands of the police, call my mother first."
Repeat that to yourself for a minute. Think about how foreign that feels. If I die at the hands of the police, call my mother.
Hearts should be broken that anyone has to consider that part of their daily reality.
They wanted the candidates to empathize, not pontificate. Is that really so much to expect?
MoveOn issued this statement.
It's time to say their names.
Charleston, South Carolina
Clementa Pinckney
Sharonda Coleman Singleton
Tywanza Sanders
Ethel Lance
Susie Jackson
Cynthia Hurd
Myra Thompson
Daniel Simmons Sr.
DePayne Middleton Doctor
Sandra Bland, Texas.
Tanisha Anderson, Cleveland
Tamir Rice, Cleveland
Michael Brown, Ferguson
Eric Garner, New York
Freddie Gray, Baltimore
And more.
and more.
and still more.
All of them had mothers who received those calls. The calls telling them their child was dead.
And we can't take an hour out of our own agendas to hear their concerns? Really?
First things first. Because I received complaints on my "real time" post about the Netroots Nation Town Hall on Saturday, I'm embedding the full videos of Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley in this post. When I wrote and posted my Saturday post, it was in real time while the Convention Center security employees were shooing me out of the hall. I was literally uploading video and walking at the same time.
So in the interests of fully airing the hour in dispute, videos are at your fingertips. Bernie above, O'Malley below.
This was a difficult moment for the conference organizers, the candidates, and yes, the attendees. For that hour, all of us had to choose to look beyond ourselves and consider whether or not the Black Lives Matter action was appropriate, whether the candidates responded appropriately, and whether there is space to understand the urgency these activists feel.
Opinions are divided. Deeply divided. So I offer you some opinions other than mine, which might better clarify what I was trying to say.
Dave Dayen:
The reaction of the candidates after the protest was varied and significant. O’Malley spent the entire day sitting with activists, publicly apologizing for his “white/all lives matter” remarks in an interview with This Week in Blackness and generally atoning for his performance. Sanders canceled all his events, including meetings with black and brown activists. At his evening speech before 11,000 in the same convention center, he did obliquely address the issue, using practiced lines he has said in the past but with a little more depth. “If any police officer breaks the law, that officer must be held accountable,” Sanders said. On Sunday, he uttered Bland's name at a rally in Dallas. But the no-shows earlier in the day just exacerbated the problem.
The tragedy is that Sanders and the protesters probably agree on nearly every issue, but they don’t have a language to talk to each other about it. As a result, the anger builds and the communication breaks down. This is fixable, but those who want to lead a progressive movement need to understand that taking the crisis in black communities for granted won’t work with this new generation of organizers. That goes the same for Hillary Clinton, who wasn’t in attendance at Netroots Nation this year. But as the campaign progresses, activists will undoubtedly attempt to make her uncomfortable until they get the answers they seek. As Oso said, “Your agenda needs to be correct and if it’s not correct we’re going to continue to have problems.”Chris Savage at Eclectablog:
Sitting in the middle of this maelstrom was a fascinating experience. I, like many of the others there, was initially irritated by the protestors. I was there to hear the candidates and was frustrated that they weren’t being heard. Even a bit angry, in fact. “These are your allies,” I thought. “Why on earth are you attacking them? Why are you disrupting an event where the people there are sympathetic to your cause?”
Frustration. Anger. Being silenced.
Frustration.
Anger.
Silenced.
Talked over.
Ignored.
Every single one of these emotions that ran through my white privileged brain in the first few moments of the protest until I was slapped across the face with what I was being forced to confront. Every single one of these emotions are felt acutely and painfully every single day by racial minority groups in our country. But, instead of being inconvenienced by not being able to hear a politician speak, they face them in the context of being slaughtered in the streets by the police officers who are tasked to protect them, incarcerated in astonishingly disparate numbers, and blamed for not being able to escape from the prison of poverty that holds far too many of them in bondage.
Wonder how many @BernieSanders supporters will leave #NN15 angry & frustrated but ironically unaware that black activists live that daily.— Chris Savage (@Eclectablog) July 18, 2015
After that realization, my perception of the event changed 180°. From that moment on, I saw what was happening in front of me with new eyes. The black and brown people around me were on their feet, chanting, demanding to be heard.Even in the disagreements, the dialogue isn't happening. There is such entrenchment, an assumption that even the mildest criticism of Bernie Sanders is some kind of personal attack.
If a candidate can't acknowledge his/her weaknesses and change them, you have a weak candidate who will grow weaker over time. (Yes, he incorporated some extra language in his stump speech, and that's good. But he still didn't listen at that time.)
Whatever I may think of Martin O'Malley (and my personal jury is out on him), his response was certainly better than crossing his arms and leaving angry. He screwed up, acknowledged he screwed up, and then engaged.
As for Sanders, he had an opportunity and completely missed it. That doesn't make him a bad person or a bad candidate or a bigot or anything else. It makes him a candidate who missed a golden opportunity to close the gap with people who aren't connecting with him or his message, regardless of whether he has been an advocate for the meta-issues which affect them.
As Dayen pointed out in his article, if you want directions for how to get from Phoenix to Oakland, you look at a map and get turn-by-turn directions. You don't just tell someone to drive north. See the difference?
The idea that the interruption was rude, disrespectful, and otherwise unwarranted ignores what these communities have experienced. It ignores the people who are dead. It ignores the systemic racism inside our communities that hinder policymakers and policy, and the Black Lives Matter people are simply calling for it to stop, to be noticed, to say their names.
At one point during the call and response moments, the shout was "If I die at the hands of the police, call my mother first."
Repeat that to yourself for a minute. Think about how foreign that feels. If I die at the hands of the police, call my mother.
Hearts should be broken that anyone has to consider that part of their daily reality.
They wanted the candidates to empathize, not pontificate. Is that really so much to expect?
MoveOn issued this statement.
“The presidential candidates’ responses today to the powerful protest led by Black activists at Netroots Nation—as well as other remarks from the campaign trail in recent weeks—make clear that all Democratic candidates have work to do in understanding and addressing the movement for Black lives.
“Saying that ‘all lives matter’ or ‘white lives matter’ immediately after saying ‘Black lives matter’ minimizes and draws attention away from the specific, distinct ways in which Black lives have been devalued by our society and in which Black people have been subject to state and other violence.
“Similarly, while economic and racial justice issues certainly intersect, and reducing economic inequality will benefit people of all races, portrayals of racial injustice as merely an offshoot of economic injustice or the implication that solutions to economic inequality will take care of racism represent a fundamental misunderstanding of how race operates in our country.
“Frankly, all Democratic presidential candidates need to do better. Candidates must make clear that they stand in solidarity with the movement for Black lives and be willing to say explicitly ‘Black lives matter’—full stop, without qualifiers. Candidates should develop and convey an understanding of how racism operates independently of as well as how it intersects with economic inequality, and say what they intend to do to about it. And candidates should heed the call to say the names of Black men and women like Sandra Bland who have died in police custody, and give specific commitments to address police brutality and mass incarceration.”It isn't enough to have an economic agenda that will help black people. It's time to say -- full stop -- Black Lives Matter.
It's time to say their names.
Charleston, South Carolina
Clementa Pinckney
Sharonda Coleman Singleton
Tywanza Sanders
Ethel Lance
Susie Jackson
Cynthia Hurd
Myra Thompson
Daniel Simmons Sr.
DePayne Middleton Doctor
Sandra Bland, Texas.
Tanisha Anderson, Cleveland
Tamir Rice, Cleveland
Michael Brown, Ferguson
Eric Garner, New York
Freddie Gray, Baltimore
And more.
and more.
and still more.
All of them had mothers who received those calls. The calls telling them their child was dead.
And we can't take an hour out of our own agendas to hear their concerns? Really?
Is MSNBC’s Morning Blow Team Pitching Themselves For A Move To CNN?
By Matt Schneider
The NY Post is reporting that MSNBC co-hosts of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski recently talked up the idea of a move to CNN with Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes. Their show frequently generates headlines, yet the ratings often don’t correlate with the popularity Morning Joe enjoys in media and political circles, and the NY Post suggests Mika and Joe want a larger platform.
Given the recent departure of their executive producer Chris Licht, the Morning Joe team may in fact be ready for a move, as the report also claims that famed agent Ari Emmanuel (brother of now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel) has been recruited to help. And given that this alleged pitch took place at the Newhouse School journalism awards lunch last week, with other journalists buzzing around, it seems that if true, Mika and Joe aren’t shy about their desire to mix up the location where they drink their morning coffee.
Update: Scarborough tells TVNewser:
The NY Post is reporting that MSNBC co-hosts of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski recently talked up the idea of a move to CNN with Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes. Their show frequently generates headlines, yet the ratings often don’t correlate with the popularity Morning Joe enjoys in media and political circles, and the NY Post suggests Mika and Joe want a larger platform.
Given the recent departure of their executive producer Chris Licht, the Morning Joe team may in fact be ready for a move, as the report also claims that famed agent Ari Emmanuel (brother of now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel) has been recruited to help. And given that this alleged pitch took place at the Newhouse School journalism awards lunch last week, with other journalists buzzing around, it seems that if true, Mika and Joe aren’t shy about their desire to mix up the location where they drink their morning coffee.
Update: Scarborough tells TVNewser:
“Mika and I had nice conversation with a CNN executive who joked that we should bring our show to CNN. We laughed, exchanged pleasantries and left the event. Mika and I plan to work at NBC for a long time.”
Watch Bill Kristol Retract Praise of Trump Less Than 24 Hours After Giving It
By Evan McMurry
24 hours ago, Wrongest Man in Politics Bill Kristol claimed Trump would make a better president than Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, saying the celebrity plutocrat was “older, wiser, and richer!”
He retracted the “wiser” part this morning.
“He’s dead to me,” Kristol said on This Week Sunday morning, following Trump’s comments dismissing Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) war heroism, and that of every other POW. “He was a controversial character who said some useful things, I think, who brought some people into the Republican tent. He jumped the shark yesterday.”
Kristol predicted that the comments would cost Trump his current lead in the polls, as GOP primary voters don’t cotton to insulting veterans (just supporting the wars that make them veterans in the first place).
Watch below, via ABC News:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-bill-kristol-retract-praise-of-trump-less-than-24-hours-after-giving-it/#ooid=RsZ2lidjqpFJc8CpuGVS7qBBVhZtk_8w
24 hours ago, Wrongest Man in Politics Bill Kristol claimed Trump would make a better president than Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, saying the celebrity plutocrat was “older, wiser, and richer!”
He retracted the “wiser” part this morning.
“He’s dead to me,” Kristol said on This Week Sunday morning, following Trump’s comments dismissing Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) war heroism, and that of every other POW. “He was a controversial character who said some useful things, I think, who brought some people into the Republican tent. He jumped the shark yesterday.”
Kristol predicted that the comments would cost Trump his current lead in the polls, as GOP primary voters don’t cotton to insulting veterans (just supporting the wars that make them veterans in the first place).
Watch below, via ABC News:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/watch-bill-kristol-retract-praise-of-trump-less-than-24-hours-after-giving-it/#ooid=RsZ2lidjqpFJc8CpuGVS7qBBVhZtk_8w
What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was suffering as a prisoner of war
Left: John S. McCain, USN, is shown in this undated photo lying injured in North Vietnam wearing an arm cast. He was a held prisoner during the Vietnam War. (AP Photo)
Right: Donald Trump seen in 1976. (Tom Allen/The Washington Post)
It was the spring of 1968 and Donald Trump had it good.
He was 21 years old and handsome with a full head of hair. He avoided the Vietnam War draft on his way to earning an Ivy League degree. He was fond of fancy dinners, beautiful women and outrageous clubs. Most important, he had a job in his father’s real estate company and a brain bursting with money-making ideas that would make him a billionaire.
“When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $200,000,” he said in his 1987 autobiography “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” written with Tony Schwartz. (That’s about $1.4 million in 2015 dollars.) “I had my eye on Manhattan.”
More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid North Vietnamese prison cell. The Navy pilot’s body was broken from a plane crash, starvation, botched operations and months of torture.
As Trump was preparing to take Manhattan, McCain was trying to relearn how to walk.
The stark contrast in their fortunes was thrown into sharp relief Saturday when Trump belittled McCain during a campaign speech in Iowa.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain.
“He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said sarcastically. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam war veteran, was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese. (C-SPAN)
[Trump slams McCain for being ‘captured’ in Vietnam; other Republicans quickly condemn him]
Trump’s comments drew scorn from his fellow Republican presidential contenders. But The Donald didn’t back down.
“When I left the room, it was a total standing ovation,” he told ABC News in reference to his already infamous Iowa speech. “It was wonderful to see. Nobody was insulted.”
In fact, a lot of people were insulted.
“John McCain is a hero, a man of grit and guts and character personified,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. “He served and bled and endured unspeakable acts of torture. His captors broke his bones, but they couldn’t break his spirit, which is why he refused early release when he had the chance. That’s heroism, pure and simple, and it is unimpeachable.”
If The Donald doesn’t think that that’s heroic, then what, exactly, is admirable in his eyes?
And what was he doing while McCain was locked up in a jungle dungeon?
The answer reveals deep divides in the two men’s lives and claims to leadership. They may similarly embrace free enterprise, but when it comes to character, the two GOP presidential hopefuls could hardly be more different.
McCain famously followed his father and grandfather — both admirals — into the Navy. He has said his role model was Teddy Roosevelt, the barrel-chested, bear-hunting war hero turned conservative president. He also saw his grandfather and father as heroes too, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”
“My grandfather was a naval aviator, my father a submariner. They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition of my life.”
Growing up in Queens, The Donald’s role models were more … theatrical.
“Two of the people I admired most and who I kind of studied for the way they did things were the great Flo Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer, and Bill Zeckendorf, the builder,” he told the New York Times in 1984. “They created glamor, and the pageantry, the elegance, the joy they brought to what they did was magnificent.”
McCain grew up in a military household. Trump grew up in a home dominated by his hard-charging, penny-pinching businessman father.
Both young men had rebellious streaks. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, McCain was known as a “tough, mean little f——” who “was defiant and flouted the rules” but never enough to get kicked out, according to Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song.”
McCain enlisted in the Navy in 1958. Around the same time, Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy to straighten him out after his own youthful transgressions. ”He was a pretty rough fellow when he was small,” his father told the Times in 1983.
But the similarities stopped there. Despite a successful stint at the military school, Trump doesn’t seem to have been eager to enlist. It was 1964 and the Vietnam War was escalating.
He considered going to film school in California. “I was attracted to the glamor of the movies,” he said in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” adding that he “admired” Hollywood’s “great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.”
Instead Trump attended Fordham for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took economics courses at its famed Wharton School. (According to a book by Gwenda Blair, Trump was allowed to transfer into the Ivy League school because of family connections, and has exaggerated his performance at Penn.)
During his time in school, Trump received four student deferments from the draft.
“If I would have gotten a low [draft] number, I would have been drafted. I would have proudly served,” he told ABC News. “But I got a number, I think it was 356. That’s right at the very end. And they didn’t get — I don’t believe — past even 300, so I was — I was not chosen because of the fact that I had a very high lottery number.”
As Trump was enjoying the Ivy League and avoiding the war, John McCain was about to become one of its most high-profile casualties.
The lieutenant commander had been flying for months, conducting targeted strikes on North Vietnam.
He had already been injured in an aircraft carrier fire that killed 134 fellow sailors. And he had already made a name for himself as a pilot.
On Oct. 25, 1967, McCain had destroyed two enemy MiG fighter planes parked on a runway outside Hanoi. He begged to go out the next day, too.
But as he flew into Hanoi again on Oct. 26, his jet’s warning lights began to flash.
John McCain is administered to in a Hanoi, Vietnam hospital as a prisoner of war in the fall of 1967.
McCain spent 20 years in the Navy, a quarter of it in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp after his jet was shot down over Hanoi during a bombing mission Oct. 26, 1967. The Navy pilot nearly gave up during his captivity but his memory of books and movies helped him survive. (AP Photo)
“I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up — the sky was full of them — and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber,” he wrote in a 1973 account of his ordeal. “It went into an inverted, a most straight-down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection.”
McCain regained consciousness when his parachute landed him in a lake. The explosion had shattered both arms and one of his legs. With 50 pounds of gear on him and one good limb, he struggled to swim to the surface.
North Vietnamese dragged him to shore. Then stripped him to his underwear and began “hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.”
“One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly,” he wrote.
“Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused.
As the voluble Trump was already making a name for himself sweet-talking deals for his dad’s real estate developing company, McCain was clamming up in his filthy prison camp.
And as Trump drove around Manhattan in his father’s limo, McCain was refusing to mention his dad for fear of handing valuable intelligence to the enemy.
McCain might have died from his injuries had the North Vietnamese not found out on their own that his father was an admiral. Instead, they moved him to a hospital and performed several botched operations on him. They sliced his knee ligaments by accident and couldn’t manage to set his bones.
“They had great difficulty putting the bones together, because my arm was broken in three places and there were two floating bones,” he wrote. “I watched the guy try to manipulate it for about an hour and a half trying to get all the bones lined up. This was without benefit of Novocain.”
That Christmas, as Donald Trump was celebrating the holiday with his family, McCain was starving to death in a prison camp called “The Plantation.”
“I was down to about 100 pounds from my normal weight of 155,” he wrote. “I was told later on by [cellmate] Major Day that they didn’t expect me to live a week.”
McCain survived, however, slowly regaining his strength. By the spring of 1968, he had taught himself to walk again. Not that there was anywhere to walk. He was in solitary confinement inside a hot, stifling, windowless cell.
Trump, meanwhile, was taking Manhattan by storm. He had already made a small fortune — $200,000 then is almost $1.4 million today — working for his father during college.
In his autobiography, Trump describes these early years as fraught with danger: a quick learning curve for the soon-to-be-celebrity CEO as he went around learning the business. “This was not a world I found very attractive,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
“I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best.”
The danger? Collecting rent.
Left: Donald Trump stands next to a model of the D.C. convention center he hopes to develop in 1976. (Tom Allen/The Washington Post)
Right: John McCain being welcomed be President Richard Nixon in 1973. (Us Navy)
“One of the first tricks I learned was that you never stand in front of someone’s door when you knock. Instead you stand by the wall and reach over to knock,” Trump wrote of collecting for his father, who owned low-income housing blocks. “The first time a collector explained that to me I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. ‘What’s the point,’ I said. The point, he said, is that if you stand to the side, the only thing exposed to danger is your hand.”
“There were tenants who’d throw their garbage out the window, because it was easier than putting it in the incinerator,” he wrote in horror.
Meanwhile, McCain languished in a genuine hell. When he wasn’t being tortured — several times his interrogators re-broke his mended bones — he was battling everything from dysentery to hemorrhoids.
The prisoner of war survived on watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. He saw several fellow prisoners beaten to death, yet McCain refused to sign the confession that would have granted him a speedy release (and a publicity coup to the North Vietnamese).
Trump was living large — maybe not by today’s Trump standards but larger than most Americans.
He ate in New York City’s finest restaurants, rode in his father’s limousines and began hitting the clubs with beautiful women.
“The turning point came in 1971, when I decided to rent a Manhattan apartment,” he wrote. “It was a studio, in a building on Third Avenue and 75th Street, and it looked out on the water tank in the court of the adjacent building. ….I was a kid from Queens who worked in Brooklyn, and suddenly I had an apartment on the Upper East Side. …. I got to know all the good properties. I became a city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs. As far as I was concerned, I had the best of all worlds. I was young, and I had a lot of energy.”
That energy went into signing some of his first real estate deals — and into partying.
“One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive–like Studio 54 at its height,” he wrote. “Its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.
“It turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally. I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night,” he added. “Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation.”
He was so good looking he said, that the manager of the club “was worried that I might be tempted to try to steal their wives. He asked me to promise that I wouldn’t do that.”
As McCain remained in solitary confinement, tapping messages on the filthy walls to his fellow POW's in Morse code, Trump was out partying at legendary nightclubs.
Several years later, The Donald was frequenting “Studio 54 in the disco’s heyday and he said he thought it was paradise,” Timothy O’Brien wrote in “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
“His prowling gear at the time included a burgundy suit with matching patent-leather shoes,” O’Brien wrote.
“’I saw things happening there that to this day, I have never seen again,'” Trump told O’Brien. “‘I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room.’”
As Trump made plans to buy and refurbish bankrupt hotels, McCain was staving off death in a prison dubbed “The Hanoi Hilton.”
And as McCain continued to refuse special treatment, The Donald actively courted it.
“The other thing I promoted was our relationship with politicians, such as Abraham Beame, who was elected mayor of New York in November of 1973,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “Like all developers, my father and I contributed money to Beame, and to other politicians. The simple fact is that contributing money to politicians is very standard and accepted for a New York City developer.”
McCain refused to meet with most visitors for fear of being used as a puppet by the North
Vietnamese. But back in the U.S., Trump was too eager to manipulate the press.
“At one point, when I was hyping my plans to the press but in reality getting nowhere, a big New York real estate guy told one of my close friends. ‘Trump has a great line of s–t, but where are the bricks and mortar?’” he wrote. “I remember being outraged when I heard that.” (Expletive deleted by the Post not by Trump.)
If Trump was used to dining well, the only decent meal McCain had during his five years in prison was the night before he was released.
It was March 14, 1973. McCain arrived back in America a physically broken man, but also a hero.
That word has yet to be applied to Trump.
That same year, the Department of Justice slapped the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act.
“The Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,” according to the New York Times. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.”
Trump at first resisted signing a consent decree, according to the Times. He hired his friend, Roy Cohn, the lawyer and former right hand man to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. “Mr Trump said he would not sign such a decree because it would be unfair to his other tenants,” the Times reported. “He also said that if he allowed welfare clients into his apartments … there would be a massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants but the communities as a whole.”
But ultimately the company came to terms with the government.
Trump would weather the scandal, of course, and go one to build his fortune to its present day tally of $4 billion.
McCain, in contrast, received a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. He would become a U.S. Senator and nearly become President.
Whether Trump can triumph where McCain came up short remains to be seen.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Republicans Terrified As Texas Demand For Bernie Sanders Forces Rally To A Bigger Venue
By
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has a message that is so popular that he was forced to move a rally in Texas to a larger venue to accommodate the growing crowd.
The Sanders campaign announced the change in venue for the Democratic candidate’s Houston, TX rally on July 19, “With turnout projections mounting, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign has shifted the location of Sunday’s town meeting in Houston, Texas, to the Hofheinz Pavilion.”
These events were intended to be town hall meetings, but demand is so high that format has been getting changed to a campaign rally. I anticipate that the Houston event will also be more of a rally than a town hall.
Demand has also forced the campaign to move a Saturday rally in Phoenix to a larger venue, as the big crowds are showing no signs of diminishing for Bernie Sanders.
Republicans should be terrified of Bernie Sanders’ popularity because Texas is the heart of the Republican Party. The state is demographically changing, but the reason Republicans should be worried about Sanders is that he is demonstrating the power of a liberal populist economic message in red states.
Bernie Sanders, the candidate, isn’t what Republicans should be concerned about. The message that Sanders is bringing is what should strike fear into the GOP. Sanders talks about creating jobs, repealing Citizens United, raising wages for working people, equal pay for women. The Sanders message is that it is time to stand up to the billionaires and corporations and return the government back to the people.
If this message can find support in red states like Arizona and Texas, it can be successful all across the country.
Bernie Sanders is demonstrating that there is and huge demand among red state liberals for their candidates. Democrats and liberals in red states are often unfairly forgotten and lumped in with Republicans. Sen. Sanders is making an effort to campaign in front of these voters and ask for their support.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has a message that is so popular that he was forced to move a rally in Texas to a larger venue to accommodate the growing crowd.
The Sanders campaign announced the change in venue for the Democratic candidate’s Houston, TX rally on July 19, “With turnout projections mounting, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign has shifted the location of Sunday’s town meeting in Houston, Texas, to the Hofheinz Pavilion.”
These events were intended to be town hall meetings, but demand is so high that format has been getting changed to a campaign rally. I anticipate that the Houston event will also be more of a rally than a town hall.
Demand has also forced the campaign to move a Saturday rally in Phoenix to a larger venue, as the big crowds are showing no signs of diminishing for Bernie Sanders.
Republicans should be terrified of Bernie Sanders’ popularity because Texas is the heart of the Republican Party. The state is demographically changing, but the reason Republicans should be worried about Sanders is that he is demonstrating the power of a liberal populist economic message in red states.
Bernie Sanders, the candidate, isn’t what Republicans should be concerned about. The message that Sanders is bringing is what should strike fear into the GOP. Sanders talks about creating jobs, repealing Citizens United, raising wages for working people, equal pay for women. The Sanders message is that it is time to stand up to the billionaires and corporations and return the government back to the people.
If this message can find support in red states like Arizona and Texas, it can be successful all across the country.
Bernie Sanders is demonstrating that there is and huge demand among red state liberals for their candidates. Democrats and liberals in red states are often unfairly forgotten and lumped in with Republicans. Sen. Sanders is making an effort to campaign in front of these voters and ask for their support.
Be afraid
Republicans, because Bernie Sanders is showing the country the potential
power of liberal populist ideas in red states.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
How Many Lies Can Scott Walker Cram Into One Ad?
By Heather
The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz and Ana Kasparian take a look at Scott Walker's campaign kickoff ad, which is riddled with lies and a recent article from The Hill where they did a bit of fact checking on his record as governor in Wisconsin.
I've got my issues with the publication, one being that even though so much of their content is non-partisan, they look like they refuse to monitor or clean up their comments section on the site, which regularly reads like some of the what we'd see on sites like Free Republic or some of the worst of the right wing blogs on the net. I don't know if they're too cheap to pay for site monitors or if they just don't care and welcome the hateful dialog you see over there, but the results are the same either way, so that doesn't matter much.
That said, I'll give them credit, as Cenk and his crew did as well, for allowing this editorial to be run, which took an honest look at Walker's record in Wisconsin and what the voters can expect if heaven forbid somehow this man manages to wind up being elected president.
A closer look at Wisconsin’s economy under Gov. Scott Walker:
The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz and Ana Kasparian take a look at Scott Walker's campaign kickoff ad, which is riddled with lies and a recent article from The Hill where they did a bit of fact checking on his record as governor in Wisconsin.
I've got my issues with the publication, one being that even though so much of their content is non-partisan, they look like they refuse to monitor or clean up their comments section on the site, which regularly reads like some of the what we'd see on sites like Free Republic or some of the worst of the right wing blogs on the net. I don't know if they're too cheap to pay for site monitors or if they just don't care and welcome the hateful dialog you see over there, but the results are the same either way, so that doesn't matter much.
That said, I'll give them credit, as Cenk and his crew did as well, for allowing this editorial to be run, which took an honest look at Walker's record in Wisconsin and what the voters can expect if heaven forbid somehow this man manages to wind up being elected president.
A closer look at Wisconsin’s economy under Gov. Scott Walker:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is looking for a new job but, unfortunately, so are too many of his constituents.
After running on the promise to create 250,000 new private sector jobs by the end of his first term, Walker didn’t just fail to meet this goal, he failed miserably, creating barely half of his promised amount.Walker has implemented a failed economic strategy, based on basic and failed Republican economic principals, that has left Wisconsin lagging behind peer states.
Even just a glance at economic metrics in Wisconsin tells a story of stifled job growth, ballooning deficits, and a shrinking middle class.
When looking for reasons why Walker may have failed so miserably at creating jobs in Wisconsin, the obvious place to look would be his flagship job creation agency: The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). WEDC, which Walker chaired, gave out taxpayer-funded loans to hundreds of companies in the hopes of spurring growth. But the jobs Walker promised never materialized. Instead, in an epic display of mismanagement, WEDC lost track of millions of dollars in loans, gave awards to ineligible businesses, and has generally been a poor steward of taxpayers’ money.
In terms of job growth, Wisconsin has consistently trailed the national average. In fact, Wisconsin only saw 1.5 percent private-sector job growth in 2014. Unfortunately for Wisconsinites, while this is the best job creation number Walker has seen throughout his entire time in office, it lags far behind the national growth rate of 2.6 percent.
But none of this should come as a surprise. Instead of fulfilling his promise to create jobs, Walker has chosen to prioritize attacking public workers and teachers. All this did was create a culture of polarization that has divided his state to the core.
How big a failure have Walkernomics been? Just look next door at Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton’s Minnesota, which leads Wisconsin in almost every economic indicator.
In Minnesota, Dayton turned a $5 billion budget deficit into an over $1 billion budget surplus in just one term. By requiring the wealthiest earners to pay their fair share, Minnesota is now in a position to invest more resources into the state’s schools and infrastructure.
In Wisconsin, Walker was unable to take his state out of the red and faced a $2 billion budget deficit. Walker made the decision to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, while slashing education funding and refusing to make investments that would benefit middle class families and Wisconsin’s financial wellbeing.
In Minnesota, Dayton has moved forward Democratic policies like increasing the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, and investing in the middle class, and now we are seen as one of the most business friendly states in the country. Just this year, Forbes ranked Minnesota as the 9th best state for business and careers, 7th in economic climate and 2nd in quality of life. On top of all that, CNBC just ranked Minnesota the country’s top state for business in 2015.
In Wisconsin, Walker refuses to raise the minimum wage and equal pay legislation, rejected federal funds to expand Medicaid, and attacked Wisconsin workers with right to work legislation and anti-collective bargaining policies. As a result, the cost of doing business in Wisconsin is higher than the national average, and median household income in Wisconsin is thousands of dollars less than it is in Minnesota.
Read on...
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
5 Places Black People Can Move To When They've Had Enough of America
There are plenty of options all over the globe that go beyond the traditional spots in Europe.
By Tomika Anderson
By Tomika Anderson
Top row: Costa Rica; Thailand. Bottom row: Hong Kong; Dubai.
Thinkstock
Chris Rock summed up the black experience in the United States kind of perfectly during his HBO special Never Scared more than a decade ago: “If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different,” he joked, stone-faced. “You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college but who molested you.”
Since then, that “generous” uncle has moved from molesting to killing, with the list of victims growing by the day: the Charleston 9. Freddie Gray. Michael Brown. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Yuvette Henderson. Trayvon Martin.
Now, with only seconds left on the clock for that one person inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to consistently fight for some critical black issues—from universal health care and clemency for nonviolent drug offenders to the overall improvement of black male lives—pre-election jitters might be setting in, and some African Americans may want out.
But where do you move outside the good ol’ U.S. of A. to fulfill the type of vision you have for yourself and your family, where you can be as black as you want to be without fearing for your safety? Where, literally on earth, can you go and maintain—or even enhance—the kind of lifestyle you’re accustomed to, from robust career opportunities to world-class health care?
Turns out that the options—give or take a potential visa drama or two—have expanded far beyond traditional European go-to spots, like London and Paris. We hollered at our friends over at the Nomadness Travel Tribe (their Facebook page has become a hub for black expats) to come up with a list of five destinations black people can escape to if America doesn’t work out.
Please note, however: No country is an across-the-board utopia, particularly as it pertains to race, and each expat experience is ultimately an individual one. The following is a roundup of places beyond the U.S. and the rest of the world’s 17 largest African Diaspora locations (e.g., Brazil, Cuba and most of the Caribbean) that generally score high points among our melanin-enhanced brothers and sisters, in no particular order.
It’s not hard to feel right at home in Thailand. From its beautiful, tropical weather; low cost of living (in Chiang Mai, a rented two-bedroom home goes for about $500 a month); and access to high-quality medical care (in Ko Samui, it’s just $20 for a basic doctor’s visit), it’s altogether possible for the investment-minded among us to maintain residences in the heart of Southeast Asia as well as back at home.
Plus, the Thai come by their reputation for being among the world’s kindest people honestly; as a majority-Buddhist country, their literal attitude is to be kind always. This means that outside of the occasional, innocent staring (depending on how far beyond touristy areas like Bangkok or Phuket you travel), African Americans generally report receiving the red-carpet treatment (although plenty of African immigrants, who tend to work in large numbers there, report otherwise).
Your stateside relatives can visit often (which may or may not be a good thing) if you adopt this Central American nation—just a three-hour plane ride from Florida—as your new home. With its perfect tropical weather, universal health care and consistently high marks among Latin American countries on the Human Development Index (pdf), Costa Rica has jumped in popularity for American expats overall within the past 10 years. Other pluses: its stable economy, low cost of living, strong middle class and robust diplomatic relations with the U.S. Add to this few reported natural disasters, low rates of violent crime (theft and credit card fraud are traditionally its biggest crime problems), a great mix of urban and rural areas, and the much-raved-about jungle and beach life, and you’ve got a virtual paradise.
This is particularly the case for telecommuting entrepreneurs and English teachers. “I love the vibe and I love speaking Spanish,” reports one Tribe member of the country’s primary language. “The cost of living is low, and I could afford to live in a house on the beach and just chill.”
An African-American couple currently raising their 2-year-old outside Wellington, the capital city of Australia’s gorgeous southeastern neighbor, reports, “We chose not to raise him in the USA for a myriad of reasons—the safety of our African-American child, the inconsistent quality of education there and other factors. New Zealand was a perfect place for us. The country was rated the fourth safest in the world, the public schools consistently rank in the top 10 in the world, violent crime is low—like, there was one murder in our town in the last eight years. Also, we have not experienced anything significant as far as racism. We feel welcome, supported and like true members of the community.”
If you’ve ever given serious thought to chucking the deuces to your 9-to-5 and moving abroad to work in high-impact industries like finance or lower-impact industries like teaching (English), you already know we roll deep in the Pearl of the Orient. There are roughly 60,000 Americans living in Hong Kong, an estimated 10,000 of them black, according to an African-American expat who lives and works there. If you’re like most black people and don’t know Cantonese, you’re in luck—English is also an official language. One long-term black expat couple were so smitten by H.K.—and eager to educate curious natives about African-American culture and achievements—that they launched International Black History Month there earlier this year.
If you follow tourism trends, you know that Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is literally and figuratively hot right now, especially among people of color. With foreigners making up 71 percent of the city’s population, it’s nice to live somewhere “that is not ruled by white men,” exclaims one black expat. This has a huge impact on how black folks are treated. “You’ll find people of all races here to be quite humble,” she says of the most liberal of the Arab emirates, although American women should still expect to cover up inside the UAE, a majority-Muslim country. Plus, because it is by all accounts a young country, there is an unending list of services, goods and expertise needed there, opening itself up nicely to African-American professionals and entrepreneurs alike.
Chris Rock summed up the black experience in the United States kind of perfectly during his HBO special Never Scared more than a decade ago: “If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different,” he joked, stone-faced. “You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college but who molested you.”
Since then, that “generous” uncle has moved from molesting to killing, with the list of victims growing by the day: the Charleston 9. Freddie Gray. Michael Brown. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Yuvette Henderson. Trayvon Martin.
Now, with only seconds left on the clock for that one person inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to consistently fight for some critical black issues—from universal health care and clemency for nonviolent drug offenders to the overall improvement of black male lives—pre-election jitters might be setting in, and some African Americans may want out.
But where do you move outside the good ol’ U.S. of A. to fulfill the type of vision you have for yourself and your family, where you can be as black as you want to be without fearing for your safety? Where, literally on earth, can you go and maintain—or even enhance—the kind of lifestyle you’re accustomed to, from robust career opportunities to world-class health care?
Turns out that the options—give or take a potential visa drama or two—have expanded far beyond traditional European go-to spots, like London and Paris. We hollered at our friends over at the Nomadness Travel Tribe (their Facebook page has become a hub for black expats) to come up with a list of five destinations black people can escape to if America doesn’t work out.
Please note, however: No country is an across-the-board utopia, particularly as it pertains to race, and each expat experience is ultimately an individual one. The following is a roundup of places beyond the U.S. and the rest of the world’s 17 largest African Diaspora locations (e.g., Brazil, Cuba and most of the Caribbean) that generally score high points among our melanin-enhanced brothers and sisters, in no particular order.
1. Thailand
Sitting Buddha statue in Thailand
Thinkstock
It’s not hard to feel right at home in Thailand. From its beautiful, tropical weather; low cost of living (in Chiang Mai, a rented two-bedroom home goes for about $500 a month); and access to high-quality medical care (in Ko Samui, it’s just $20 for a basic doctor’s visit), it’s altogether possible for the investment-minded among us to maintain residences in the heart of Southeast Asia as well as back at home.
Plus, the Thai come by their reputation for being among the world’s kindest people honestly; as a majority-Buddhist country, their literal attitude is to be kind always. This means that outside of the occasional, innocent staring (depending on how far beyond touristy areas like Bangkok or Phuket you travel), African Americans generally report receiving the red-carpet treatment (although plenty of African immigrants, who tend to work in large numbers there, report otherwise).
2. Costa Rica
Drake Bay in Costa Rica
Thinkstock
Your stateside relatives can visit often (which may or may not be a good thing) if you adopt this Central American nation—just a three-hour plane ride from Florida—as your new home. With its perfect tropical weather, universal health care and consistently high marks among Latin American countries on the Human Development Index (pdf), Costa Rica has jumped in popularity for American expats overall within the past 10 years. Other pluses: its stable economy, low cost of living, strong middle class and robust diplomatic relations with the U.S. Add to this few reported natural disasters, low rates of violent crime (theft and credit card fraud are traditionally its biggest crime problems), a great mix of urban and rural areas, and the much-raved-about jungle and beach life, and you’ve got a virtual paradise.
This is particularly the case for telecommuting entrepreneurs and English teachers. “I love the vibe and I love speaking Spanish,” reports one Tribe member of the country’s primary language. “The cost of living is low, and I could afford to live in a house on the beach and just chill.”
3. New Zealand
Maori man performing haka powhiri chant and dance on a beach in New Zealand
Thinkstock
An African-American couple currently raising their 2-year-old outside Wellington, the capital city of Australia’s gorgeous southeastern neighbor, reports, “We chose not to raise him in the USA for a myriad of reasons—the safety of our African-American child, the inconsistent quality of education there and other factors. New Zealand was a perfect place for us. The country was rated the fourth safest in the world, the public schools consistently rank in the top 10 in the world, violent crime is low—like, there was one murder in our town in the last eight years. Also, we have not experienced anything significant as far as racism. We feel welcome, supported and like true members of the community.”
4. Hong Kong
A sampan on the water in Hong Kong
Thinkstock
If you’ve ever given serious thought to chucking the deuces to your 9-to-5 and moving abroad to work in high-impact industries like finance or lower-impact industries like teaching (English), you already know we roll deep in the Pearl of the Orient. There are roughly 60,000 Americans living in Hong Kong, an estimated 10,000 of them black, according to an African-American expat who lives and works there. If you’re like most black people and don’t know Cantonese, you’re in luck—English is also an official language. One long-term black expat couple were so smitten by H.K.—and eager to educate curious natives about African-American culture and achievements—that they launched International Black History Month there earlier this year.
5. Dubai
Dubai Marina
Thinkstock
If you follow tourism trends, you know that Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is literally and figuratively hot right now, especially among people of color. With foreigners making up 71 percent of the city’s population, it’s nice to live somewhere “that is not ruled by white men,” exclaims one black expat. This has a huge impact on how black folks are treated. “You’ll find people of all races here to be quite humble,” she says of the most liberal of the Arab emirates, although American women should still expect to cover up inside the UAE, a majority-Muslim country. Plus, because it is by all accounts a young country, there is an unending list of services, goods and expertise needed there, opening itself up nicely to African-American professionals and entrepreneurs alike.
Tomika Anderson
is a freelance writer, editor, producer and military brat who has
traveled to 36 countries and counting. Follow her on Twitter.
Monday, July 13, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
David Letterman Returns From Retirement To Deliver Scathing Top 10 List On Donald Trump
July 10, 2015 Majestic Theater in San Antonio, TX
Friday, July 10, 2015
PSM+ is now publicly available
By Wololo
PSM+ is now available for all registered members on our /talk forum. you can access psmplus here.
PSM+ allows you to access PSM and PSM Unity (coming soon) without a license from Sony. This means you can develop and test with the PSM SDK and PSM for Unity without a publisher license–even after Sony shuts down developer access. Additionally, it allows for hacks such as Rejuvenate to work on any device with PSM DevAssistant installed for unrestricted native homebrew.
You must be running firmware 3.51 or lower and have PSM DevAssistant installed on your PS Vita.
PSM+ is compatible with the PSM Unity Assistant app, but the rejuvenate hack has not been ported to this yet. You should be able to try PSM+ if you have the PSM App for unity, though, in order to confirm you can run PSM apps with it.
In the first step, you receive a special license by email that needs to be installed on your Vita , + matching files for your computer.
The second step is something you need to do on a daily basis: you need to update your license to prevent it from expiring. This is also done through an email sent by our servers.
PSM+ is now available for all registered members on our /talk forum. you can access psmplus here.
What is PSM+
You must be running firmware 3.51 or lower and have PSM DevAssistant installed on your PS Vita.
PSM+ is compatible with the PSM Unity Assistant app, but the rejuvenate hack has not been ported to this yet. You should be able to try PSM+ if you have the PSM App for unity, though, in order to confirm you can run PSM apps with it.
How to use PSM+
PSM+ works in two steps.In the first step, you receive a special license by email that needs to be installed on your Vita , + matching files for your computer.
The second step is something you need to do on a daily basis: you need to update your license to prevent it from expiring. This is also done through an email sent by our servers.
PSM Plus pages
You can access PSM+ here. Remember that you need to be signed in to your /talk account in order to access the tool.Thursday, July 9, 2015
El Salvador Farmers Successfully Defy Monsanto
The perils of ingesting food that has any contact with a Monsanto-produced product are in the news on nearly a weekly basis.
As Dr. Jeff Ritterman has documented, Monstanto's herbicide, Roundup, has been linked to a fatal kidney disease epidemic, and has also been repeatedly linked to cancer.
Recently, a senior research scientist at MIT predicted that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, will cause half of all children to have autism by 2025.
Farmers in El Salvador are acutely aware of the importance of producing their own seeds, and avoiding those from the bioengineering giant. The farmers, who have already been consistently outperforming Monsanto with their seed, as the local seed is far healthier and more productive, have just managed to bring about a giant defeat of Monsanto by preventing it from supplying El Salvador with its seeds. Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture released a new round of contracts to provide seed to subsistence farmers across the country.
RELATED: How Monsanto Could Get Even Bigger and More Powerful
"Remember that Monsanto is together with DuPont, Pioneer, all the large businesses that control the world's seed market," said Juan Luna Vides, the director of diversified production for the Mangrove Association, a nongovernmental organization that was created to support a grassroots social movement for environmental conservation in El Salvador. "Unfortunately, many of the governments in Latin America, or perhaps the world, have beneficiary relationships with these companies."
Vides said that his group is working to "minimize this dependency" — and the dire situation in El Salvador demonstrates the importance of doing so.
"The efforts of transnational companies are masked by other companies within small countries," he explained. "In the case of El Salvador, this example is very obvious ... the company of ex-president [Alfredo] Cristiani Burkard manages the business within the [national] market ... Although you don't see the Monsanto brand, it's Monsanto."
Thus, companies like Pioneer generate commercials for various media in El Salvador that market their agrochemical products, exerting great influence over the local farmer population of the country.
The Importance of Keeping It Local
"We are losing the traditions of local seed, so we are trying to maintain it here," small-scale seed producer Santos Cayetan told Truthout. "Native seeds don't have what these other seeds have that come with the chemicals, based in chemicals."
Cayetan, who is a recipient of corn seed from the government program that uses local, GMO-free seeds and also works to grow native corn, said that the difference between using local seed versus Monsanto's is stark.
"[Native seeds are] always the same, they always produce, and they're always there," he said. "[Native seeds] are drought resistant."
Vides said that native seeds are also far better adapted to local conditions like droughts and floods in his country, as well as the climate and soil.
"[Native seeds] don't need a great injection of agrochemicals in comparison to other seeds.... Seeds coming from different places, we don't know if those seeds are GMO or modified in some way," he said. "You can reuse native seeds and create a full cycle; you can use your own seeds for the next planting. That's not the case with hybrid seeds."
RELATED: Why Did Gov't Give Big Thumbs Up to Notorious Monsanto Pesticide We Now Believe Causes Cancer?
Oscar
Cruz scatters fertilizer on a cornfield in Tecomatepe, El Salvador, 23
miles north of the capital. (image: U.S. State Department)
One of Monsanto's insidious goals is to force farmers to purchase the company's seeds every year, at very expensive prices.
What's more, it is well known that Monsanto's hybrid seeds are dependent upon a high level of toxic fertilizers, and without those the yields of the hybrids would be far, far lower.
"[Using only local seed] would be much better [for Salvadoran farmers]; they wouldn't have to buy seeds every year," Vides added. "It has to do with generating the conditions to promote food security ... you can produce what you consume ... produce and consume the same product."
Cayetan said that many farmers in El Salvador simply cannot afford Monsanto seeds — and that is by design.
"If all the producers produced [imported] seed, [local producers] would lose their businesses ... this is what [Monsanto] wants."
RELATED: How Seed Laws Make Farmers’ Seeds Illegal
Jesus Reyes Fuente, also a local seed producer in El Salvador's Ciudad Romero, told Truthout that native seeds also taste better than hybrid seeds.
"They're less contaminated by fertilizers," he said. "And you can use them year after year ... with hybrids, after the second year, you can't use them."
Like the others with whom Truthout spoke, Fuente was aware of the health dangers of Monsanto products, and stressed the importance of stopping Monsanto from forcing local farmers to use its products.
"It's an imposition ... they [Monsanto] are trying to force people to use transgenic seeds," he said.
"There's pressure, to make us produce in a way we don't want to."
Evelyn Martinez is a political analyst for Salvadoran Foundation for Reconstruction and Development (REDES). REDES works to strengthen organizational capacity and advocacy among vulnerable populations who are looking to improve their quality of life.
"Before, there was a monopoly in the seed market. It was controlled by Cristiani Burkard, which today is Monsanto, and other large agribusinesses," Martinez told Truthout. "Today, we have opened the possibility for local production. We have opened the market."
The local seed program has also generated jobs, increased investment in equipment and infrastructure by local producers, and has had positive social impacts by preventing youths from joining gangs, as well as enabling producers to improve their production techniques and business skills.
"In economic terms, the country is less dependent on importers and has increased its autonomy," Martinez added. "The [local] seeds are better adapted for climate change and to the soils of El Salvador and have high yield potential."
Martinez was very clear about why any dealings with Monsanto would be harmful for El Salvador.
"At the global level, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta have control of 67 percent of the seed and agrochemical market. Monsanto controls 23 percent of the corn market and 80 percent of the world's GMO market," she said. "What Monsanto wants is to take more market share ... in order to increase their profits. Monsanto wants to increase the use of their seed in the country, not to benefit the small-scale producers. If you control the seed, you control the whole production process."
RELATED: Monsanto GMOs Defeated by Oregon Organic Farmers as Federal Judge Upholds Seed Ban
Martinez also stressed the importance of food sovereignty and was blunt about what would happen politically if local farmers had to rely on Monsanto seed.
"The nutrition of the country will depend on transnational companies ... We will lose our autonomy," Martinez concluded. "In terms of democracy, this isn't democratic; [Salvadorans] can't decide what we eat. It's a dictatorship."
Local Government Support
In 2014, the U.S. government threatened to deny all foreign aid to El Salvador unless it opened up its seed contracts to foreign businesses (i.e. Monsanto). Now, however, the United States claims that it supports the country's contract on seed, through which domestic seed producers offer both a better and more financially competitive product.
This is not a new battle — farmers in El Salvador have also successfully opposed the use of Monsanto seeds in the past — but it is one that Salvadorans find themselves perpetually fighting.
To make protections more permanent, El Salvador Congresswoman Estela Hernandez stressed the importance of farmers continuing to have the freedom to make their own decisions.
Interestingly, she also said that the pressure to use Monsanto seeds came more from the United States than from Monsanto itself.
"Monsanto didn't express its opinions here.... the pressure really came from the politicians from the United States, in this case the ambassador," she said. "We don't know if it was for the quality of seed, more likely for the businesses."
Elias Figueroa, a technical agronomist in the Ministry of Agriculture, also strongly supports the movement to keep seed local, and to disallow companies like Monsanto from introducing their seed into the country.
"This year the government purchased corn and bean seed in accordance to CAFTA's [Central American Free Trade Agreement] tender requirements ... demonstrating that what the [U.S.] embassy suggested, that the process was not transparent, was not true," Figueroa told Truthout. "Under this [bidding] process, everyone can participate, as long as they meet the legal and technical requirements of the Ministry of Agriculture."
Figueroa explained how El Salvador has a center for the investigation of El Salvador's National Center for Agricultural and Forestry Technology, called CENTA, which since 2011 has participated in increasing the domestic production of seed.
El Salvador used to import more than 70 percent of seed used nationally, but since 2000, CENTA has worked with the Center of Investigation for Corn and Wheat in Mexico to produce a parent seed.
CENTA generated the parent seed for H-59, the hybrid variety produced domestically. The plant is created for the tropical climate: It is drought resistant, produces high yields under local conditions, and is resistant to plagues and fungi.
In contrast, GMO seeds from Monsanto, which are more susceptible to plagues and aren't drought resistant, are clearly not designed for the tropical climate. The verdict from producers?
RELATED: Monsanto Herbicide Faces Global Fallout After World Health Organization Labels It a Probable Carcinogen
"According to the latest census, 84 percent of producers in the country prefer using H-59," Figueroa said. "The most important [thing] is that it has generated employment, nearly 240,000 direct jobs."
Still, Figueroa said, the public relations fight continues: He explained that Monsanto is "running an aggressive marketing campaign," portraying its seed as better and spreading false claims that local seed is mediocre and not certified.
"But this doesn't worry us," Figueroa said. "The national seed law, approved by Congress, and CAFTA lay out the parameters for quality, and we are complying with all of these. We have the best product, the best product in all of Central America. We can outcompete them in export markets as well. We have the studies that demonstrate the quality of our seed."
Figueroa added that 100 percent of the seed required for the country's food security program is now provided by national producers, and that one of the ministry's objectives is to promote native seed varieties by establishing local seed banks.
Nathan Weller, the program and policy director for EcoViva, an NGO that supports environmental sustainability, social justice and peace for communities in Central America, has been working with local farmers in El Salvador for years, supporting their efforts to produce and control their own seeds.
"El Salvador is ensuring that its national seed lineage doesn't need to be outsourced to foreign interests, and can be developed by its own farmers," Weller told Truthout. "It's better for the farmers who earn access to the best product, better for the government that can stretch limited public budgets to outreach to the most farmers, and better for El Salvador's struggling rural economy which drives many families to migrate away from their communities."
Weller explained that the Salvadoran producers' success came as a result of their flexibility and responsiveness to the people using the seed.
"They innovated to meet government standards, learned how to navigate administrative hurdles to earn contracts and employed hundreds of people in traditionally underserved rural areas where opportunity is scarce," he said. "Transnational agribusiness like Monsanto treat farmers in the developing world as consumers, not partners. They have yet to demonstrate an ability to provide such sweeping benefits to El Salvador's rural economy."
While the recent victory for local farmers and organic seed is important, and even the U.S. Embassy has endorsed the outcome, Vides is aware that there is still work to do.
"There doesn't exist a [national] agriculture policy supporting alternative farming, producing organically and ecologically," he said. "But regional efforts exist, such as La Coordinadora and the Mangrove Association, that are [supporting] local producers [in working] with alternative production techniques, such as using organic inputs and producing in an ecological manner."
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Biotech Giant DuPont-Pioneer Found Guilty of Pesticide Contamination
From Big-Box Stores to Organic Boutiques, Bee-Killing Pesticides Are Vanishing from Shelves
As Dr. Jeff Ritterman has documented, Monstanto's herbicide, Roundup, has been linked to a fatal kidney disease epidemic, and has also been repeatedly linked to cancer.
Recently, a senior research scientist at MIT predicted that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, will cause half of all children to have autism by 2025.
Farmers in El Salvador are acutely aware of the importance of producing their own seeds, and avoiding those from the bioengineering giant. The farmers, who have already been consistently outperforming Monsanto with their seed, as the local seed is far healthier and more productive, have just managed to bring about a giant defeat of Monsanto by preventing it from supplying El Salvador with its seeds. Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture released a new round of contracts to provide seed to subsistence farmers across the country.
RELATED: How Monsanto Could Get Even Bigger and More Powerful
"Remember that Monsanto is together with DuPont, Pioneer, all the large businesses that control the world's seed market," said Juan Luna Vides, the director of diversified production for the Mangrove Association, a nongovernmental organization that was created to support a grassroots social movement for environmental conservation in El Salvador. "Unfortunately, many of the governments in Latin America, or perhaps the world, have beneficiary relationships with these companies."
Vides said that his group is working to "minimize this dependency" — and the dire situation in El Salvador demonstrates the importance of doing so.
"The efforts of transnational companies are masked by other companies within small countries," he explained. "In the case of El Salvador, this example is very obvious ... the company of ex-president [Alfredo] Cristiani Burkard manages the business within the [national] market ... Although you don't see the Monsanto brand, it's Monsanto."
Thus, companies like Pioneer generate commercials for various media in El Salvador that market their agrochemical products, exerting great influence over the local farmer population of the country.
The Importance of Keeping It Local
"We are losing the traditions of local seed, so we are trying to maintain it here," small-scale seed producer Santos Cayetan told Truthout. "Native seeds don't have what these other seeds have that come with the chemicals, based in chemicals."
Cayetan, who is a recipient of corn seed from the government program that uses local, GMO-free seeds and also works to grow native corn, said that the difference between using local seed versus Monsanto's is stark.
"[Native seeds are] always the same, they always produce, and they're always there," he said. "[Native seeds] are drought resistant."
Vides said that native seeds are also far better adapted to local conditions like droughts and floods in his country, as well as the climate and soil.
"[Native seeds] don't need a great injection of agrochemicals in comparison to other seeds.... Seeds coming from different places, we don't know if those seeds are GMO or modified in some way," he said. "You can reuse native seeds and create a full cycle; you can use your own seeds for the next planting. That's not the case with hybrid seeds."
RELATED: Why Did Gov't Give Big Thumbs Up to Notorious Monsanto Pesticide We Now Believe Causes Cancer?
One of Monsanto's insidious goals is to force farmers to purchase the company's seeds every year, at very expensive prices.
What's more, it is well known that Monsanto's hybrid seeds are dependent upon a high level of toxic fertilizers, and without those the yields of the hybrids would be far, far lower.
"[Using only local seed] would be much better [for Salvadoran farmers]; they wouldn't have to buy seeds every year," Vides added. "It has to do with generating the conditions to promote food security ... you can produce what you consume ... produce and consume the same product."
Cayetan said that many farmers in El Salvador simply cannot afford Monsanto seeds — and that is by design.
"If all the producers produced [imported] seed, [local producers] would lose their businesses ... this is what [Monsanto] wants."
RELATED: How Seed Laws Make Farmers’ Seeds Illegal
Jesus Reyes Fuente, also a local seed producer in El Salvador's Ciudad Romero, told Truthout that native seeds also taste better than hybrid seeds.
"They're less contaminated by fertilizers," he said. "And you can use them year after year ... with hybrids, after the second year, you can't use them."
Like the others with whom Truthout spoke, Fuente was aware of the health dangers of Monsanto products, and stressed the importance of stopping Monsanto from forcing local farmers to use its products.
"It's an imposition ... they [Monsanto] are trying to force people to use transgenic seeds," he said.
"There's pressure, to make us produce in a way we don't want to."
Evelyn Martinez is a political analyst for Salvadoran Foundation for Reconstruction and Development (REDES). REDES works to strengthen organizational capacity and advocacy among vulnerable populations who are looking to improve their quality of life.
"Before, there was a monopoly in the seed market. It was controlled by Cristiani Burkard, which today is Monsanto, and other large agribusinesses," Martinez told Truthout. "Today, we have opened the possibility for local production. We have opened the market."
The local seed program has also generated jobs, increased investment in equipment and infrastructure by local producers, and has had positive social impacts by preventing youths from joining gangs, as well as enabling producers to improve their production techniques and business skills.
"In economic terms, the country is less dependent on importers and has increased its autonomy," Martinez added. "The [local] seeds are better adapted for climate change and to the soils of El Salvador and have high yield potential."
Martinez was very clear about why any dealings with Monsanto would be harmful for El Salvador.
"At the global level, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta have control of 67 percent of the seed and agrochemical market. Monsanto controls 23 percent of the corn market and 80 percent of the world's GMO market," she said. "What Monsanto wants is to take more market share ... in order to increase their profits. Monsanto wants to increase the use of their seed in the country, not to benefit the small-scale producers. If you control the seed, you control the whole production process."
RELATED: Monsanto GMOs Defeated by Oregon Organic Farmers as Federal Judge Upholds Seed Ban
Martinez also stressed the importance of food sovereignty and was blunt about what would happen politically if local farmers had to rely on Monsanto seed.
"The nutrition of the country will depend on transnational companies ... We will lose our autonomy," Martinez concluded. "In terms of democracy, this isn't democratic; [Salvadorans] can't decide what we eat. It's a dictatorship."
Local Government Support
In 2014, the U.S. government threatened to deny all foreign aid to El Salvador unless it opened up its seed contracts to foreign businesses (i.e. Monsanto). Now, however, the United States claims that it supports the country's contract on seed, through which domestic seed producers offer both a better and more financially competitive product.
This is not a new battle — farmers in El Salvador have also successfully opposed the use of Monsanto seeds in the past — but it is one that Salvadorans find themselves perpetually fighting.
To make protections more permanent, El Salvador Congresswoman Estela Hernandez stressed the importance of farmers continuing to have the freedom to make their own decisions.
Interestingly, she also said that the pressure to use Monsanto seeds came more from the United States than from Monsanto itself.
"Monsanto didn't express its opinions here.... the pressure really came from the politicians from the United States, in this case the ambassador," she said. "We don't know if it was for the quality of seed, more likely for the businesses."
Elias Figueroa, a technical agronomist in the Ministry of Agriculture, also strongly supports the movement to keep seed local, and to disallow companies like Monsanto from introducing their seed into the country.
"This year the government purchased corn and bean seed in accordance to CAFTA's [Central American Free Trade Agreement] tender requirements ... demonstrating that what the [U.S.] embassy suggested, that the process was not transparent, was not true," Figueroa told Truthout. "Under this [bidding] process, everyone can participate, as long as they meet the legal and technical requirements of the Ministry of Agriculture."
Figueroa explained how El Salvador has a center for the investigation of El Salvador's National Center for Agricultural and Forestry Technology, called CENTA, which since 2011 has participated in increasing the domestic production of seed.
El Salvador used to import more than 70 percent of seed used nationally, but since 2000, CENTA has worked with the Center of Investigation for Corn and Wheat in Mexico to produce a parent seed.
CENTA generated the parent seed for H-59, the hybrid variety produced domestically. The plant is created for the tropical climate: It is drought resistant, produces high yields under local conditions, and is resistant to plagues and fungi.
In contrast, GMO seeds from Monsanto, which are more susceptible to plagues and aren't drought resistant, are clearly not designed for the tropical climate. The verdict from producers?
RELATED: Monsanto Herbicide Faces Global Fallout After World Health Organization Labels It a Probable Carcinogen
"According to the latest census, 84 percent of producers in the country prefer using H-59," Figueroa said. "The most important [thing] is that it has generated employment, nearly 240,000 direct jobs."
Still, Figueroa said, the public relations fight continues: He explained that Monsanto is "running an aggressive marketing campaign," portraying its seed as better and spreading false claims that local seed is mediocre and not certified.
"But this doesn't worry us," Figueroa said. "The national seed law, approved by Congress, and CAFTA lay out the parameters for quality, and we are complying with all of these. We have the best product, the best product in all of Central America. We can outcompete them in export markets as well. We have the studies that demonstrate the quality of our seed."
Figueroa added that 100 percent of the seed required for the country's food security program is now provided by national producers, and that one of the ministry's objectives is to promote native seed varieties by establishing local seed banks.
Nathan Weller, the program and policy director for EcoViva, an NGO that supports environmental sustainability, social justice and peace for communities in Central America, has been working with local farmers in El Salvador for years, supporting their efforts to produce and control their own seeds.
"El Salvador is ensuring that its national seed lineage doesn't need to be outsourced to foreign interests, and can be developed by its own farmers," Weller told Truthout. "It's better for the farmers who earn access to the best product, better for the government that can stretch limited public budgets to outreach to the most farmers, and better for El Salvador's struggling rural economy which drives many families to migrate away from their communities."
Weller explained that the Salvadoran producers' success came as a result of their flexibility and responsiveness to the people using the seed.
"They innovated to meet government standards, learned how to navigate administrative hurdles to earn contracts and employed hundreds of people in traditionally underserved rural areas where opportunity is scarce," he said. "Transnational agribusiness like Monsanto treat farmers in the developing world as consumers, not partners. They have yet to demonstrate an ability to provide such sweeping benefits to El Salvador's rural economy."
While the recent victory for local farmers and organic seed is important, and even the U.S. Embassy has endorsed the outcome, Vides is aware that there is still work to do.
"There doesn't exist a [national] agriculture policy supporting alternative farming, producing organically and ecologically," he said. "But regional efforts exist, such as La Coordinadora and the Mangrove Association, that are [supporting] local producers [in working] with alternative production techniques, such as using organic inputs and producing in an ecological manner."
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Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Bernie Sanders, Health Clinics and GOP Hypocrisy
By Lee Fang
The conventional wisdom on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is that he’s a charming if impractical dreamer, a pie-in-the-sky socialist who’s good at inspiring young people and aging hippies, but hopeless at the knife fighting that real-life politics requires.
Despite the inherent limitations of a self-described democratic socialist who eschews the norms of Beltway fundraising, the Democratic presidential candidate from Vermont has won legislative victory after victory on an issue that has been dear to him since his days as Burlington’s mayor.
That issue is the simultaneously benign and revolutionary expansion of federally qualified community health clinics.
Over the years, Sanders has tucked away funding for health centers in appropriation bills signed by George W. Bush, into Barack Obama’s stimulus program, and through the earmarking process. But his biggest achievement came in 2010 through the Affordable Care Act. In a series of high-stakes legislative maneuvers, Sanders struck a deal to include $11 billion for health clinics in the law.
The result has made an indelible mark on American health care, extending the number of people served by clinics from 18 million before the ACA to an expected 28 million next year.
As one would expect, the program was largely met with plaudits from patients and public health experts, but it has also won praise from even the biggest Obamacare critics on Capitol Hill. In letters I obtained through multiple record requests, dozens of Republican lawmakers, including members of the House and Senate leadership, have privately praised the ACA clinic funding, calling health centers a vital provider in both rural and urban communities.
To Sanders, the clinics have served as an alternative to his preferred single-payer system. Community health centers accept anyone regardless of health, insurance status or ability to pay. They are founded and managed by a board composed of patients and local residents, so each center is customized to fit the needs of a community. No two health centers are alike.
In rural North Carolina, ACA-backed health centers now provide dental and nutrition services, while in San Francisco, the clinics provide translation services and outreach for immigrant families. In other areas, they provide mental health counseling, low-cost prescription drugs, and serve as the primary care doctors for entire counties. They have also served as a platform for innovation, introducing electronic medical record systems and paving the way with new methods for tracking those most susceptible for heart disease and diabetes.
Author John Dittmer, in The Good Doctors, traces the history of the modern health center to the civil rights activists who ventured into the South during the early 1960s. The activists were seen as outside agitators, and local doctors refused to treat them. As a solution, volunteer bands of physicians were organized by a group called the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
Beyond treating the civil rights workers, the MCHR physicians were struck by the stark disparity in health services, encountering many African-Americans who had never seen a doctor before in their lives. The activist physicians returned to the South after the “Freedom Rides” to found a small clinic in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and by doing so, began a movement to launch health clinics across the country in underserved areas. Winning support from President Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the clinics became part of Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”
Over the years, health centers have gained support on a bipartisan basis. Health centers secured critical funding from the efforts of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and both George W. Bush and John McCain campaigned on pledges to expand them.
Sanders’s place in health clinic history will be remembered for his forceful role in the winter of the health reform debate. In December 2009, tensions ran high as Congress inched closer to a final health reform deal. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., tapped Sanders to help win support from liberals who thought the bill was too weak as well as from Democrats from rural states who were facing mounting pressure. More funding for community health centers, Sanders argued, was a win-win solution for both camps, since the program would ensure access to health care for even the most remote areas of the country while also helping those without insurance. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., among others, held out to the very last moment.
Two days before the Senate voted to break a Republican filibuster of the bill, Reid called on Sanders to make his case on the Senate floor. Sanders, in typical fashion, said the legislation was far from perfect, but thundered about the common-sense need for health centers, citing the acute demand for more primary care doctors, the cost-savings from patients who would otherwise use the emergency room for the common cold, the patient-centered model of clinics, and so on. Senate Democrats rallied and overcame the Republican filibuster.
Another turning point came several weeks later, when Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won a special election in an upset victory, ending the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. Brown’s election brought Democrats close to despair, because lawmakers could only use a procedure called reconciliation to pass the law. Such a move would keep chances for passage alive while foreclosing any chance of enacting the much stronger legislation that originated in the House of Representatives through a conference committee. For progressives, it was a painful blow that not only sealed the defeat of the Public Option insurance program but also removed many robust provisions they had worked hard to include. Again called upon to work out a solution with House liberals, with whom Sanders enjoys a strong working relationship, the Vermont senator forged a deal to build support for the bill by focusing on health clinics.
Daniel Hawkins, vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers, recalls that in the end Sanders was able to negotiate with Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., to increase health clinic funding through a special technical amendment that could modify the reconciliation Senate bill through a simple majority vote. The technical amendment passed, with $9.5 billion targeted for health center operations and $1.5 billion for construction and renovation projects. The House passed the final Senate bill, and President Obama signed the legislation with $11 billion in health clinic funding into law on March 23, 2010.
“There was no one who played a more important role than Senator Sanders,” Hawkins says, remembering Sanders’s constant lobbying of other lawmakers to support the funding.
That relative invisibility has shielded health clinic funding from the hyper-partisan attacks faced by other provisions of the law. But it has also allowed Republican opponents of Obamacare to play a two-faced game. Every single congressional Republican has voted to repeal the entire bill, health center funding included. But many have taken credit for popular local health clinic programs funded by the ACA, without disclosing the source of the funds. Others have written letters expressing their support for the money.
As I reported previously for The Nation, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., among other Republicans, authored letters to the Obama administration to recommend ACA funding for local health clinics. Now, a new batch of letters, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows other requests by GOP leaders.
Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House Republican whip, for instance, signed onto a letter with other members of the Louisiana congressional delegation to ask the Obama administration for health center funding in New Orleans. The proposed clinic, the letter noted, would build a graduate medical training program, a proposal that “will attract not only more citizens back to our community but provide critical training opportunities for our region’s future healthcare workforce.”
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the number two leader in the Senate, wrote at least 17 letters to the administration asking for funding, in cities such as Lubbock and Houston, for a wide range of programs, including clinics devoted to low-income rural residents and Asian-Americans in Texas. Senators Mark Kirk, R-Ill., Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., David Vitter, R-La., Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., made similar requests.
It’s no wonder that politicians from rural states such as Texas would seek community health centers to better serve their constituents. A recent report from the Texas A&M School of Public Health found that only 9 percent of physicians practice in rural areas. Many rural Texans live in areas that are more than 30 minutes from the nearest hospital, which dramatically raises mortality rates in cases of medical emergencies.
Still, press releases from GOP officials have lashed out at the Affordable Care Act’s health center funding as some sort of “slush fund.”
Regardless of the politics, the success of health centers has been particularly satisfying for Sanders, who can simply point to his own state as a reminder of its impact. One in four Vermonters are now served by more than 50 health centers throughout the state, according to the senator’s office. Just last month, a new federally qualified health clinic opened in Shoreham, Vermont, to provide dental care, physicals and medication for common diseases.
Though his own role in securing the funds for the ACA is barely mentioned on his Senate website, the image gallery is adorned with pictures of Sanders beaming a smile as he breaks ground and cuts ribbons for various health clinic openings in Vermont.
Photo: Bernie Sanders, during a news conference on June 25, 2015. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP)
The conventional wisdom on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is that he’s a charming if impractical dreamer, a pie-in-the-sky socialist who’s good at inspiring young people and aging hippies, but hopeless at the knife fighting that real-life politics requires.
Despite the inherent limitations of a self-described democratic socialist who eschews the norms of Beltway fundraising, the Democratic presidential candidate from Vermont has won legislative victory after victory on an issue that has been dear to him since his days as Burlington’s mayor.
That issue is the simultaneously benign and revolutionary expansion of federally qualified community health clinics.
Over the years, Sanders has tucked away funding for health centers in appropriation bills signed by George W. Bush, into Barack Obama’s stimulus program, and through the earmarking process. But his biggest achievement came in 2010 through the Affordable Care Act. In a series of high-stakes legislative maneuvers, Sanders struck a deal to include $11 billion for health clinics in the law.
The result has made an indelible mark on American health care, extending the number of people served by clinics from 18 million before the ACA to an expected 28 million next year.
As one would expect, the program was largely met with plaudits from patients and public health experts, but it has also won praise from even the biggest Obamacare critics on Capitol Hill. In letters I obtained through multiple record requests, dozens of Republican lawmakers, including members of the House and Senate leadership, have privately praised the ACA clinic funding, calling health centers a vital provider in both rural and urban communities.
To Sanders, the clinics have served as an alternative to his preferred single-payer system. Community health centers accept anyone regardless of health, insurance status or ability to pay. They are founded and managed by a board composed of patients and local residents, so each center is customized to fit the needs of a community. No two health centers are alike.
In rural North Carolina, ACA-backed health centers now provide dental and nutrition services, while in San Francisco, the clinics provide translation services and outreach for immigrant families. In other areas, they provide mental health counseling, low-cost prescription drugs, and serve as the primary care doctors for entire counties. They have also served as a platform for innovation, introducing electronic medical record systems and paving the way with new methods for tracking those most susceptible for heart disease and diabetes.
Author John Dittmer, in The Good Doctors, traces the history of the modern health center to the civil rights activists who ventured into the South during the early 1960s. The activists were seen as outside agitators, and local doctors refused to treat them. As a solution, volunteer bands of physicians were organized by a group called the Medical Committee for Human Rights.
Beyond treating the civil rights workers, the MCHR physicians were struck by the stark disparity in health services, encountering many African-Americans who had never seen a doctor before in their lives. The activist physicians returned to the South after the “Freedom Rides” to found a small clinic in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and by doing so, began a movement to launch health clinics across the country in underserved areas. Winning support from President Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, the clinics became part of Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”
Over the years, health centers have gained support on a bipartisan basis. Health centers secured critical funding from the efforts of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and both George W. Bush and John McCain campaigned on pledges to expand them.
Sanders’s place in health clinic history will be remembered for his forceful role in the winter of the health reform debate. In December 2009, tensions ran high as Congress inched closer to a final health reform deal. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., tapped Sanders to help win support from liberals who thought the bill was too weak as well as from Democrats from rural states who were facing mounting pressure. More funding for community health centers, Sanders argued, was a win-win solution for both camps, since the program would ensure access to health care for even the most remote areas of the country while also helping those without insurance. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., among others, held out to the very last moment.
Two days before the Senate voted to break a Republican filibuster of the bill, Reid called on Sanders to make his case on the Senate floor. Sanders, in typical fashion, said the legislation was far from perfect, but thundered about the common-sense need for health centers, citing the acute demand for more primary care doctors, the cost-savings from patients who would otherwise use the emergency room for the common cold, the patient-centered model of clinics, and so on. Senate Democrats rallied and overcame the Republican filibuster.
Bernie Sanders on community health centers in the ACA from The Intercept on Vimeo.
Another turning point came several weeks later, when Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won a special election in an upset victory, ending the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. Brown’s election brought Democrats close to despair, because lawmakers could only use a procedure called reconciliation to pass the law. Such a move would keep chances for passage alive while foreclosing any chance of enacting the much stronger legislation that originated in the House of Representatives through a conference committee. For progressives, it was a painful blow that not only sealed the defeat of the Public Option insurance program but also removed many robust provisions they had worked hard to include. Again called upon to work out a solution with House liberals, with whom Sanders enjoys a strong working relationship, the Vermont senator forged a deal to build support for the bill by focusing on health clinics.
Daniel Hawkins, vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers, recalls that in the end Sanders was able to negotiate with Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., to increase health clinic funding through a special technical amendment that could modify the reconciliation Senate bill through a simple majority vote. The technical amendment passed, with $9.5 billion targeted for health center operations and $1.5 billion for construction and renovation projects. The House passed the final Senate bill, and President Obama signed the legislation with $11 billion in health clinic funding into law on March 23, 2010.
“There was no one who played a more important role than Senator Sanders,” Hawkins says, remembering Sanders’s constant lobbying of other lawmakers to support the funding.
Although the
health reform has transformed the funding of local health clinics, few
patients even realize that the changes have occurred as a result of the
law, because few aspects of the health reform are explicitly branded as
being part of the ACA.
That relative invisibility has shielded health clinic funding from the hyper-partisan attacks faced by other provisions of the law. But it has also allowed Republican opponents of Obamacare to play a two-faced game. Every single congressional Republican has voted to repeal the entire bill, health center funding included. But many have taken credit for popular local health clinic programs funded by the ACA, without disclosing the source of the funds. Others have written letters expressing their support for the money.
As I reported previously for The Nation, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., among other Republicans, authored letters to the Obama administration to recommend ACA funding for local health clinics. Now, a new batch of letters, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows other requests by GOP leaders.
Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House Republican whip, for instance, signed onto a letter with other members of the Louisiana congressional delegation to ask the Obama administration for health center funding in New Orleans. The proposed clinic, the letter noted, would build a graduate medical training program, a proposal that “will attract not only more citizens back to our community but provide critical training opportunities for our region’s future healthcare workforce.”
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the number two leader in the Senate, wrote at least 17 letters to the administration asking for funding, in cities such as Lubbock and Houston, for a wide range of programs, including clinics devoted to low-income rural residents and Asian-Americans in Texas. Senators Mark Kirk, R-Ill., Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., David Vitter, R-La., Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., made similar requests.
It’s no wonder that politicians from rural states such as Texas would seek community health centers to better serve their constituents. A recent report from the Texas A&M School of Public Health found that only 9 percent of physicians practice in rural areas. Many rural Texans live in areas that are more than 30 minutes from the nearest hospital, which dramatically raises mortality rates in cases of medical emergencies.
Still, press releases from GOP officials have lashed out at the Affordable Care Act’s health center funding as some sort of “slush fund.”
Regardless of the politics, the success of health centers has been particularly satisfying for Sanders, who can simply point to his own state as a reminder of its impact. One in four Vermonters are now served by more than 50 health centers throughout the state, according to the senator’s office. Just last month, a new federally qualified health clinic opened in Shoreham, Vermont, to provide dental care, physicals and medication for common diseases.
Though his own role in securing the funds for the ACA is barely mentioned on his Senate website, the image gallery is adorned with pictures of Sanders beaming a smile as he breaks ground and cuts ribbons for various health clinic openings in Vermont.
Photo: Bernie Sanders, during a news conference on June 25, 2015. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP)
Why does the GOP hate poor people?
Posted by Jim Hightower
As you might imagine, being poor means a life of sacrifices, frustrations, depression, and constant struggle. So what is it about Republican office holders that cause them to go out of their way to make poor people's lives even harder?
GOP governors, congress critters, and other officials perniciously insist that access to food stamps and other public assistance must be as burdensome and humiliating as possible. The latest example comes from the two Republican members of the Federal Communications Commission, which intends to expand a public subsidy called "Lifeline," extending broadband internet service to all poor households.
Universal access to the web is touted as essential to America's educational advancement and global competitiveness. Also, some 70 percent of teachers now assign homework requiring every student to do online searches. So our national interest and simple fairness say everyone should be able to connect. Yet – even though Lifeline was started in 1985 by the Republican saint, Ronald Reagan – the two FCC Republicans voted "no" on extending his sensible idea.
Luckily, they were outvoted, but they then demanded a requirement that poor families must publicly reveal that they are poor. The two Scrooges are subjecting these families to a daunting and humiliating bureaucratic process, which will prevent many kids from getting the internet access that everyone needs for education success.
Come on – the "subsidy" they're wailing about is a mere $9.25 a month. Compare that to the billions of dollars of fraud in the Pentagon budget, which Republicans approve without questioning! What is this sour, dark smudge on the souls of GOP officials that leads them to demean poor people, preventing them and our society from reaching our fullest potential? It's stupid... and it's shameful.
"F.C.C. Votes to Move Forward With a Plan to Subsidize Broadband for the Poor," The New York Times, June 19, 2015.
Listen to this Commentary
As you might imagine, being poor means a life of sacrifices, frustrations, depression, and constant struggle. So what is it about Republican office holders that cause them to go out of their way to make poor people's lives even harder?
GOP governors, congress critters, and other officials perniciously insist that access to food stamps and other public assistance must be as burdensome and humiliating as possible. The latest example comes from the two Republican members of the Federal Communications Commission, which intends to expand a public subsidy called "Lifeline," extending broadband internet service to all poor households.
Universal access to the web is touted as essential to America's educational advancement and global competitiveness. Also, some 70 percent of teachers now assign homework requiring every student to do online searches. So our national interest and simple fairness say everyone should be able to connect. Yet – even though Lifeline was started in 1985 by the Republican saint, Ronald Reagan – the two FCC Republicans voted "no" on extending his sensible idea.
Luckily, they were outvoted, but they then demanded a requirement that poor families must publicly reveal that they are poor. The two Scrooges are subjecting these families to a daunting and humiliating bureaucratic process, which will prevent many kids from getting the internet access that everyone needs for education success.
Come on – the "subsidy" they're wailing about is a mere $9.25 a month. Compare that to the billions of dollars of fraud in the Pentagon budget, which Republicans approve without questioning! What is this sour, dark smudge on the souls of GOP officials that leads them to demean poor people, preventing them and our society from reaching our fullest potential? It's stupid... and it's shameful.
"F.C.C. Votes to Move Forward With a Plan to Subsidize Broadband for the Poor," The New York Times, June 19, 2015.
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Why Bernie Sanders Won’t Attack Hillary Clinton
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) talked to The Nation: “Now, I’ve known Hillary Clinton for many years. Let me confess: I like Hillary. I disagree with Hillary Clinton on many issues. My job is to differentiate myself from her on the issues—not by personal attacks. I’ve never run a negative ad in my life. Why not? First of all, in Vermont, they don’t work—and, frankly, I think increasingly around this country they don’t work. I really do believe that people want a candidate to come up with solutions to America’s problems rather than just attacking his or her opponent.”
He added: “If you look at politics as a baseball game or a football game, then I’m supposed to be telling the people that my opponents are the worst people in the world and I’m great. That’s crap; I don’t believe that for a second…. I don’t need to spend my life attacking Hillary Clinton or anybody else. I want to talk about my ideas on the issues.”
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