Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and

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Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and

Postby admin » Sat Oct 29, 2016 9:47 pm

Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and real reform
by Thomas Frank
November, 2016

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All politicians love to complain about the press. They complain for good reasons and bad. They cry over frivolous slights and legitimate inquiries alike. They moan about bias. They talk to friendlies only. They manipulate reporters and squirm their way out of questions. And this all makes perfect sense, because politicians and the press are, or used to be, natural enemies.

Conservative politicians have built their hostility toward the press into a full-blown theory of liberal media bias, a pseudosociology that is today the obsessive pursuit of certain nonprofit foundations, the subject matter of an annual crop of books, and the beating heart of a successful cable-news network. Donald Trump, the current leader of the right’s war against the media, hates this traditional foe so much that he banned a number of news outlets from attending his campaign events and has proposed measures to encourage more libel lawsuits. He does this even though he owes his prominence almost entirely to his career as a TV celebrity and to the news media’s morbid fascination with his glowering mug.

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Illustrations by John Ritter

His Democratic opponent hates the press, too. Hillary Clinton may not have a general theory of right-wing media bias to fall back on, but she knows that she has been the subject of lurid journalistic speculation for decades. Back in the Nineties, she watched her husband’s presidency drown in an endless series of petty scandals and petty fake scandals, many of them featuring her as a kind of diabolical villainess, and to this day, she stays well clear of press conferences. She does this even though it was the passionate enthusiasm of the punditry that made her husband a real contender in 1992—and even though she has stayed close to several commentators who did exemplary pro-Clinton journalism back in those days.

My project in the pages that follow is to review the media’s attitude toward yet a third politician, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year. By examining this recent history, much of it already forgotten, I hope to rescue a number of worthwhile facts about the press’s attitude toward Sanders. Just as crucially, however, I intend to raise some larger questions about the politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers.

To refresh your memory, the Vermont senator is an independent who likes to call himself a “democratic socialist.” He ran for the nomination on a platform of New Deal–style economic interventions such as single-payer health insurance, a regulatory war on big banks, and free tuition at public universities. Sanders was well to the left of where modern Democratic presidential candidates ordinarily stand, and in most elections, he would have been dismissed as a marginal figure, more petrified wood than presidential timber. But 2016 was different. It was a volcanic year, with the middle class erupting over a recovery that didn’t include them and the obvious indifference of Washington, D.C., toward the economic suffering in vast reaches of the country.

For once, a politician like Sanders seemed to have a chance with the public. He won a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, and despite his advanced age and avuncular finger-wagging, he was wildly popular among young voters. Eventually he was flattened by the Clinton juggernaut, of course, but Sanders managed to stay competitive almost all the way to the California primary in June.

His chances with the prestige press were considerably more limited. Before we go into details here, let me confess: I was a Sanders voter, and even interviewed him back in 2014, so perhaps I am naturally inclined to find fault in others’ reporting on his candidacy. Perhaps it was the very particular media diet I was on in early 2016, which consisted of daily megadoses of the New York Times and the Washington Post and almost nothing else. Even so, I have never before seen the press take sides like they did this year, openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not meet with their approval.

This shocked me when I first noticed it. It felt like the news stories went out of their way to mock Sanders or to twist his words, while the op-ed pages, which of course don’t pretend to be balanced, seemed to be of one voice in denouncing my candidate. A New York Times article greeted the Sanders campaign in December by announcing that the public had moved away from his signature issue of the crumbling middle class. “Americans are more anxious about terrorism than income inequality,” the paper declared—nice try, liberal, and thanks for playing. In March, the Times was caught making a number of post-publication tweaks to a news story about the senator, changing what had been a sunny tale of his legislative victories into a darker account of his outrageous proposals. When Sanders was finally defeated in June, the same paper waved him goodbye with a bedtime-for-Grandpa headline, hillary clinton made history, but bernie sanders stubbornly ignored it.

I propose that we look into this matter methodically, and that we do so by examining Sanders-related opinion columns in a single publication: the Washington Post, the conscience of the nation’s political class and one of America’s few remaining first-rate news organizations. I admire the Post’s investigative and beat reporting. What I will focus on here, however, are pieces published between January and May 2016 on the paper’s editorial and op-ed pages, as well as on its many blogs. Now, editorials and blog posts are obviously not the same thing as news stories: punditry is my subject here, and its practitioners have never aimed to be nonpartisan. They do not, therefore, show media bias in the traditional sense. But maybe the traditional definition needs to be updated. We live in an era of reflexive opinionating and quasi opinionating, and we derive much of our information about the world from websites that have themselves blurred the distinction between reporting and commentary, or obliterated it completely. For many of us, this ungainly hybrid is the news. What matters, in any case, is that all the pieces I review here, whether they appeared in pixels or in print, bear the imprimatur of the Washington Post, the publication that defines the limits of the permissible in the capital city.

Why should anyone care today that the pundits were unkind to Bernie Sanders? The primaries are long over. Even the senator’s most die-hard fans suspect that he is unlikely to run for the presidency again. His campaign is, as we like to say, history. Still, I think that what befell the Vermont senator at the hands of the Post should be of interest to all of us. For starters, what I describe here represents a challenge to the standard theory of liberal bias. Sanders was, obviously, well to the left of Hillary Clinton, and yet that did not protect him from the scorn of the Post—a paper that media-hating conservatives regard as a sort of liberal death squad. Nor was Sanders undone by some seedy journalistic obsession with scandal or pseudoscandal. On the contrary, his record seemed remarkably free of public falsehoods, security-compromising email screwups, suspiciously large paychecks for pedestrian speeches, escapades with a comely staffer, or any of that stuff.

An alternative hypothesis is required for what happened to Sanders, and I want to propose one that takes into account who the media are in these rapidly changing times. As we shall see, for the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed.

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Who are those people? Let us think of them in the following way. The Washington Post, with its constant calls for civility, with its seemingly genetic predisposition for bipartisanship and consensus, is more than the paper of record for the capital—it is the house organ of a meritocratic elite, which views the federal city as the arena of its professional practice. Many of its leading personalities hail from a fairly exalted socioeconomic background (as is the case at most important American dailies). Its pundits are not workaday chroniclers of high-school football games or city-council meetings. They are professionals in the full sense of the word, well educated and well connected, often flaunting insider credentials of one sort or another. They are, of course, a comfortable bunch. And when they look around at the comfortable, well-educated folks who work in government, academia, Wall Street, medicine, and Silicon Valley, they see their peers.1

Now, consider the recent history of the Democratic Party. Beginning in the 1970s, it has increasingly become an organ of this same class. Affluent white-collar professionals are today the voting bloc that Democrats represent most faithfully, and they are the people whom Democrats see as the rightful winners in our economic order. Hillary Clinton, with her fantastic résumé and her life of striving and her much-commented-on qualifications, represents the aspirations of this class almost perfectly. An accomplished lawyer, she is also in with the foreign-policy in crowd; she has the respect of leading economists; she is a familiar face to sophisticated financiers. She knows how things work in the capital. To Washington Democrats, and possibly to many Republicans, she is not just a candidate but a colleague, the living embodiment of their professional worldview.

In Bernie Sanders and his “political revolution,” on the other hand, I believe these same people saw something kind of horrifying: a throwback to the low-rent Democratic politics of many decades ago. Sanders may refer to himself as a progressive, but to the affluent white-collar class, what he represented was atavism, a regression to a time when demagogues in rumpled jackets pandered to vulgar public prejudices against banks and capitalists and foreign factory owners. Ugh.

Choosing Clinton over Sanders was, I think, a no-brainer for this group. They understand modern economics, they know not to fear Wall Street or free trade. And they addressed themselves to the Sanders campaign by doing what professionals always do: defining the boundaries of legitimacy, by which I mean, defining Sanders out.

After reading through some two hundred Post editorials and op-eds about Sanders, I found a very basic disparity. Of the Post stories that could be said to take an obvious stand, the negative outnumbered the positive roughly five to one.2 (Opinion pieces about Hillary Clinton, by comparison, came much closer to a fifty-fifty split.)

One of the factors making this result so lopsided was the termination, in December, of Harold Meyerson, a social democrat and the only regular Post op-ed personality who might have been expected to support Sanders consistently. Fred Hiatt, who oversees the paper’s editorial page, told Politico that Meyerson “failed to attract readers.” Meyerson offered the magazine an additional explanation for his firing. Hiatt, he said, had blamed his unpopularity on his habit of writing about “unions and Germany”—meaning, presumably, that nation’s status as a manufacturing paradise.

But the factor that really mattered was that the Post’s pundit platoon just seemed to despise Bernie Sanders. The rolling barrage against him began during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses, when it first dawned on Washington that the Vermonter might have a chance of winning. And so a January 20 editorial headlined level with us, mr. sanders decried his “lack of political realism” and noted with a certain amount of fury that Sanders had no plans for “deficit reduction” or for dealing with Social Security spending—standard Post signifiers for seriousness. That same day, Catherine Rampell insisted that the repeal of Glass–Steagall “had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis,” and that those populists who pined for the old system of bank regulation were just revealing “the depths of their ignorance.”3

The next morning, Charles Lane piled on with an essay ridiculing Sanders’s idea that there was a “billionaire class” that supported conservative causes. Many billionaires, Lane pointed out, are actually pretty liberal on social issues. “Reviewing this history,” he harrumphed, “you could almost get the impression billionaires have done more to advance progressive causes than Bernie Sanders has.”

On January 27, with the Iowa caucuses just days away, Dana Milbank nailed it with a headline: nominating sanders would be insane. After promising that he adored the Vermont senator, he cautioned his readers that “socialists don’t win national elections in the United States.” The next day, the paper’s editorial board chimed in with a campaign full of fiction, in which they branded Sanders as a kind of flimflam artist: “Mr. Sanders is not a brave truth-teller. He is a politician selling his own brand of fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it.”

Stung by the Post’s trolling, Bernie Sanders fired back—which in turn allowed no fewer than three of the paper’s writers to report on the conflict between the candidate and their employer as a bona fide news item. Sensing weakness, the editorial board came back the next morning with yet another kidney punch, this one headlined the real problem with mr. sanders. By now, you can guess what that problem was: his ideas weren’t practical, and besides, he still had “no plausible plan for plugging looming deficits as the population ages.”

Actually, that was only one of two editorials to appear on January 29 berating Sanders. The other sideswiped the senator in the course of settling a question of history, evidently one of the paper’s regular duties. After the previous week’s lesson about Glass–Steagall, the editorial board now instructed politicians to stop reviling tarp—i.e., the Wall Street bailouts with which the Bush and Obama Administrations tried to halt the financial crisis. The bailouts had been controversial, the paper acknowledged, but they were also bipartisan, and opposing or questioning them in the Sanders manner was hereby declared anathema. After all, the editorial board intoned:

Contrary to much rhetoric, Wall Street banks and bankers still took losses and suffered upheaval, despite the bailout—but TARP helped limit the collateral damage that Main Street suffered from all of that. If not for the ingenuity of the executive branch officials who designed and carried out the program, and the responsibility of the legislators who approved it, the United States would be in much worse shape economically.


As a brief history of the financial crisis and the bailout, this is absurd. It is true that bailing out Wall Street was probably better than doing absolutely nothing, but saying this ignores the many other options that were available to public officials had they shown any real ingenuity in holding institutions accountable. All the Wall Street banks that existed at the time of TARP are flourishing to this day, since the government moved heaven and earth to spare them the consequences of the toxic securities they had issued and the lousy mortgage bets they made. The big banks were “made whole,” as the saying goes. Main Street banks, meanwhile, died off by the hundreds in 2009 and 2010. And average home owners, of course, got no comparable bailout. Instead, Main Street America saw trillions in household wealth disappear; it entered into a prolonged recession, with towering unemployment, increasing inequality, and other effects that linger to this day. There has never been a TARP for the rest of us.

Charles Krauthammer went into action on January 29, too, cautioning the Democrats that they “would be risking a November electoral disaster of historic dimensions” should they nominate Sanders—cynical advice that seems even more poisonous today, as scandal after scandal engulfs the Democratic candidate that so many Post pundits favored. Ruth Marcus brought the hammer down two days later, marveling at the folly of voters who thought the Vermont senator could achieve any of the things he aimed for. Had they forgotten “Obama’s excruciating experience with congressional Republicans”? The Iowa caucuses came the next day, and Stephen Stromberg was at the keyboard to identify the “three delusions” that supposedly animated the campaigns of Sanders and the Republican Ted Cruz alike. Namely: they had abandoned the “center,” they believed that things were bad in the United States, and they perceived an epidemic of corruption—in Sanders’s case, corruption via billionaires and campaign contributions. Delusions all.

And then, mirabile dictu, the Post ran an op-ed bearing the headline the case for bernie sanders (in iowa). It was not an endorsement of Sanders, of course (“This is not an endorsement of Sanders,” its author wrote), but it did favor the idea of a sustained conversation among Democrats. The people of Iowa “must make sure” that the battle between Clinton and Sanders continued. It was the best the Post could do, I suppose, before reverting to its customary position.

On and on it went, for month after month, a steady drumbeat of denunciation. The paper hit every possible anti-Sanders note, from the driest kind of math-based policy reproach to the lowest sort of nerd-shaming—from his inexcusable failure to embrace taxes on soda pop to his awkward gesticulating during a debate with Hillary Clinton (“an unrelenting hand jive,” wrote Post dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman, “that was missing only an upright bass and a plunky piano”).

The paper’s piling-up of the senator’s faults grew increasingly long and complicated. Soon after Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, the editorial board denounced him and Trump both as “unacceptable leaders” who proposed “simple-sounding” solutions. Sanders used the plutocracy as a “convenient scapegoat.” He was hostile to nuclear power. He didn’t have a specific recipe for breaking up the big banks. He attacked trade deals with “bogus numbers that defy the overwhelming consensus among economists.” This last charge was a particular favorite of Post pundits: David Ignatius and Charles Lane both scolded the candidate for putting prosperity at risk by threatening our trade deals. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer grew so despondent over the meager 2016 options that he actually pined for the lost days of the Bill Clinton presidency, when America was tough on crime, when welfare was being reformed, and when free trade was accorded its proper respect.

Ah, but none of this was to imply that Bernie Sanders, flouter of economic consensus, was a friend to the working class. Here too he was written off as a failure. Instead of encouraging the lowly to work hard and get “prepared for the new economy,” moaned Michael Gerson, the senator was merely offering them goodies—free health care and college—in the manner of outmoded “20th century liberalism.” Others took offense at Sanders’s health-care plan because it envisioned something beyond Obamacare, which had been won at such great cost.

This brings us to the question of qualifications, a non-issue that nevertheless caused enormous alarm among the punditry for a good part of April. Columnist after columnist and blogger after blogger offered judgments on how ridiculous, how very unjustified it was for Sanders to suggest Clinton wasn’t qualified for the presidency, and whether or not Clinton hadn’t started the whole thing first by implying Sanders wasn’t qualified, and whether she was right when she did or didn’t make that accusation. Reporters got into the act, too, wringing their hands over the lamentable “tone” of the primary contest and wondering what it portended for November. Maybe you’ve forgotten about this pointless roundelay, but believe me, it happened; acres of trees fell so that every breathless minute of it could be documented.

Then there was Sanders’s supposed tin ear for racial issues. Jonathan Capehart (a blogger, op-ed writer, and member of the paper’s editorial board) described the senator as a candidate with limited appeal among black voters, who had trouble talking “about issues of race outside of the confines of class and poverty” and was certainly no heir to Barack Obama. Sanders was conducting a “magic-wand campaign,” Capehart insisted on another occasion, since his voting-reform proposals would never be carried out. Even the inspiring story of the senator’s salad days in the civil-rights movement turned out to be tainted once Capehart started sleuthing. In February, the columnist examined a famous photograph from a 1962 protest and declared that the person in the picture wasn’t Sanders at all. Even when the photographer who took the image told Capehart that it was indeed Sanders, the Post grandee refused to apologize, fudging the issue with bromides: “This is a story where memory and historical certitude clash.” Clearly Sanders is someone to whom the ordinary courtesies of journalism do not apply.

Extra credit is due to Dana Milbank, one of the paper’s cleverest columnists, who kept varying his angle of attack. In February, he name-checked the Bernie Bros—socialist cyberbullies who were turning comment sections into pens of collectivist terror. In March, Milbank assured readers that Democrats were too “satisfied” to sign up with a rebel like Sanders. In April, he lamented Sanders’s stand on trade on the grounds that it was similar to Trump’s and that it would be hard on poor countries. In May, Milbank said he thought it was just awful the way frustrated Sanders supporters cursed and “threw chairs” at the Nevada Democratic convention—and something close to treachery when Sanders failed to rebuke those supporters afterward.4 “It is no longer accurate to say Sanders is campaigning against Clinton, who has essentially locked up the nomination,” the columnist warned on the occasion of the supposed chair-throwing. “The Vermont socialist is now running against the Democratic Party. And that’s excellent news for one Donald J. Trump.”

The danger of Trump became an overwhelming fear as primary season drew to a close, and it redoubled the resentment toward Sanders. By complaining about mistreatment from the Democratic apparatus, the senator was supposedly weakening the party before its coming showdown with the billionaire blowhard. This matter, like so many others, found columnists and bloggers and op-ed panjandrums in solemn agreement. Even Eugene Robinson, who had stayed fairly neutral through most of the primary season, piled on in a May 20 piece, blaming Sanders and his noisy horde for “deliberately stoking anger and a sense of grievance—less against Clinton than the party itself,” actions that “could put Trump in the White House.” By then, the paper had buttressed its usual cast of pundits with heavy hitters from outside its own peculiar ecosystem. In something of a journalistic coup, the Post opened its blog pages in April to Jeffrey R. Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, so that he, too, could join in the chorus of denunciation aimed at the senator from Vermont. Comfort the comfortable, I suppose—and while you’re at it, be sure to afflict the afflicted.

It should be noted that there were some important exceptions to what I have described. The paper’s blogs, for instance, published regular pieces by Sanders sympathizers like Katrina vanden Heuvel and the cartoonist Tom Toles. (The blogs also featured the efforts of a few really persistent Clinton haters.) The Sunday Outlook section once featured a pro-Sanders essay by none other than Ralph Nader, a kind of demon figure and clay pigeon for many of the paper’s commentators. But readers of the editorial pages had to wait until May 26 to see a really full-throated essay supporting Sanders’s legislative proposals. Penned by Jeffrey Sachs, the eminent economist and professor at Columbia University, it insisted that virtually all the previous debate on the subject had been irrelevant, because standard economic models did not take into account the sort of large-scale reforms that Sanders was advocating:

It’s been decades since the United States had a progressive economic strategy, and mainstream economists have forgotten what one can deliver. In fact, Sanders’s recipes are supported by overwhelming evidence—notably from countries that already follow the policies he advocates. On health care, growth and income inequality, Sanders wins the policy debate hands down.


It was a striking departure from what nearly every opinionator had been saying for the preceding six months. Too bad it came just eleven days before the Post, following the lead of the Associated Press, declared Hillary Clinton to be the preemptive winner of the Democratic nomination.

What can we learn from reviewing one newspaper’s lopsided editorial treatment of a left-wing presidential candidate?

For one thing, we learn that the Washington Post, that gallant defender of a free press, that bold bringer-down of presidents, has a real problem with some types of political advocacy. Certain ideas, when voiced by certain people, are not merely debatable or incorrect or misguided, in the paper’s view: they are inadmissible. The ideas themselves might seem healthy, they might have a long and distinguished history, they might be commonplace in other lands. Nevertheless, when voiced by the people in question, they become damaging.

We hear a lot these days about the dangers to speech posed by political correctness, about those insane left-wing college students who demand to be shielded from uncomfortable ideas. What I am describing here is something similar, but far more consequential. It is the machinery by which the boundaries of the Washington consensus are enforced.

You will recall how, after the Nevada unpleasantness, Eugene Robinson, who claimed to share Sanders’s philosophy, nonetheless condemned the candidate’s criticism of the Democratic Party’s nominating process as “reckless in the extreme.” Impugning the party, Robinson argued, might empower Donald Trump. Looking back from the vantage point of several months, however, it seems to me that the real recklessness is the idea that certain political questions are off-limits to our candidates—that they must not disparage the party machinery, that they must not “revile” the Wall Street bailouts, and so on. Consider the circumstances in which Post pundits demanded that Sanders refrain from disparaging the Democratic National Committee. Democratic elected officials across the country were virtually unanimous in their support of Hillary Clinton, President Obama was doing nearly everything in his power to secure her nomination, and the D.N.C. itself was more or less openly taking her side. All these players were determined (as we later learned) to make this deeply unpopular woman the nominee, regardless of the consequences. Maybe Sanders didn’t have the story exactly right—nobody did, back then. But still: if ever a situation cried out for critique, for millions of newspaper readers gnashing their teeth, this was it.

Perhaps it is reckless of me to say so. Journalists these days are apparently expected to become soldiers in the political war, and so maybe we must weigh what we write against the possibility that it might in some way help the Republican candidate. As I have already noted: I am a liberal, I vote for Democrats, I don’t want Donald Trump to become president, I am almost certainly going to vote for Hillary Clinton. Maybe I should just turn off my laptop right now.

This is a political way of looking at things, I suppose, but it would be more accurate to say that it is anti-political, that it is actively hostile to political ideas. Consider once again the Post’s baseline philosophy, as the editorial board explained it in two February editorials. In one of them, headlined mr. sanders’ attack on reality, the editors denounced the candidate’s “simplistic” views, and argued that by advocating for better policies in certain areas, he was implicitly criticizing President Obama. What’s the harm in that? you might wonder. The Post unfolded its reasoning:

The system—and by this we mean the constitutional structure of checks and balances—requires policymakers to settle for incremental changes. Mr. Obama has scored several ambitious but incomplete reforms that have made people’s lives better while ideologues on both sides took potshots.


What the Post is saying here is that the American system, by its nature, doesn’t permit a president to achieve anything more than “incremental change.” Obama did the best anyone could under this system—indeed, as the paper pointed out, he had “no other option” than to proceed as he did. Therefore he should be exempt from criticism at the hands of other Democrats.

The board explained its philosophy slightly differently in the other editorial, battle of the extremes. Sanders, like Ted Cruz, was said to harbor the toxic belief that “the road to progress is purity, not compromise.” Again, his great failing was his refusal to acknowledge the indisputable rules of the game. Heed the wisdom of our savviest political journalists:

Progress will be made by politicians who are principled but eager to shape compromises, to acknowledge that they do not have a monopoly on wisdom and to accept incremental change. That is a harder message to sell in primary campaigns, but it is a message far likelier to produce a nominee who can win in November—and govern successfully for the next four years.


To say that this gets reality wrong—that there are many examples of sweeping political achievement in U.S. history, that it was indeed possible for Barack Obama to do more than he did in 2009, that even the most ideological politicians sometimes compromise, or that Bernie Sanders (unlike Ted Cruz) actually works well with his Senate colleagues—is only to begin unpacking the errors here. What matters more, though, is the paper’s curious, unrelenting logic. Since sweeping change is structurally impossible, the Post assures us, no such change should be advocated by political candidates. “No we can’t” turns out be the iron law of American politics, and should therefore become the slogan of every aspiring presidential candidate.

Perhaps you have noticed that the paper’s two great ideas, combined in this way, do not really make sense. Let’s say that it’s true, as the Post asserts, that the American system won’t allow a president to achieve high-flown goals—that such accomplishments are simply off-limits, even to a golden-tongued orator or an LBJ-style political animal. Okay. But what’s wrong with a candidate who talks about those goals? By the paper’s own definition, there’s no chance of them ever becoming law. The only person to be penalized for making such grand, hollow promises will be the politician herself, whose followers will be disappointed with her after she foolishly demands a hundred percent of everything (“purity, not compromise”) and is inevitably defeated by the system. Too bad for her, we will say. That was a really dumb way to play it. But why should we care what happens to her?

Indeed, this logic, applied across the board, would require us to condemn even the most pragmatic leaders. What are we to make, for example, of a politician who says we ought to enact some sort of gun control? Everyone knows that there is virtually no way such a measure will get through Congress, and even if it did, there’s the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment to contend with. How about a politician who goes to China and bravely proclaims that “women’s rights are human rights,” when all the wised-up observers know the Chinese system is organized to ensure that such an ideal will not be realized there anytime soon? And shouldn’t the Post be frothing with vituperation at the lèse-majesté of a candidate who once confronted a respected U.S. senator with the suggestion that politics ought to be the “art of making what appears to be impossible possible”?

The reason the Post pundits embrace these tidy sophistries is simple enough. Knee-jerk incrementalism is, after all, a nifty substitute for actually thinking difficult issues through. Bernie Sanders ran for the presidency by proposing reforms that these prestigious commentators, for whatever reason, found distasteful. Rather than grapple with his ideas, however, they simply blew the whistle and ruled them out of bounds. Plans that were impractical, proposals that would never pass Congress—these things are off the table, and they are staying off.

Clinging to this so-called pragmatism is also professionally self-serving. If “realism” is recognized as the ultimate trump card in American politics, it automatically prioritizes the thoughts and observations of the realism experts—also known as the Washington Post and its brother institutions of insider knowledge and professional policy practicality. Realism is what these organizations deal in; if you want it, you must come to them. Legitimacy is quite literally their property. They dole it out as they see fit.

Think of all the grand ideas that flicker in the background of the Sanders-denouncing stories I have just recounted. There is the admiration for consensus, the worship of pragmatism and bipartisanship, the contempt for populist outcry, the repeated equating of dissent with partisan disloyalty. And think of the specific policy pratfalls: the cheers for TARP, the jeers aimed at bank regulation, the dismissal of single-payer health care as a preposterous dream.

This stuff is not mysterious. We can easily identify the political orientation behind it from one of the very first pages of the Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide to the Ideologies. This is common Seaboard Centrism, its markings of complacency and smugness as distinctive as ever, its habitat the familiar Beltway precincts of comfort and exclusivity. Whether you encounter it during a recession or a bull market, its call is the same: it reassures us that the experts who head up our system of government have everything well under control.

It is, of course, an ideology of the professional class, of sound-minded East Coast strivers, fresh out of Princeton or Harvard, eagerly quoting as “authorities” their peers in the other professions, whether economists at MIT or analysts at Credit Suisse or political scientists at Brookings. Above all, this is an insider’s ideology; a way of thinking that comes from a place of economic security and takes a view of the common people that is distinctly patrician.

Now, here’s the mystery. As a group, journalists aren’t economically secure. The boom years of journalistic professionalization are long over. Newspapers are museum pieces every bit as much as Bernie Sanders’s New Deal policies. The newsroom layoffs never end: in 2014 alone, 3,800 full-time editorial personnel got the axe, and the bloodletting continues, with Gannett announcing in September a plan to cut more than 200 staffers from its New Jersey papers. Book-review editors are so rare a specimen that they may disappear completely, unless somebody starts breeding them in captivity. The same thing goes for the journalists who once covered police departments and city government. At some papers, opinion columnists are expected to have day jobs elsewhere, and copy editors have largely gone the way of the great auk.

In other words, no group knows the story of the dying middle class more intimately than journalists. So why do the people at the very top of this profession identify themselves with the smug, the satisfied, the powerful? Why would a person working in a moribund industry compose a paean to the Wall Street bailouts? Why would someone like Post opinion writer Stephen Stromberg drop megatons of angry repudiation on a certain Vermont senator for his “outrageous negativity about the state of the country”? For the country’s journalists—Stromberg’s colleagues, technically speaking—that state is pretty goddamned negative.

Maybe it’s something about journalism itself. This is a field, after all, that has embraced the forces that are killing it to an almost pathological degree. No institution has a greater appetite for trendy internet thinkers than journalism schools. We are all desperately convincing ourselves that we need to become entrepreneurs, or to get ourselves attuned to the digital future—the future, that is, as it is described for us hardheaded journalists by a cast of transparent bullshit artists. When the TV comedian John Oliver recently did a riff on the tragic decline of newspaper journalism, just about the only group in America that didn’t like it was—that’s right, the Newspaper Association of America, which didn’t think we should be nostalgic about the days when its members were successful. Truly, we are like buffalo nuzzling the rifles of our hunters.

Or maybe the answer is that people at the top of the journalism hierarchy don’t really identify with their plummeting peers. Maybe the pundit corps thinks it will never suffer the same fate as, say, the Tampa Tribune. And maybe they’re right. As I wrote this story, I kept thinking back to Sound and Fury, a book that Eric Alterman published in 1992, when the power of pundits was something new and slightly alarming. Alterman suggested that the rise of the commentariat was dangerous, since it supplanted the judgment of millions with the clubby perspective of a handful of bogus experts. When he wrote that, of course, newspapers were doing great. Today they are dying, and as they gutter out, one might expect the power of this phony aristocracy to diminish as well. Instead, the opposite has happened: as serious journalism dies, Beltway punditry goes from strength to strength.

It was during that era, too, that the old-school Post columnist David Broder gave a speech deploring the rise of journalistic insiders, who were too chummy with the politicians they were supposed to be covering. This was, he suggested, not only professionally questionable. It also bespoke a fundamental misunderstanding of the journalist’s role as gadfly and societal superego:

I can’t for the life of me fathom why any journalists would want to become insiders, when it’s so damn much fun to be outsiders—irreverent, inquisitive, impudent, incorrigibly independent outsiders—thumbing our nose at authority and going our own way.


Yes, it’s fun to be an outsider, but it’s not particularly remunerative. As the rising waters inundate the Fourth Estate, it is increasingly obvious that becoming an insider is the only way to hoist yourself above the deluge. Maybe that is one reason why the Washington Post attracted the fancy of megabillionaire Jeff Bezos, and why the Post seems to be thriving, with a fancy new office building on K Street and a swelling cohort of young bloggers ravening to be the next George Will, the next Sid Blumenthal. It remains, however precariously, the cradle of the punditocracy.

Meanwhile, between journalism’s insiders and outsiders—between the ones who are rising and the ones who are sinking—there is no solidarity at all. Here in the capital city, every pundit and every would-be pundit identifies upward, always upward. We cling to our credentials and our professional-class fantasies, hobnobbing with senators and governors, trading witticisms with friendly Cabinet officials, helping ourselves to the champagne and lobster. Everyone wants to know our opinion, we like to believe, or to celebrate our birthday, or to find out where we went for cocktails after work last night.

Until the day, that is, when you wake up and learn that the tycoon behind your media concern has changed his mind and everyone is laid off and that it was never really about you in the first place. Gone, the private office or award-winning column or cable-news show. The checks start bouncing. The booker at MSNBC stops calling. And suddenly you find that you are a middle-aged maker of paragraphs—of useless things—dumped out into a billionaire’s world that has no need for you, and doesn’t really give a damn about your degree in comparative literature from Brown. You start to think a little differently about universal health care and tuition-free college and Wall Street bailouts. But of course it is too late now. Too late for all of us.
_______________

Notes:

1 The professionalization of journalism is a well-known historical narrative. James Fallows, in Breaking the News (1996), describes how journalism went from being “a high working-class activity” to an occupation for “college boys” in the mid-1960s. The Washington Post’s role in this story, as a compulsive employer of Ivy League graduates, is also well known. Indeed, the concentration of obnoxious Ivy Leaguers at the Post was once so great, Fallows writes, that editor Leonard Downie (who went to Ohio State) was known among his colleagues as “Land-Grant Len.” At present, five of the eight members of the Post’s editorial board are graduates of Ivy League universities.

2 For research purposes, I used the Nexis electronic search service to find all Washington Post stories mentioning Bernie Sanders and identified as “editorial copy.” Judgments of what constituted “negative” and “positive” were made by me and a Harper’s Magazine intern and were entirely subjective. In arriving at this ratio, I did not count letters to the editor, articles that appeared in other sections of the paper, or blog posts, even though a number of the latter are reviewed in this essay. Throughout, I have used print rather than online headlines (which sometimes differ for identical stories). And finally: I am indebted to Adam Johnson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting for his help with this essay.

3 In point of fact, several authoritative works on the crisis describe how the multi-step repeal of Glass–Steagall (and the weak regulation that replaced it) set the stage for the meltdown. Nevertheless, dismissing the significance of the Glass–Steagall repeal was a frequent talking point for anti-Sanders pundits, possibly because (a) that’s what Hillary Clinton was saying, and (b) it showed their solidarity with the many experts and politicians who had participated in the repeal of Glass–Steagall, and (c) Glass–Steagall was killed off by the very sort of universal, bipartisan consensus that the Post frequently claims to be the model of correct policymaking.

4 The incident of the tossed chairs was cause for much clucking in Post-land. It was mentioned in an editorial on May 19 and referred to in at least three other stories. The myth of the thrown chairs turned out to be hugely exaggerated, while the D.N.C.’s non-neutrality was later established as fact.
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Re: Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders,

Postby admin » Sat Oct 29, 2016 10:00 pm

Hillary Clinton is not an incremental reformer
by Phil Ebersole
May 16, 2016

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Image

It is Bernie Sanders who is the incremental reformer. Hillary Clinton is a defender of the status quo. Too many people are fooled into thinking their disagreement is about the pace of change.

It is not.

Their disagreement is about whether there should be any change at all and, if so, in what direction.

He wants to limit corporate power. She depends on corporate power, both for her campaign and her personal income.

Nothing Bernie Sanders advocates is radical. Everything he proposes has been tried and worked, either in the USA or abroad.

He wants to enforce anti-trust laws and laws against financial frauds. He wants to restore worker protections and corporate regulations that worked well in the late 20th century. He wants to adopt a version of Canada’s popular and successful Medicare-for-all plan.

He does not—for better or worse—advocate drastic redistribution of wealth and power, only a halt to the growing concentration of wealth. He is not a peace candidate nor a civil liberties candidate, although I think he would be less eager than Clinton to go to war or hunt down whistle-blowers.

Even though the reforms Sanders proposes are popular, Hillary Clinton says they are impossible. She says Sanders is doing people a disservice by encouraging them to hope for the impossible.

Universal health care is “never, ever” going to happen, she says; restoring free tuition at state universities is an example of foolish “free this and free that”, and young people who hope for something better haven’t done the research.

Clinton depends for her income and her campaign funds on the corporate establishment. That establishment is so dead set against even minor reforms that pushing them through will require the equivalent of a political revolution.

_______________

LINKS

Why must the Trump alternative be self-satisfied, complacent Democrats? by Thomas Frank for The Guardian.

Q&A: Thomas Frank on the Democrats’ Disgrace: Abandoning Working-Class Americans for the National Book Review.

Hillary and the Corporate Elite by Paul Street for Counterpunch

The Coming Democratic Crackup by Robert Parry for Consortiumnews

Why Democrats Are Becoming the Party of the 1 Percent by T.A. Frank for Vanity Fair.

How Bill, Hillary and the Democratic Leadership Council Gutted Progessivism by Paul Rosenberg for Salon.

Clinton Plans to Run As Smarter Republican Than Trump by Kevin Gosztola for ShadowProof.

Hillary Clinton Goes on Wall Street Fundraising Spree by Dan Wright for ShadowProof.

The Base by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for Boston Review.
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Re: Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders,

Postby admin » Sat Oct 29, 2016 11:22 pm

Hillary and the Corporate Elite
by Paul Street
May 17, 2016

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“Mainstream” U.S. media is struck by the “strange bedfellows” phenomenon whereby a number of right wing foreign policy neoconservatives and top business elites – including at least one of the notorious hard right-wing Koch brothers – are lining up with Democrat Hillary Clinton against the Republican Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential race. But what’s so strange about it? Trump is off the elite capitalist and imperial leash. He channels some nasty things that have long been part of the Republican Party playbook: frustrated white nationalism, racism, nativism, and male chauvinism.

At the same time, however, he often sounds remarkably populist in ways that white working class voters appreciate. He has been critical of things that elite Republicans (and elite corporate Democrats) hold dear, including corporate globalization, “free trade’ (investor rights) deals, global capital mobility, cheap labor immigration. He questions imperialist adventures like the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the destabilization of Syria, and the provocation of Russia. He’s a largely self-funded lone wolf and wild card who cannot be counted to reliably make policy in accord with the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire. And he’s seizing the nomination of a political organization that may have ceased to be a functioning national political party.

Things are different with Hillary. She’s a tried and true operative on behalf of both the nation’s capitalist and imperialist ruling class who sits atop the United States’ only remaining fully effective national and major party – the Democrats. She’s a deeply conservative right-winger on both the domestic and the foreign policy fronts, consistent with the rightward drift of the Democratic Party (and the entire U.S. party system) – a drift that she and her husband helped trail-blaze back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1964, when Mrs. Clinton was 18, she worked for the arch-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Asked about that high school episode on National Public Radio (NPR) in 1996, then First Lady Hillary said “That’s right. And I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with. I don’t recognize this new brand of Republicanism that is afoot now, which I consider to be very reactionary, not conservative in many respects. I am very proud that I was a Goldwater girl.”

It was a telling reflection. The First Lady acknowledged that her ideological world view was still rooted in conservatism of her family of origin. Her problem with the reactionary Republicanism afoot in the U.S. during the middle 1990s was that it was “not conservative in many respects.” She spoke the language not of a liberal Democrat but of a moderate Republican in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon.

The language was a perfect match for Hillary and Bill Clinton’s politico-ideological history and trajectory. After graduating from the venerable ruling class training ground Yale Law School, the Clintons went to Bill’s home state of Arkansas. There they helped “lay…the groundwork for what would eventually hit the national stage as the New Democrat movement, which took institutional form as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)” (Doug Henwood). The essence of the DLC was dismal, dollar-drenched “neoliberal” abandonment of the Democratic Party’s last lingering commitments to labor unions, social justice, civil rights, racial equality, the poor, and environmental protection and abject service to the “competitive” bottom-line concerns of Big Business.

The Clintons helped launch the New (neoliberal corporatist) Democrat juggernaut by assaulting Arkansas’ teacher unions (Hillary led the attack) and refusing to back the repeal of the state’s anti-union “right to work” law – this while Hillary began working for the Rose Law firm, which “represented the moneyed interests of Arkansas” (Henwood). When the Arkansas-based community-organizing group ACORN passed a ballot measure lowering electrical rates residential users and raising them for commercial businesses in Little Rock, Rose deployed Hillary to shoot down the new rate schedule as an unconstitutional “taking of property.” Hillary joined the board of directors at the low wage retail giant Wal-Mart.

During the Clintons’ time in the White House, Bill advanced the neoliberal agenda beneath fake-progressive cover, in ways that no Republican president could have pulled off. Channeling Ronald Reagan by declaring that “the era of big government is over,” Clinton collaborated with the right wing Congress of his time to end poor families’ entitlement to basic minimal family cash assistance. Hillary backed this vicious welfare “reform” (elimination), which has proved disastrous for millions of disadvantaged Americans. Mr. Clinton earned the gratitude of Wall Street and corporate America by passing the arch-global-corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act (which had mandated a necessary separation between commercial deposit and investment banking), and by de-regulating the burgeoning super-risky and high-stakes financial derivatives sector. Hillary took the lead role in the White House’s efforts to pass a corporate-friendly version of “health reform.” Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the “co-presidents” decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care “discussion.” (Barack Obama would do the same thing in 2009.)

The Clinton White House’s hostility to “big government” did not extend to the United States’ giant and globally unmatched mass incarceration state or to its vast global military empire. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill helped expand the chilling expansion of the nation’s mostly Black and Latino prison population. Clinton kept the nation’s “defense” (Empire) budget (a giant welfare program for high-tech military corporations) at Cold War levels despite the disappearance of the United States’ Cold War rival the Soviet Union.

Mrs. Clinton’s service to the rich and powerful has continued into the current millennium. As a U.S. Senator, she did the bidding of the financial industry by voting for a bill designed to make it more difficult for consumers to use bankruptcy laws to get out from crushing debt. As Secretary of State (2009-2012), she repeatedly voiced strong support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a secretive, richly corporatist 12-nation Pacific “free trade” (investor rights) agreement that promises to badly undermine wages, job security, environmental protections, and popular governance at home and abroad. In Australia in November of 2012, she said that “TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements for open free, transparent, [and]fair trade…”

Bernie Sanders supporters like to claim that they’ve been moving the eventual Democratic nominee Hillary “to the left.” But nobody actually moves a dyed-in-the wool Goldman Sachs-neoliberal-top-of-the Ivy League-Council of Foreign Relations Eisenhower Democrat like Hillary or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama to the left. All that might shift somewhat to the portside is such politicians’ purposively deceptive campaign rhetoric. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce knows this very well. A top Chamber lobbyist calmly observed last January that Mrs. Clinton will be on board with the unpopular TPP after the 2016 election. The Chamber understands that she has no choice right now but to pose as an opponent of the measure as part of her unavoidable election year job of impersonating someone who cares about the working class majority.

Nobody grasps the Machiavellian nature of her campaign rhetoric better than Hillary’s Wall Street funders. A report in the widely read insider online Washington political journal Politico last year was titled “Hillary’s Wall Street Backers: ‘We Get It.’” As Politico explained, “Populist rhetoric, many [of those backers] say, is good politics – but doesn’t portend an assault on the rich…It’s ‘just politics,’ said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street…many of the financial-sector donors supporting her …say they’ve been expecting [such rhetoric] all along.” One Democrat at a top Wall Street firm even told Politico that Hillary’s politically unavoidable populist rhetoric “is a Rorschach test for how politically sophisticated [rich] people are…If someone is upset by this it’s because they have no idea how populist the mood of the country still is.”

It’s nothing new. In his bitter and acerbic book on and against the Clintons, No One Left to Lie To (2000), the still left Christopher Hitchens usefully described “the essence of American politics” as “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” It’s a story that goes back as far as the 1820s but nobody has perfected the game more insidiously and effectively in the neoliberal era than the Clinton machine.

Partisan liberal Democrats don’t like to hear it, but, there’s nothing all that surprising about the Koch brothers turning to Hillary over Trump. It’s not at all difficult to believe that Bill Clinton will succeed in his recently reported efforts to court support from other Republican billionaires. It’s not at all surprising that Wall Street and corporate America prefer the good friend they know.

In a subsequent essay, I will show why there’s nothing all that strange or surprising about the support Hillary is getting from foreign policy neoconservatives.

This essay originally appeared on teleSur English.
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Re: Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders,

Postby admin » Sun Oct 30, 2016 12:03 am

Clintonism screwed the Democrats: How Bill, Hillary and the Democratic Leadership Council gutted progressivism
Imagine there's no Clintons. It's easy if you try! Without pernicious DLC, liberalism is a stronger movement today

by Paul Rosenberg
April 30, 2016

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Hillary Clinton today promotes herself as a “reformer with results,” and she’s relied on a widespread impression that she and Bernie Sanders aren’t really that far apart on major issues. After the last round of primaries in the Northeast, she expressed it again:

“Because whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there’s much more that unites us than divides us. We all agree that wages are too low and inequality is too high, that Wall Street can never again be allowed to threaten Main Street, and we should expand Social Security, not cut or privatize it. We Democrats agree that college should be affordable to all, and student debt shouldn’t hold anyone back.”


Of course, it’s not just Democrats. The points she touched on have broad popular support, despite elite hostility, or at best neglect, which is a large part of why Sanders went from 3% support in the polls to near parity in some April polls [FOX, NBC/WSJ, IPSOS/REUTERS].

But Clinton is a skilled politician, so she’s artfully re-aligned herself to blur their differences, with overwhelming support from the elite punditocracy. When the dark side of the Clinton record from 1990s is raised—NAFTA, Defense Of Marriage Act, “welfare reform,” mass incarceration, Wall Street deregulation, etc.—two defenses come readily to mind: “Hillary didn’t do it!/Bill was president” and “times change/you’re forgetting what it was like.”

These are both effective narratives in the establishment echo chamber, which is designed and intended for horse-race politics at the expense of political understanding (as well as factual accuracy). But Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be here today if she hadn’t been aligned with those policies—and with helping to create the environment in which they came to pass. Even before entering the White House with her husband, who had promised voters “two for the price of one” during the 1992 campaign, the pair had cast their lot in with those who moved the party to the right, most notably when Bill Clinton became head of the DLC—the Democratic Leadership Council, or as Jesse Jackson called it, “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”

The DLC was crucial to the Clinton’s rise to power, so it’s absolutely essential to understand it, if one wants to understand their politics—and that of the party they’ve so profoundly reshaped—all the way up through Hillary Clinton’s most recent rearticulation of the day.

An excellent starting point for understanding this comes via the much broader focus of Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers’s book, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics. While the book makes references going back to the Carter era, it opens with a meeting of twenty top Democratic Party fund-raisers three weeks after Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in the 1984 election, where they discussed “1988 and how they could have more policy influence in that campaign, how they might use their fund-raising skills to move the party toward their business oriented, centrist viewpoints,” as the Washington Post reported the next day.

It goes on to describe how, two days later, a closely-related group, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, sponsored a similarly-themed public forum that drew national press attention, dominated by speeches given by Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt and Virginia governor Charles Robb, who, in turn, were also prominent founding members of the Democratic Leadership Council in the following spring, along with Missouri Representative Richard Gephardt and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn:

“The moderate and conservative Democrats didn’t make it past the first round in its primaries in 1984 and we want to change that,” said Nunn, a major Democratic proponent of increased military spending who had backed John Glenn in the 1984 race.


Right Turn makes it abundantly clear that the DLC was just one facet of a much broader mosaic of elite political reorientation—a reorientation profoundly out of step with the American people, as the book also takes pains to point out. Salon contributor Corey Robin recently illuminated this broader elite shift in a blog post, “When Neoliberalism Was Young: A Lookback on Clintonism before Clinton,” citing in particular “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto” by Charles Peters, founder and editor of The Washington Monthly, in which “The basic orientation is announced in the opening paragraph,” Robin notes:

We still believe in liberty and justice for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.


This captures neoliberalism in a nutshell: a disavowal of New Deal liberalism in the posture of open-mindness, which (“Ooops, I did it again!”) repeatedly lends itself to conservative cooptation. It quickly became a popular stance in the Democratic donor class, spread further by the publications they financed and other political infrastructure.

Still, the DLC emerged to play a much more central role than most of the other forces involved, specifically because of Bill Clinton. Al From tells the story like this:

A little after four o’clock on the afternoon of April 6, 1989, I walked into the office of Governor Bill Clinton on the second floor of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” I told Clinton after a few minutes of political chitchat. “If you agree to become chairman of the DLC, we’ll pay for your travel around the country, we’ll work together on an agenda, and I think you’ll be president one day and we’ll both be important.” With that proposition, Clinton agreed to become chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, and our partnership was born.


Clinton was a natural fit for DLC, From said. Both Clintons, in fact:

He was not afraid to challenge old orthodoxies. In the early 1980s, long before I knew him, he and Hillary Clinton pushed cutting-edge education reforms, like pay for performance and public-school choice, against the opposition of the powerful Arkansas Education Association.


Fighting teachers unions! Just like Bernie Sanders, I’m sure!

As far as the DLC was concerned, Joan Walsh put things a little more realistically here in 2003:

Clinton…. took the DLC’s shelves of policy-wonk manifestoes and dark warnings about special-interest politics, and turned it into an agenda for winning elections and governing, with his own charm and his own brand of compromise and conciliation, not DLC founder Al From’s. The DLC thinks it made Bill Clinton, but in fact Clinton made the DLC. Without his charisma and political smarts, its earnest, castor-oil approach to politics and policy would never have won a national election.


The same, of course, is true of Hillary Clinton as well: however smart, educated, and otherwise well-qualified she may be—as much as anyone in her generation, arguably—she would never have been where she is today without her husband’s charisma and political smarts, which in turn undermines her retroactive efforts to disavow the path they blazed together. And that path was “progressive” because From decided to label it so—as push-back against journalists’ more accurate recognition that it represented a conservative force within the Democratic Party. As Paul Star wrote in 2014:

In 1991, Clinton told a DLC conference in Cleveland: “Our New Choice plainly rejects the old ideologies and the false choices they impose. Our agenda isn’t liberal or conservative. It is both, and it is different.” This denial of labels was a way of getting people to listen. Eventually, though, needing a label, From settled on “progressive,” an ironic choice. During the Cold War, “progressive” had meant left of liberal (as in Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party), but it now came to refer vaguely to any viewpoint left of center. From says he called the DLC’s policy arm the Progressive Policy Institute because he was tired of his organization being described by journalists as conservative.


Even the claim of being ‘vaguely left of center’ is a questionable one, considering the vast differences between elite and mass opinion which have so shaken and confused elites this cycle. It’s arguably more instructive to recall that in 1896, running against the Populist/Democratic Party alliance headed by William Jennings Bryant, William McKinley’s big business Republicans successfully portrayed themselves as representing the forces of progress. It’s an extremely ambiguous term, to say the least. Clinton’s description of their agenda as neither liberal nor conservative, but “both” and “different” perfectly exemplifies this ambiguity.

While it’s true the DLC’s formation was born out of a widespread Democratic donor class revolt, and was intended to combat forces pushing the party to the left, that’s not the full story of its genesis, and it’s misleading to ignore that there were some genuinely progressive motivations involved. We need to understand that side of the story, too, if we’re to understand the limitations that live on today in Hillary Clinton’s continuing claims to be a progressive. And for that, we can turn to Mark Schmitt’s look back in 2011, “When the Democratic Leadership Council Mattered,” just after the DLC closed its doors. “The real DLC was far more complicated — though not necessarily more benign — than its caricature in the 2000s, when it became best known for blind support of the Iraq War and for founder Al From’s simmering anger at anti-Iraq War liberals like Howard Dean and Ned Lamont.” Schmitt wrote.

“To understand the real DLC, it’s useful to know the name Gillis Long,” the Louisiana congressman (cousin of the legendary Huey Long) who chaired the House Democratic Caucus after Reagan’s election. “Both DLC co-founder Will Marshall — who now runs the thriving and independent think tank the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) — and From had worked for Long and remained devoted to him after his death, on the day of Reagan’s second inauguration.”

The DLC was, in significant ways, an effort to keep Long’s style of politics alive:

But chasing the chimera of a South that was going to elect more than the occasional Long or [Florida Governor Lawton] Chiles led the DLC into a cul-de-sac, in which the pursuit of white Southern votes became an end in itself, and so the fight to eliminate affirmative action and reform welfare (neither of which would much affect the economic well-being of the working middle class that was already losing ground) became the organization’s touchstone issues in the mid-1990s. Racial politics, not “corporatism,” was the more controversial aspect of the DLC at the time Jesse Jackson called it “Democrats for the Leisure Class.”


Which is why it’s so ironic to see Hillary Clinton depending so heavily minority support (especially Southern blacks) to not only keep her candidacy alive, but also her reputation as a progressive. Schmitt goes on to say, “But at least the organization was thinking about how to construct a working majority with progressive ideas at the heart of it,” but there three distinct problems here: First, how progressive were those ideas? Second, were they really at the heart of what the DLC was doing? And third, what working majority? The third problem is far less subject to obfuscation than the other two: The fact that Democrats lost the House in a landslide two years after Clinton’s election for the first time in 40 years, and held on to it for 12 years after that does not square at all with notion that Clinton “saved the Democratic Party,” or that DLC politics constructed “a working majority with progressive ideas at the heart of it.”

In fact, they did the exact opposite: they destroyed the Democratic House majority which had long been a bastion for progressive ideas and political leaders. That fact alone casts doubts about the whole thrust of the DLC’s progressive claims. After all, if their argument was—like Clinton’s today—that they are pragmatic progressives, then their failure to build an enduring political majority undermines the very core of their argument.

The fact that the same pattern of record-breaking Congressional losses (and state legislative ones as well) repeated itself with Barack Obama should tell us something. Obama had nothing to do with the DLC, directly. But he grew up politically in the world that the DLC did so much to create, and he espoused a similar desire to be neither liberal nor conservative, neither “blue state” nor “red state,” but “both” and “something different.” Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both successful politicians individually, but neither was successful in constructing “a working majority with progressive ideas at the heart of it,” even if you don’t question how progressive their ideas really were. Perhaps the best way to understand their success, as well as the limits of this brand of “progressive ideas” is through analytic lens of Augustus Cochrane III’s 2001 book, Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie.

Cochrane argued that the same sorts of maladies which afflicted the South circa 1950, diagnosed in V.O. Key’s classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation, had come to afflict the nation as a whole. The specific structures might differ—lungs vs gills—but the functions, or dysfunctions were strikingly similar, he argued, with political power held tight by wealthy elites while the majority of voters were confused, disengaged, or entirely absent, with politics serving them primarily as entertainment. In the 1950s-era South, its one party system was functionally a no-party system, operating somewhat differently from state to state. In the country at large, the same result later came from a dealignment of politics—the White House controlled by one party, congress by another—a frequent, but not dominant pattern in American politics until 1968, after which it’s become the normal state of affairs. The intensified role of money and media served to accelerate the breakdown of party bonds and further entrepreneurial politics, in which individual politicians thrive by branding themselves, regardless of how party allies may fare.

This is the environment in which Bill Clinton and Barack Obama proved so successful, even as their parties crumbled. Their branding worked first and foremost with the donor class, and then the broader political elite which provides guidance to the mass public public in ordinary times. But this system fails to really engage the public directly, or respond to their needs, which is why participation falls off so sharply during mid-term elections, leaving the possibility of a working majority—with a well-thought out, reality-based policy agenda—increasingly out of reach.

The DLC brand of progressivism was perfectly crafted within this corrupt system of politics to enable certain individual politicians to succeed with their targeted messages and well-honed promises combining “responsibility” on the one hand an “compassion” on the other. The Clinton’s early 80s fight against the Arkansas teachers union was a textbook example of how this worked, which is why From cited that example as showing that the Clintons were made for the DLC. The problem Cochrane described is not about corrupt individuals, necessarily, but it is about systems in which mass organizations like teachers unions are automatically labeled corrupt. In an upside-down world like that, things are bound to be confusing.

Which is why that world favors clear, crisp messaging more than almost anything else. “Reformer with results” is a powerful branding message, regardless of how meager those results may be, or even how toxic they are now seen to be two decades on down the road. In the end, the real problem with Bill and Hillary Clinton-style progressivism is not only what a mixed bag its results have proven to be. There’s also the further problem of how it muddles our vision of what a truly successful progressive politics might look like. Now, more than ever, we need to go back and ask ourselves, what were the roads not taken? Where could they have lead us instead of here? And how can we create similar alternatives going forward? That’s a conversation we’ve barely even begun to have.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.
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Re: Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders,

Postby admin » Sun Oct 30, 2016 12:15 am

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Re: Swat Team: The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders,

Postby admin » Sun Oct 30, 2016 1:53 am

Progressives’ Case Against Hillary Clinton. The Clintons are right out of “House of Cards” - the Netflix series. The corporate media is in cahoots with her for obvious reasons – she represents corporatocracy, warmongering and globalism.
by Chris Kanthan
October 23, 2016

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About a decade ago, there was a popular book called “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” that talked about how working class and Middle-Class Republicans vote against their self-interest. The observations in that brilliant book can very well be applied to liberals who are now voting for Hillary Clinton – a Neoliberal corporatist and a warmonger. Perhaps there will soon be a book called “What’s the Matter with California?”

For a long time, country club Republicans knew how to manipulate ordinary conservative voters using emotional wedge issues such as “God, Guns and Gays.” Using meaningless trigger words such as freedom, liberty, smaller government and bigger tax cuts, clever politicians got people to vote for them. But people actually ended up with freedom infringed, liberty crippled, money stolen and government bloated.

The same thing is happening to progressives in America. Corporate Democrats are funded by the same banks, corporations and the oligarchs as the Republicans. The politicians just had to choose different trigger words to appeal to the various groups on the left. Democrats have a little more work to do since they have to tailor the messages for different demographics – women, blacks, Latinos, LGBT etc.

Let’s start with what Hillary Clinton stands for. She is pro-Wall Street, pro-Big Pharma, pro-Monsanto, pro-Fracking, pro-Big Media, pro-globalism, pro-TPP (yes, she is) and pro-military industrial complex. She is funded by the 0.1% and will rule for the 0.1%.

She can say whatever and read whatever speeches her staff writes for her, but as she said in one of her speeches behind closed doors, politicians “need a private and a public opinion on policies.” In other words, it’s okay to lie to get votes.

She and her husband made $150 million in “speeches” from global corporations, banks and governments since they left the White House. Hillary Clinton will also have spent close to $1 billion of other people’s money in this election cycle by Nov 8. None of this charity. This is an investment by the Establishment. They would want at least 10,000% return on their investment.

Economy

In her paid speeches, Hillary was gushing with love and friendship for Wall Street (“I Had Great Relations [with Wall Street] And Worked So Close Together After 9/11 To Rebuild Downtown; I Have A Lot Of Respect For The Work You Do And The People Who Do It.”) She made fun of Wall Street reforms such as Frank-Dodd and said that best people to regulate Wall Street are … the people from Wall Street! Clinton even sympathized with them by saying “there is a bias against successful people with complicated lives.” See, making billions of dollars by manipulating the stock market is a bit complicated!

When it comes to environment and climate change, Hillary was a different person while talking to oil companies. She made it clear she was very pro-Fracking and said the environmentalists should “get a life.” Really! As for fossil fuel, while Keystone Pipeline was being debated her State Department, banks representing it gave Bill Clinton $1 million for “speeches.” This is not a progressive.

In other private speeches to donors, she supported cutting social security benefits and raising the retirement age (“Simpson Bowles” proposal) and said she is “far removed from the struggles of Middle Class.” You can read a summary of her “problematic” words from her speeches in this WikiLeaks page (put together by her staff earlier this year).

In those same speeches, Hillary said her dream is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” However people spin it, this means equalization of wages across the Americas. Under this plan, economics and the ideology of “one world” dictate that more American jobs will flee and wages will shrink for most people. This is, of course, a wonderful scenario for corporations and banks which can buy up all their counterparts in Latin America.

In that Clintonian world, everyone in North and South America has their money in Citibank, shops at Walmart, eats Monsanto/Bayer GMO food, depends on Rx drugs from Merck, watches the same TV and gets the same curated search results from Google that says it’s all wonderful. Of course, WikiLeaks will be blocked and NSA will be monitoring everyone from Canada to Chile. And if people get restless, there will always be wars with China and Russia to suppress any dissent.

Foreign Policy

Clinton recently tweeted, “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who are.” We can see that she walks with all the big banks and global corporations. She also walks with Neocons and the architects of Iraq war such as Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz who are openly supporting her.

Under Secretary Hillary Clinton, US arms sales to other countries exploded. In just two years (Oct 2010 thru Sept 2012), she approved weapons sales of more than $165 billion, much too controversial and authoritarian regimes. She even approved chemical weapons to Bahrain which ruthlessly puts down democratic uprisings.

She talks in public about defeating ISIS, but in her private emails, she admits that Saudi Arabia and Qatar fund ISIS. These are the same countries that have given tens of millions of dollars to Clinton Foundation. This is beyond ridiculous.

Hillary Clinton as a President will definitely mean war with Russia and/or China. Without most Americans realizing, America has been at a proxy war with Syria for the last five years. Now it has escalated to a very serious level. Hillary Clinton played a major role in the destruction of Libya and then laughed about it. Now, a once wealthy and stable nation is in ruins, ruled by jihadists and ISIS. (You can read about the details of war in Syria and the rise of ISIS in my previous articles – Part I and Part II).

In one of her secret speeches, Hillary said she could rename Pacific Ocean as American Sea which will extend from California to the Philippines, thus openly advocating arrogant imperialism. In the same speech, she said – bizarrely – that the U.S. discovered Japan!

In a recent campaign speech, Hillary threatened Russia that any cyber attack will be treated as a full-fledged military attack. This is a mad statement for two reasons: one, it’s easy to spoof the origin of a cyber attack; two, the U.S./NSA has hacked into (and still does) emails and cell phones of many foreign leaders including Germany and Brazil. Spying is a part of geopolitical reality. In fact, more than any other country, Israel spies on and steals information from the U.S.

Email Scandal

Switching from policies, Hillary Clinton’s character and judgment have to be questioned. Her story about emails is so outrageous that one has to be a hardcore party loyalist to believe it. She deleted 30,000 emails and said they were “personal.” In 4 years, that comes to 7,500 personal emails per year or about 4 personal emails every work-hour. This is unacceptable for any employee at any job. But that false claim is moot, since the FBI has already recovered about 5,600 emails which were all work-related. Fortunately for her, those won’t be released until after the election.

She got the subpoena for her emails on March 4, 2015. The emails were deleted about three weeks later (the famous “oh sh*t” moment described by her IT staff). Any normal person will be charged with destruction of evidence for such an action. New WikiLeaks emails also show that she had deleted all her emails to/from Obama but never told the public or the FBI about it. Her emails to Sidney Blumenthal about Benghazi were also conveniently considered “personal” and deleted.

Hillary also lied about using only one device at a time while she had used Blackberries and iPads at the same time. Her blatant disregard to security protocols is shocking. Her email was simply available on the web by going to “clintonmail.com”! Anyone who could hack the password had full access to all her emails. Don’t be surprised if those deleted emails come out in the next couple of weeks! There are numerous other questions any reasonable person could ask about her emails.

The bottom line is that those deleted emails will land her in trouble, whether they are about Benghazi or the Clinton Foundation donors seeking/acknowledging favors.

Clinton Foundation

The talking points in much of mainstream media are about how great Clinton Foundation is. Even assuming that it’s a good charity, one cannot deny the conflict of interest and the conspicuous pay-for-play scheme involved with Clinton Foundation and the multitude of associated organizations (Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton Health Access Initiative and dozen others).

In case after case, when some country had a case pending with Hillary’s State Department, this is what happened:

Step 1: The country gives a large donation to Clinton Foundation or pays hefty fees to Bill Clinton for speeches

Step 2: Favorable rulings come from the State Department

There is no solid proof for quid pro quo, but anyone with a basic understanding of politics and real life can see through these shenanigans.

Some quick examples of pay for play:

• Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and other authoritarian regimes gave money after which arms deals were approved.
• Qatar gave Bill Clinton $1 million as a “birthday gift”
• South Sudan got increased military aid and their use of child soldiers was ignored after hefty donations.
• Morocco gave $12 million to CGI and $10 million to Clinton Foundation. In return, Hillary forgave Morocco’s human rights violations, helped Morocco get $92 million in loans from U.S. Import-Export bank, approved massive arms deals, and then held the CGI convention in Morocco
• Hillary refused to label Boko Haram as a terrorist group after Nigeria’s billionaire took care of Bill Clinton with $1.4 million for two speeches.
• UBS (Swiss Bank) had tens of thousands of illegal accounts that IRS wanted to investigate. UBS gave Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speeches and then Hillary flew to Switzerland and met with IRS investigators and rescued UBS.
• Canadian billionaire Frank Giustra has done numerous deals leveraging the Clintons, including the infamous acquisition of rights to U.S. Uranium by Russian corporations. Just Google “Frank Giustra Clinton Foundation” and you will find enough stories to read over a weekend.

Clinton Foundation spends money like no other charity. For example, in 2014, it spent $20 million on “travel and conferences.” This was more than 1/5th of its total spending that year. This is one example of how the Clintons created their loyal network in the media and the government. These meetings were great opportunities for super-rich people to schmooze and special interests to lobby Hillary’s State Department. The donors also took up more than half of Secretary Hillary’s calendar for phone calls and private meetings. Pay for play.

But didn’t the Clinton Foundation do great charity work? One of the Foundation’s most touted work is giving drugs to AIDS patients. However, that money really comes from the U.N. as well as airlines that levy a special tax on passengers. Never mind this program is also a boost in sales and profits for the drug companies.

Conclusion

The Clintons are right out of “House of Cards” – the Netflix series. The corporate media is in cahoots with her for obvious reasons – she represents corporatocracy, warmongering and globalism. WikiLeaks clearly shows how the DNC rigged the primaries to defeat Bernie Sanders. Another undercover video shows NYC Election Commissioner talking about people being put in buses and taken to multiple poll sites to vote repeatedly. The only reason that liberals could vote for Hillary Clinton is fear of Donald Trump. However, this is the kind of logic that prevents any true progressive leader from ever winning. The only way to get a true progressive and a moral representative of the 99% … is to not vote for Hillary Clinton. Vote for Jill Stein or write in Bernie Sanders. This is the year to send a clear message that a corrupt puppet backed by $1 billion of special interests’ money cannot buy this election. This is the year to prevent major global wars that are guaranteed to happen under Madam President Hillary Clinton.
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