Cataloging the Bern: Reasoned and Also Unabashedly Pro-Sanders Web Links

A special guest post by H. Flannery

I am a left-wing American. I am liberal on social issues and progressive on economic issues. I believe that if we can move our country more in the direction of a social democracy like Canada or Britain, that would be a good thing.

I also used to pride myself on being a strictly rational, pragmatic voter. Wearing my political science BA like a badge, I was painfully intellectual about my electoral decisions. I held my nose over and over again to vote for candidates I didn't believe in all that much because I thought it was the smartest, most practical decision at the time.

But after my Senator, Paul Wellstone, died in 2002, leaving a huge gaping hole in the fiery liberal national legislator category, I knew that I had to start voting with my heart. I was sick of my realpolitik behavior resulting in leaders who cared more about their own careers than about the people they were representing, who got us deeper and deeper into unending wars, and who paid lip service to, but did next to nothing about, inequality, human rights, and environmental destruction.

The best candidate, though, of course, is still one I can vote for with both my heart and my head at the same time. I believe that Bernie Sanders is that kind of candidate.

I have strong opinions about the 2016 presidential race. I have difficulty articulating them in person and feel I can do so more effectively in writing. But I also have found that pretty much everything I want to say...someone else has already said, and often better than I would have. I've read reams of well-written and/or well-argued articles about various aspects of Bernie Sanders' career and platform, Hillary Clinton's career and platform, and the Democratic nominees' race in general.

So many articles, in fact, that when I wanted to find one in particular, it was almost impossible to remember where it was and who wrote it. So, in the hopes that it speeds others' information-gathering and the dissemination of crucial pre-primary voting opinion pieces, I have cataloged several of my favorites here by topic.

Effectiveness and That Oft-Discussed but Ill-Defined Ability to "Reach Across the Aisle"

One of Clinton's most powerful tactics in the run-up to the primaries has been to make voters (and the mainstream media) question whether or not Bernie would be "effective" if he was elected. The presumption is that since he is so radical, the Republicans would block him at every turn, and he would get nothing done.

First, with all the talk about revolution and effectiveness and whatnot, what gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that Bernie Sanders has been in elected office since 1981, and has been in the U.S. Congress for the past 26 years. During that time he has worked effectively with both Democrats and Republicans to get bills passed. Sanders not only knows how to make fiery speeches, but he also knows perfectly well how to play the political negotiation game. As journalist Zaid Jilani said in an article on AlterNet:

The problem with this narrative is that it is completely false. Not only has Sanders gotten a lot more things done than Clinton did in her own short legislative career, he's actually one of the most effective members of Congress, passing bills, both big and small, that have reshaped American policy on key issues like poverty, the environment and health care.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-gets-it-done-sanders-record-pushing-through-major-reforms-will-surprise-you

Second, a Republican Congress will be just as obstructionist against Clinton, if not more so. They have already proven this in the past with other moderate Democrats, such as her husband and Obama, and against Clinton herself when they sunk her health care plan. The idea that Congressional Republicans will suddenly want to compromise with Hillary Clinton—someone they have been spewing particularly nasty vitriol about for decades—is a little hard to believe. As Bill Curry, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, said in a recent piece in Salon:

The core of Clinton's realpolitik brief pertains not to electability but to governance. Her point is that Sanders is naïve. She says none of his proposals can get though a Republican Congress. She strongly implies that he'd roll back Obamacare, a charge that is false, cynical and so nonsensical she'll have to stop making it soon. She says she has a plan to get to universal health care—she doesn't—and that she'll do it by working "in partnership" with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Who's being naïve here? A Republican Congress won't pass any of her ideas either. The only way to get real change is to elect Democrats to Congress and have a grass-roots movement strong enough to keep the heat on them. Nor will insurers cough up a dime of profit without a fight. Vowing to spare us a "contentious debate" over single-payer care she ignores the admonition of Frederick Douglass; "Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/07/its_almost_over_for_hillary_this_election_is_a_mass_insurrection_against_a_rigged_system/

Third, following up on the last point Curry made, we will never get progressive goals achieved if we continue to start negotiating from the middle. For the past thirty years, since Ronald Reagan was president, the Republicans have pursued a unified, consistent, overt strategy in which they introduce increasingly outrageously right-wing bills, and do not compromise until they get them passed. They are not in the least embarrassed to even go so far as to shut down the government if they need to.

Moderate Democrats have reacted to this strategy by surrendering: moving to the center and often the center-right in an attempt to get anything passed. We must stop playing this game. And I believe that Sanders is far more likely to be able to pull the debate back towards the left—both because of where he will start and where he will be willing to fight to end up. As Ben Jealous, the former director of the NAACP, said on Democracy Now:

There are some things that she’ll be able to get done—simply because she’ll capitulate. But the reality is that nobody says that the Republicans can’t—that their idealists can’t get things done. And game recognizes game. We need our idealists there, so that when they compromise, it’s an actual compromise. 

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/9/hillary_clinton_the_mass_incarceration_machine

To some extent, however, all of these arguments are irrelevant. Because even if Clinton turned out to be the most effective president of all time—meaning that she was able to get everything she wanted unaltered through a Republican House and Senate—I do not believe that she would bring up, much less fight passionately and resolutely for, the issues I care about the most and believe are the most necessary for the health of our nation and our world. Her record does not support it, and I believe that her massive fees from corporations and campaign contributions from corporate lobbyists would severely inhibit it. A few examples follow below.

Foreign Policy: Diplomacy and War

Another major Clinton hit on Sanders has been that he doesn't have much foreign policy experience. It is true that he hasn't seemed as well prepared to talk about it in the debates. But there is a strong argument to be made that Sanders actually has quite a bit of foreign policy experience from his work on the national stage in the House and Senate over the past 26 years.

And even if a President Sanders came into office with less foreign policy experience than some candidates, it doesn't mean that he wouldn't be able to pursue a fair, strong, smart foreign policy—one that I believe would be far more accountable and pragmatic, and far less warlike, than what we have seen in the past three administrations.

Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reagan, wrote a great article about this topic for Politico. In it, he points out how (a) other presidents had even less experience when they were elected (like Obama); (b) other presidents have been pretty vague on their foreign policy plans when they were running (like Eisenhower); and (c) other presidents with not that much foreign policy experience have nevertheless become very effective in that department by gathering an experienced and diverse group of advisers around them (like Obama and [Bill] Clinton). As Korb says,

In my dealings with him, and in analyzing his record in Congress over the past 25 years, I have found that Sanders has taken balanced, realistic positions on many of the most critical foreign policy issues facing the country. In the mold of realists like Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, Sanders voted against the invasion of Iraq in 2002, while wisely supporting the war against Afghanistan in 2001 and the intervention in the Balkans in 1990s. And Sanders certainly isn't a foreign policy lightweight: In fact, given his long tenure in the House and Senate, he has more foreign policy experience than Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama did when they were running for office the first time.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-foreign-poicy-213619

As far as Clinton goes…it is important to remember that it is not just experience that makes a good leader. It is also judgment.

During her tenure as Senator and then as Secretary of State, Clinton demonstrated that she is a committed, consistent hawk—in spite of the fact that her militarism almost always created more problems than it solved, and led to diminishing respect of the United States by our allies. In country after country, she pushed for CIA and/or military intervention over diplomatic solutions, even when her own past experience should have shown her that this approach was likely to lead to even greater instability.

Conn Hallinan wrote an article on CommonDreams.org that lists, by nation, the human and diplomatic costs of the various wars Clinton pushed for and/or managed as Secretary of State. In it, Hallinan talks about Hard Choices, Clinton's autobiography of that time:

Hard Choices covers her years as secretary of state and seemingly unconsciously tracks a litany of American foreign policy disasters: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Georgia, Ukraine, and the "Asia pivot" that's dangerously increased tensions with China.

At the heart of Hard Choices is the ideology of "American exceptionalism," which for Clinton means the right of the U.S. to intervene in other countries at will. As historian Jackson Lears, in the London Review of Books, puts it, Clinton's memoir "tries to construct a coherent rationale for an interventionist foreign policy and to justify it with reference to her own decisions as Secretary of State. The rationale is rickety: the evidence unconvincing."

…The one act on her part for which she shows any regret is her vote to invade Iraq. But even here she quickly moves on, never really examining how it is that the U.S. had the right to invade and overthrow a sovereign government. For Clinton, Iraq was only a "mistake" because it came out badly.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/03/adding-costs-hillary-clintons-wars

Jeffrey Sachs, an economic adviser to the UN Secretary General, wrote a recent article for the Huffington Post that goes into the consequences of some of her foreign policy "initiatives" in even more detail:

Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Hillary's relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration [that] Assad must "get out of the way," backed by secret CIA operations.

Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war, and no place poses a great[er] threat to US security. More than 10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/hillary-is-the-candidate_b_9168938.html

To me, there was no better confirmation of how far apart she and I are on foreign policy than when she was recently praised by Henry Kissinger for her foreign policy expertise. Dan Froomkin of The Intercept recently wrote about what Kissinger's support for Clinton reveals about the Democratic hawk/dove divide:

Clinton and Sanders stand on opposite sides of that divide. One represents the hawkish Washington foreign policy establishment, which reveres and in some cases actually works for Kissinger. The other represents the marginalized non-interventionists, who can't possibly forgive someone with the blood of millions of brown people on his hands.

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/henry-kissingers-war-crimes-are-central-to-the-divide-between-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders/

Economic Inequality, Campaign Finance Reform, and Wall Street

If you've heard one or two or five of Sanders' stump speeches, you know by now that economic issues are right smack in his wheelhouse. He cares deeply about the negative effects of economic inequality on our country and has spent his entire political life trying to beat back the forces that would increase that inequality to the point of oligarchy.

Sanders believes that the presence of corporate money in politics corrupts elected officials, and that it results in laws that protect the most wealthy while leaving increasing numbers of people of color, working-class people, youth, the elderly, the disabled, and a whole host of other less powerful demographic groups deeper in debt. Throughout his entire career, he has been passionate, vocal, and, yes, effective in fighting for policies that would reverse this.

And, as he loves to explain, he has refused all big-money contributions from corporations and special interests, raising money from individual human beings with an average contribution of $27.

Clinton, on the other hand, has received massive campaign contributions from PACs, super PACs, and corporate lobbyists. All campaign contribution data is publicly available, and you can research it in detail at OpenSecrets.org; it is very interesting to see the amounts and types of donations behind not only Sanders and Clinton, but all the candidates running for president this year. Clinton's campaign has so far received the most money from commercial banks, hedge funds and private equity firms, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies of any candidate for president in 2016 (including any of the Republicans).

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/select-industries.php

To me, as to Sanders, this is cause for concern. When you receive enormous campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies, you might just be a bit tempted to temper your health care plan to include higher prescription costs. When you receive enormous campaign contributions from Wall Street banks, you might just be a bit tempted to be lax in regulating them, and to be more lenient on their executives personally when they commit crimes. And when you receive enormous campaign contributions from fossil fuel industries, you might just be a bit tempted to weaken your environmental agency's regulatory ability and to temper your energy policy to emphasize coal and natural gas rather than solar and wind.

That is the purpose of lobbying. That is why corporations pay the money.

Clinton has said in the debates that her policies are in no way influenced by her corporate contributions. She says that she confronted Wall Street banks about the activities that led to the housing crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-2009, that she told them to "cut it out," that she will prevent them from doing something like that again, and that she is the only one who knows how to do so. But as Jeff Gerth writes in Politico, that is something of a disingenuous characterization of what she actually told the bankers (he links to a video of her speech to them in his article). And as far as her follow-up legislation to curb Wall Street's behavior goes, Gerth says:

During 2007 and 2008, when the housing market collapsed and while she was also running for president, the Democrats controlled the Senate. Of the 140 bills Clinton introduced during that period, five were related to housing finance or foreclosures, according to congressional records, including one aimed at making it easier for homeowners facing foreclosure to get their loans modified. Only one of the five secured any co-sponsors—New York Sen. Charles Schumer signed onto a bill that would have helped veterans refinance their mortgages.

…No Senate committee took action on any of the bills, and they died without further discussion.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-told-wall-street-to-cut-it-out-not-so-much-the-record-shows-213363

Clinton also somehow managed to miss all of the votes on Dodd-Frank (the one major bill that was passed to regulate Wall Street after the crash), except for the last ceremonial vote to support it after it had already passed.

It is also worth asking, if what she says is true, why then is she not pushing for any of the executives at any of the banks involved to be personally held to account in any way?

Sanders has also raised the issue of how Clinton has enriched not only her campaign but herself personally through hefty corporate speaking fees. Since she left the government in 2013, she has earned $21 million from private lectures given to corporations. Eight of these lectures were given to major Wall Street banks, including UBS, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs, all of which have been documented by CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-paid-speeches/index.html

She has responded that raising this issue is a "smear," that Sanders is insinuating that her positions have been compromised by these payments, and that she has not changed one vote because of her cozy relationship to Wall Street. Leaving aside the fact that she probably did change at least one vote because of it…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/02/09/elizabeth-warrens-critique-of-hillary-clintons-2001-bankruptcy-vote/

…she never addresses the issue that this practice is, indeed, an enormous conflict of interest. Accepting millions of dollars from an industry makes you, at best, more aware of their concerns, more willing to sit down with them and to hear them out, and more likely to want to avoid conflict with them than you might be with their opponents. At worst, it can lead to you altering your behavior to avoid jeopardizing potential future streams of money.

On a related note, it can also be interesting (and telling) to realize the relative financial situations of the candidates themselves. Marc Priester wrote a great investigative piece on this for Inequality.org, in which he says:

This public concern over Clinton's relationship with the financial industry speaks to more than the issue of campaign contributions. Average Americans are worrying today about the power and influence wealthy Americans, especially wealthy white males, have over the political class. Our political leaders themselves too often appear to be part of this same white male economic elite.

The 2016 presidential candidates may be more diverse by race, gender, and class than candidates in the past. But that's not saying much. According to Forbes, six of the remaining 10 major contenders have fortunes worth at least $20 million. … Outside of Sanders and Senator Rubio, every candidate in the top tier has a personal fortune worth at least $3 million.

http://inequality.org/inequality-political-class/

Black Lives Matter & Issues of Race

Sanders has been oddly ineffective in the debates in articulating his long-standing support for civil rights and his lifelong history of passing legislation that disproportionately benefits people of color. Going back to the 1960s, Sanders has been on the right side of the fight for racial justice, participating in protest marches and serving as chairman of his university's chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), as Tim Murphy writes in Mother Jones:

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2016/02/bernie-sanders-core-university-chicago

Sanders' problem may be that he seems to be impatient with policy that specifically addresses issues of race, rather than addressing issues affecting the working poor in general. Sanders' approach is what Ta-Nehisi Coates describes as "universalist." That is, in Sanders' view, overt racism has led to a more subtle institutional racism in which our economic system is rigged against people of color, who therefore disproportionately suffer the results of that unequal system, so if we reduce inequality in general, we don't need to address racial inequality with specific legislation.

Although this may, in fact, be logically true, it doesn't resonate with many Black listeners, who are asking for more explicit awareness of racial issues (not just economic ones) in his talking points. Coates addressed this frustration in an interview on Democracy Now in which he said that he is voting for Sanders, and believes he is the best candidate, in spite of Sanders' opposition to reparations:

One can be very, very critical of Senator Sanders on this specific issue. One can say Senator Sanders should have more explicit antiracist policy within his racial justice platform, not just more general stuff, and still cast a vote for Senator Sanders and still feel that Senator Sanders is the best option that we have in the race.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/10/ta_nehisi_coates_is_voting_for

In contrast, Clinton has gotten comparatively little criticism and a great deal of support from the Black community. What is baffling about this is that the Clintons' legacy is actually quite disappointing when it comes to what it did for Black Americans—from criminal justice reform to welfare reform to education reform. As Michelle Alexander wrote in an article in The Nation:

To make matters worse, the federal safety net for poor families was torn to shreds by the Clinton administration in its effort to "end welfare as we know it." In his 1996 State of the Union address, given during his re-election campaign, Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over" and immediately sought to prove it by dismantling the federal welfare system known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The welfare-reform legislation that he signed—which Hillary Clinton ardently supported then and characterized as a success as recently as 2008—replaced the federal safety net with a block grant to the states, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added work requirements, barred undocumented immigrants from licensed professions, and slashed overall public welfare funding by $54 billion (some was later restored).

…To be fair, the Clintons now feel bad about how their politics and policies have worked out for black people. Bill says that he "overshot the mark" with his crime policies; and Hillary has put forth a plan to ban racial profiling, eliminate the sentencing disparities between crack and cocaine, and abolish private prisons, among other measures.

But what about a larger agenda that would not just reverse some of the policies adopted during the Clinton era, but would rebuild the communities decimated by them? If you listen closely here, you'll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie's rhetoric because we must be "pragmatic," "face political realities," and not get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win. When politicians start telling you that it is "unrealistic" to support candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages, universal healthcare, and an end to corporate control of our political system, it's probably best to leave the room.

http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/

Women's Issues

I have a hard time imagining what could be more offensive to women than the way Clinton and her supporters have been trying to get women to vote for her. It is as if she expects women to vote for her just because she is a woman, not because she is the best candidate for the job. It is amazing to me that Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Gloria Steinem, of all people, would imply that women are not smart enough about politics to figure out for themselves where their best interests really lie. As Sarah Lazare explained for AlterNet:

Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, introduced Clinton in New Hampshire on Saturday by declaring, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other!"

…Meanwhile, speaking with HBO's "Real Time" host Bill Maher on Friday, feminist icon Gloria Steinem claimed that young women are backing presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in order to meet guys. Women get "more activist as they grow older," she said. "And when you're younger, you think: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.'" Steinem later apologized for the comment on her Facebook page, writing that she "misspoke."

Nonetheless, the statement rightfully provoked rebuke, including from some who grew up respecting Steinem. "The good news is that more and more of us are ready to change the whole system, and fewer and fewer are willing to believe that imperial feminism is the best we can do," declared Philadelphia-based writer Sarah Grey.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/dear-hillary-madeline-and-gloria-full-feminism-demands-we-say-no-americas-deadly

What troubles me about Clinton's feminism is that it appears to be a feminism of the elite. It is a feminism that focuses on important issues, yes—like abortion rights and breaking through the glass ceiling—but issues that tend to be the top concerns of white upper- and middle-class women. Clinton either pays lip service to or virtually ignores issues that are of great concern to working class women and women of color, such as achieving pay equity, raising the minimum wage, lowering health care costs, and reducing college debt. (All of which are issues that Sanders has fought for robustly.)

Journalist Liza Featherstone articulated all of this in her article in The Nation and in a follow-up appearance on Democracy Now. She talked about how Clinton was on the board of Walmart for years and still will not comment about how that company's practices during her time on the board were later the target of the largest sex discrimination suit in history. Featherstone's reporting also reveals other ways in which Clinton's record is not the most supportive of working-class women:

As first lady of Arkansas, [Clinton] led the efforts by her husband's administration to weaken teachers' unions and scapegoat teachers—most of them women, large numbers of them black—for problems in the education system, implementing performance measures and firings that set a punitive tone for education reform nationwide. Rather than trying to walk this back, Clinton recently said that as president, she would close any public school "that wasn't doing a better than average job." … And lest you think Clinton's financial hawkishness is reserved for K–12, she also opposes free college tuition, though the United States is the only country where students—57 percent of them women—are saddled with decades of debt as the price of attaining higher education. Defending this position, Clinton recently said that it was important for people seeking a college degree to have "skin in this game."

It would be hard to imagine a bigger blow to the material well-being of poor women in America than President Bill Clinton's move in 1996 to "end welfare as we know it" by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. As first lady, Hillary wasn't a mere spectator to this; within the White House, she advocated harsher policies like ending traditional welfare, even as others in the administration, like Labor Secretary Robert Reich, proposed alternatives. Clinton defended her preferred policies by demonizing mothers struggling to get by as "deadbeats" who were "sitting around the house doing nothing." ... Asked recently to comment on this legacy, Hillary declined. And while the last Clinton administration claimed that it would offset welfare reductions with pressure to raise wages (the majority of low-wage workers in this country are women), and while a growing movement is demanding a $15 minimum wage, Clinton has made it clear that $12 is just fine with her.

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-this-socialist-feminist-is-not-voting-for-hillary/

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/19/clinton_vs_sanders_who_do_progressives

Electability in the General Election

"Non-electability" is another one of those seemingly powerful issues that Clinton has hit Sanders with again and again. But the numbers don't necessarily back it up. In the majority of mainstream media polls, Sanders has, in general, a better chance against the leading Republican contenders.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/02/08/would-bernie-sanders-get-blown-out-in-november-this-political-scientist-doesnt-think-so/

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/poll-sanders-outperforms-clinton-matchup-against-trump-n498076

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-5565.html

I Support Bernie Sanders, and I'm Not Stupid or Unrealistic

And, finally, after all the debating is over…

http://codygough.com/2016/01/27/i-support-bernie-sanders-and-im-not-stupid-or-unrealistic/

I believe that it is important to vote with information and intelligence. I also believe that it is important to vote with idealism, with passion, and with your heart. I will be doing both on Super Tuesday.