Replies to post #235064 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

LOLOL USA is vibrantly moving, Australia same old fuddy duddy conservatism reigns ..

This Is How Australians Reacted To The Historic U.S. Marriage Equality Decision

“I now have the legal right to marry my fiancee in the most rural county of Mississippi or Alabama. But not Melbourne.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/aussies-react-to-us-equality#.peKJYVO1n

Chuckle, good one Bernie, you got the three.

[StephanieVanbryce]

Bernie Sanders Will End the IMF's Economic Violence in Greece and Africa

Robert Naiman
Published on
Sunday, July 05, 2015


"We should recognize and publicize the fact that Bernie Sanders is the only presidential candidate who is talking about what the IMF is doing to Greece, the only presidential candidate who has a track record of opposing the IMF, the only presidential candidate who, if elected, is likely to do anything to end the economic violence of the IMF," Naiman writes.

Many people want to know more about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' foreign policy agenda. Yes, they say, we like what Sanders is saying about reducing extreme inequality, about reducing the political power of the billionaire class. But what about U.S. foreign policy? Yes, they say, Bernie voted no on the Iraq war; yes, they acknowledge, Sanders supports the Iran deal. But we're spending more than half of our federal income tax dollars on the Pentagon's empire, money we should be spending on rebuilding our nation's domestic infrastructure. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," Dr. King said. What's Bernie going to do about that?

I'm all for pushing Bernie to talk more about downsizing the Pentagon to be an institution focused on actually defending the United States, as opposed to running around the world overthrowing other people's governments - a Pentagon that "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," as President John Quincy Adams put it.

But we should also take advantage of the new opportunity that now presents itself; it's not only with bombs that U.S. foreign policy kills and injures innocent civilians.

We should recognize and publicize the fact that Bernie Sanders is the only presidential candidate who is talking about what the IMF is doing to Greece, the only presidential candidate who has a track record of opposing the IMF, the only presidential candidate who, if elected, is likely to do anything to end the economic violence of the IMF.

In his historic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, Jesse Jackson often invoked the theme of "economic violence":

Economic violence is the critical issue of our day. When plants close on workers without notice, and leave them without jobs or training for new jobs - that's economic violence. When three to five million Americans are on the streets and homeless - that's economic violence. When merger maniacs make windfall profits and top management is given excessive bonuses, golden parachutes to aid a soft landing, while workers are asked to take a wage cut, a benefit cut and a job loss, a crash landing - that's economic violence. When our children are victimized with poor health care, poor education, poor housing, poor diets and more - that's economic violence against our children.

Jesse Jackson was talking about U.S. domestic policy. But others have used the idea to talk about the IMF:

Hundreds of campaigners are marching in Prague as the main policy-making body of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) begins a meeting to discuss debt relief. They want the IMF and its sister organisation, the World Bank, to cancel altogether debts owed to them by the poorest countries.

The protesters are staging a "funeral" procession through Czech capital to highlight their view that 7 million children a year die because of the debt crisis.

Jubliee 2000, which is organising the march, says it will be totally non-violent and that it is committed to peaceful protest.

"We condemn violence, both the violence which ends in broken windows, and the violence that kills 19,000 children a day," the group's UK director Ann Pettifor told the BBC. [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/939674.stm ]

The IMF is not "over there." The IMF is headquartered in Washington, physically, politically and financially. A progressive economist once reported that he was at a seminar at the IMF, where a senior IMF official was indignant that people were saying that IMF is unaccountable. The IMF official demanded to know: why do people always accuse us of being unaccountable? We never do anything without checking with the U.S. Treasury Department!

Until now, unfortunately, Congressional Democrats have been largely content to let Treasury to run the show at the IMF without the input of real Democrats.

The IMF is now doing to Greece what the IMF has been doing to Africa since the 1980s and what the IMF did to South America until the progressive governments there kicked the IMF out. The IMF is a member of the "troika" of official creditors that have been making extreme austerity demands on the Greek government and are now openlydemanding "regime change" in Greece before there can be any deal that ends the crisis in Greece that the troika has imposed.

(Some people complain that we shouldn't blame the IMF for what is being done to Greece; they say that some other institution or actor is more responsible. These people want us to play "accountability whack-a-mole" with the institutions. We need to hold the institutions "jointly and severally liable"; and the IMF is the bad actor in the troika for whom Americans have the most responsibility.)

Bernie Sanders is the only presidential candidate who is speaking out about this. In Congress, it's the progressive Democrats - including Sanders - who are speaking out about this.

U.S. support for the IMF is more politically fragile than many people realize. Many Congressional Republicans hate the IMF, in significant measure because they see the IMF as a Democrat-supported taxpayer-financed slush fund to bail out big private banks when their international bets go bad (which assessment is quite correct.) Without the support of Congressional Democrats, the IMF is dead meat in Washington. Whenever the IMF wants more money from Washington, there's a campaign to trick low-information Democrats into believing that the IMF is "foreign aid," so that Democrats will support it.

When more Democrats own the fact that the IMF agenda is the NAFTA-WTO-TPP agenda with a European internationalist smiley face mask pasted on, the IMF will be on a fast train to the dustbin of history. And this is not necessarily a remote prospect - the fact that this is the fundamental identity of the IMF is well known among labor activists, for example.

AFL-CIO chief economist William Spriggs recently wrote:[ http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Global-Action/Economics-as-Religion ]

In the U.S. we must take the side of Greece in this fight. It is in our interest, as the immediate problem of the instability this is causing is a rising dollar that will hurt U.S. exports and jobs. And, we can never be sure of the interrelated nature of financial collapses since so much of the banking sector remains in the shadows; with global derivatives trading at values greater than global output.

More importantly, we must also revolt against this economic order. It is the same order that saved JP Morgan Chase, but let Detroit and now Puerto Rico fail. It is the same religion that would sacrifice the earnings of American students with rising student debt and de-invest in public higher education. It is the same religion that would sacrifice American jobs and labor standards and back the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must see these as the same struggle to restore sanity and purpose to role of government and its servant, the economy.

This is why supporters of the IMF should be very afraid that Bernie Sanders and progressive Democrats are denouncing what the IMF is doing to Greece. You can add your voice here.

I left out a thousand embedded links. They're all here.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/05/bernie-sanders-will-end-imfs-economic-violence-greece-and-africa

[fuagf]

Hillary Clinton: ‘I take a back seat to no one’ on liberal record



Hillary never mentioned Bernie Sanders by name, but the subtext was unmistakeable.

By Annie Karni

7/3/15 4:41 PM EDT

Updated 7/5/15 2:38 PM EDT

HANOVER, N.H. — Hillary Clinton arrived in this liberal New England enclave with a message for anyone thinking about voting for Sen. Bernie Sanders of next-door Vermont: “I take a backseat to no one when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.”

Sanders, according to the latest New Hampshire polls, is trailing Clinton by just 8 points. And at the first stop of her two-day swing through the early-voting state, Clinton highlighted contrasts with her main Democratic rival without mentioning him by name.

“We have to take on the gun lobby one more time,” said Clinton, speaking without notes or a teleprompter in front of a crowd of about 850 Dartmouth College students and native Granite Staters. “The majority of gun owners support universal background checks, and we have to work very hard to muster the public opinion to convince Congress that’s what they should vote for.”

She said it was the “height of irresponsibility not to talk about it.” Sanders, who represents a pro-gun constituency, has voted against the Brady Bill, which required federal background checks for gun purchasers, as well as other major bills supported by gun-control advocates.

She also signaled that she would have no problem defending President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda.

“If the country elects a Republican president, then they will repeal the Affordable Care Act,” she warned. “Let’s elect a Democratic president who is committed to quality affordable health care.”

Also on POLITICO
Axelrod to Clinton: Don't 'overreact' to Sanders surge
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/david-axelrod-bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-no-overreact-119677.html?ml=ri
NICK GASS

She praised Obama’s moves to help the country recover from the economic crisis and said Republicans who say the recovery is too slow “just don’t know the theory of original sin,” blaming “the kind of poor management and bad economic policies that put us into the ditch in the first place.”

Clinton’s cookout — hamburgers and apple pie, served on a sun-dappled green on the Dartmouth campus — attracted a crowd with more questions than passion for the Democratic front-runner. A few people in the crowd wore T-shirts supporting Sanders and waved his campaign banners.

“I’m probably leaning more toward Bernie,” admitted Roland Downey, 18, who attended the rally with his father, Glenn King, a nurse. “I like that he’s being more modern,” said Downey of the 73-year-old candidate. “I don’t know enough about Hillary.” King said he was also still undecided.

Dee Roberts, who works in human resources at Dartmouth College, said she came out to see Clinton but that she likes what she’s heard from Sanders. “We’re pretty liberal here,” she said. “He’s very straightforward and doesn’t take PAC money.” She said she was hoping to hear more specifics from Clinton on her economic policy.

That didn’t happen Friday — Clinton said she plans to begin laying out “specific policies” on the economy starting in about 10 days.

Instead, she reiterated some of the issues she has been focused on so far: expanding voting rights, ending an era of mass incarceration, boosting the importance of early childhood education and treatment for those with mental health and substance abuse problems.

She also weighed in on the Iran nuclear talks taking place in Vienna this weekend, vowing to protect Israel if a deal is reached.

“I so hope we are able to get a deal next week that puts the lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” she said. “Even if we do get such a deal, we will still have major problems from Iran. They are the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. They use proxies like Hezbollah to sow discord and create insurgencies to destabilize governments. They are taking more and more control of a number of nations in the region, and they pose an existential threat to Israel.”

“We still are going to have to turn our attention to working with our partners to try to rein in and prevent this continuing Iranian aggressiveness,” she said.

Clinton’s team has been lowering expectations in New Hampshire. And the local advantage for a candidate like Sanders has, historically, been a real factor: then-Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy won the primary here in 1960, and former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis won it in 1988. New Hampshire made Bill Clinton “the comeback kid,” but he didn’t even win it — he finished second in New Hampshire in 1992, behind former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas. Then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry won the Granite State in 2004. In 2012, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary.

“It is easy for Sen. Sanders to travel here,” said Terry Shumaker, a New Hampshire attorney who co-chaired both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns. He said he is committed to a real fight in the Granite State. “I can’t even remember canvassing in late June for a primary eight months away, but we were doing it last Saturday, and Hillary is in New Hampshire today and tomorrow,” he said.

Also on POLITICO
Clinton signals to Jewish donors: I'll be better for Israel
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/hillary-clinton-jewish-donors-israel-119705.html?ml=ri
KENNETH P. VOGEL and TARINI PARTI

Clinton supporters also said support for Sanders should not be interpreted as anti-Clinton sentiment — and that polling shows many of his supporters list Clinton as their second choice. “From talking to some,” said Shumaker, “I think that a lot of these folks in the end will vote for her.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/hillary-clinton-i-take-a-backseat-to-no-one-on-liberal-record-119723.html