On Monday, in MEET THE NOT SO STAR-SPANGLED, MERIKINS…, I wrote:

So, I am reminded, once again, of my woeful ignorance of the world around me. This morning I began reading about Colin Kaepernick refusal to rise and sing The Star Spangled Banner. Kaepernick said:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

Most, myself included, might read the quote and associate Kaepernick’s protest with the Black Lives Matter movement and civil rights issues in general. We would be wrong in that assumption…

Yesterday, Robert Mackey, writing in #VeteransForKaepernick Trend Shows Freedom Means More than Flag to Many Who Serve for The Intercept, adds to the story:

Hashtag activism has its limits, and most social-media reaction stories are predictable and boring, but the discussion of Colin Kaepernick’s “Star-Spangled Banner” protest taking place in #VeteransForKaepernick threads on Twitter and Facebook right now is more varied and interesting than almost all of the commentary on the subject cramming the airwaves.

Dear America stop speaking for me you don’t care about us either we’re just your mask for racism and prejudice #VeteransForKaepernick —Beige Rob (@MrRedMartian) August 30, 2016

As a veteran, @Kaepernick7 ‘s protest is a beautiful part of what we fought for: free speech and perfecting our union #VeteransForKaepernick —Josh Howell (@lesscrazyplease) August 31, 2016

My colleague Jon Schwarz startled many Americans by pointing out that our national anthem “literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans” in a rarely sung or talked about third verse about slaughtering escaped slaves who chose to fight for their freedom, and against the United States, in the War of 1812.

The San Francisco 49ers quarterback, however, told reporters on Tuesday that he was aware of those lyrics before he began his protest by refusing to stand for the anthem before exhibition games.

There is far more to history than the sanitized pap that we learn in approved textbooks. For anyone who thinks knowing what our country has done in the past and will, if allowed to operate with impunity, continue to do, I always suggest reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.. There is also Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States: Columbus to the War on Terror and A People’s History of American Empire, a graphic adaptation of Zinn’s book in colaboration with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle.

When we fail to be mindful of what others do in our name we cannot feign indignation or even horror when we get caught in the backlash.

Corporate society takes care of everything. And all it asks of anyone, all it’s ever asked of anyone ever, is not to interfere with management decisions. —Bartholomew

What happens when real multi-national corporations aspire to the level of dominance voiced by the character of Bartholomew (played by John Houseman in the 1974 film, Rollerball? You witness the emergence of abominations like the ISDS.

Chris Hamby, writing in The Secret Justice System That Lets Executives Escape Their Crimes for BuzzFeed, explains:

Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.

This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

Remember, the purpose of Rollerball was simple. Again, Bartholomew:

The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. And the game must do its work. The Energy Corporation has done all it can, and if a champion defeats the meaning for which the game was designed, then he must lose.

What kind of harm can the ISDS do? Hamby continues:

Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:

—A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars—but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.

—In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village—including dozens of children—with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners’ lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.

—Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.

When the US Congress votes on whether to give final approval to the sprawling Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Barack Obama staunchly supports, it will be deciding on a massive expansion of ISDS.

Corporations are now the greatest existential threat to Democracy and Freedom. Corporations are not evil, but corporations allow low people to do evil.

Good people can turn the world back.

Ralph Nader emails:

Dear Friend,

I would like to invite you to attend the September 2016 Breaking Through Power Conference in Washington, DC. This conference is part of our celebration of the 50th anniversary year of my book Unsafe at Any Speed, and the forces this book put into motion. We will be featuring some of our nation’s most accomplished advocates, organizers and scholars to present an array of ambitious initiatives.

The theme of this “Civic Marathon” will be discovering ways to break through power and secure long-overdue democratic solutions by linking local communities and advocates in Washington, DC. Speakers will present innovative ideas and strategies designed to take civic groups to higher levels of effectiveness.

Speakers include:

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader.

John Bogle, the founder and retired CEO of The Vanguard Group.

Pat Quinn, Former Governor of Illinois.

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Delegate to Congress, DC.

Bill McKibben, Founder 350.org.

Karen Hobert Flynn, President, Common Cause.

Nell Minow, Vice Chair, ValueEdge Advisors.

Mitchell Garabedian- advocate for hundreds of victims of childhood sexual abuse. Most recently, he has been portrayed by Stanley Tucci in the Academy Award winning film Spotlight.

Joan Claybrook, President Emeritus, Public Citizen and Former the Administrator the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The daily conference themes are”

Building Civic Skills, Breaking Through Apathy, September 26, 2016 (Carnegie Institution of Washington) features presentations by our nation’s leading citizen advocates and scholars on successful strategies and techniques that can strengthen our civic culture and democracy.

Controlling What We Own, Shifting Power, September 27, 2016 (Carnegie Institution of Washington) brings together business, corporate governance, organized labor, and scholars outline how we can hold corporations accountable to shareholders and stakeholders.

Citizen Action and D.C. Statehood (one half day each), September 28, 2016 (DAR Constitution Hall) features national leaders who have pioneered ways to fund citizen advocacy. The second half of the day will explore how the drive for D.C. Statehood can grow beyond the confines of the boundaries of the District, and will feature the grassroots citizen activists and prominent elected officials championing this movement.

Celebrating Tort Law and Civil Justice for All September 29, 2016 (DAR Constitution Hall) Leading practitioners and scholars from around the country detail benefits of citizen access to the courts.

We must all do more to renew our society’s civic spirit and advance new modes of civic empowerment.

Please join us. Your participation is essential to these common aspirations.

For Justice,

Ralph Nader

Nader.Org
P.O. Box 19367
Washington, DC 20036

When Max, Menno Meyjes’ story of the fictional Max Rothman and the too real Adolf Hitler in 1918 Munich debuted in 2002, people were pissed. They were pissed because Meyjes, who both wrote and directed the film starring John Cusack and Noah Taylor, made Hitler, the uber-monster of the 20th century, human.

That scared the unholy fucking shit out of people. If our worst monster might have been, even for only a short time, like us; if Hitler was a product of his culture and time and the unbelievably horrific first world war, then how can we feel safe?

We can’t, ever, of course, feel safe.

John “Derf” Back wrote the award winning graphic novel My Friend Dahmer in 2012. Now, Marc Meyers is translating the book into a movie of the same title.

Again, people are pissed.

For the same reasons.

Derf writes:

I’m sure those thousands don’t like this book. I get that. Not only because it deals with a man who caused them so much pain, but, frankly, because it humanizes him, and that’s not something they want to see.

But that, too, has value, in my opinion. It’s easy to write off someone like Dahmer as a just a monster. And he certainly was. But not always. At one point in his life, he was just a sad, lonely boy struggling against a welling madness. To label him nothing but a monster absolves everyone else in this story of any responsibility, because he was ALWAYS a monster, and what he did was inevitable. Nothing could have been done. Well, I don’t believe that. Mistakes were made. MANY mistakes.

When mistakes are made, to state the obvious, they are made by people. We often need this kind of passive voice because we can’t own up to the very real fact that we made the mistakes. We are responsible. I saw this in the wake of the attacks on 11 September 2001 when I would attempt to discuss how we knew this was coming, that we were responsible for creating the reality where the attacks happened, that no one is innocent when others commit evil in our name.

I think about Derf’s book a lot when I’m dealing with students on the periphery of society. I wonder if they’re a troubled teen who might hurt themself or someone else. I worry that when they leave the school that next week, next year, or ten years in the future, they might become a person our society wants to dismiss by labeling them a monster.

They mostly don’t.

Responsibility sucks.

In August 1945, humanity generally, and particularly The United States stepped and Japan was dragged, across a line that miraculously, we were able to recross and stay safely, so far, on the other side of. On 6 August, the bombardier of an American B-29 dropped the world’s second atomic bomb (the first, a test weapon, was detonated in the desert of New Mexico on 16 July) on Hiroshima and three days later, on 9 August, the third, and final weapon then in existence, was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered unconditionally on 15 August.

A year later, 70 years ago today, The New Yorker devoted its entire issue to publishing John Hersey’s Hiroshima. In an age of print, long before television, let alone the Internet, took off, the story gripped the world. According to BBC Magazine:

Seventy years ago no-one talked about stories “going viral”, but the publication of John Hersey’s article Hiroshima in The New Yorker achieved just that. It was talked of, commented on, read and listened to by many millions all over the world as they began to understand what really happened not just to the city but to the people of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and in the following days.

This is how Hersey began:

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors.

Nearly 30,000 words later, Hersey concluded with:

It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary School: “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”

Alas.

Sean Posey asks and answers:

Every presidential election cycle, journalists descend on the ever-reliable swing state of Ohio in an attempt to play prophet. Since 1964, every president-elect has counted Ohio in his column; no Republican presidential candidate has ever taken the oath of office without first winning Ohio.

Once again this year, Ohio is a national bellwether—in large part because its status as a crucial piece of the electoral puzzle might not last much longer. Once a microcosm of the national economy with its farms and manufacturing towns, Ohio now encapsulates a broader sense of loss and foreboding.

Declining manufacturing employment and strong demographic headwinds are eroding Ohio’s electoral strength, making the state a laboratory for how the loss of economic power is followed by a loss of political power. Faced with a proud past but an uncertain future, the Buckeye State’s political and economic trajectory explain a lot about why there’s a constituency for a promise to “make America great again.”

Last week WCPN’s The Sound Of Ideas did a show discussing our Rust Belt moniker. As I recall there wasn’t much discussion on what Rust Belt replaced. Posey continues:

In the 1950s, things in Ohio were great, at least economically. For decades, immigrants from Europe, followed by African-Americans moving out of the South during the Great Migration, came to this new promised land; Ohio’s population increased 22 percent during the boom years in the 1950s.

An “Age of Affluence” settled over Ohio, one fully celebrated across the state’s cities during the 1953 sesquicentennial. By 1960, the “eight that make Ohio great” included: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, Canton, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown. They all boasted populations over 100,000 and, with the exception of Columbus, represented the state’s awesome manufacturing might—from Akron, the “Rubber Capital of the World,” to Youngstown, “America’s Ruhr Valley.”

The boom is long over, and despite platitudes and electioneering to the contrary, even getting Bruce Springsteen to write another song, bringing back the Age of Affluence is unlikely in the global economy. Our status as a presidential must-have is also fading.

The beginning of Ohio’s deindustrialization in the 1970s attracted global attention as “regional depressions” and factory closings spread across the state, yet Ohio’s problems didn’t end in the Rust Belt 1980s. While Al Gore and George W. Bush prepared to face off in May 2000, Ohio’s employment numbers peaked. It has yet to regain jobs lost in both the 2001 recession and the Great Recession.

According to numbers compiled by Innovation Ohio, prior to the Great Recession, one-third of jobs in the state paid above $20 an hour. In the post-recovery economy, over one-third of jobs now pay between $7 and $13.39. Much of this is the result of the collapse of manufacturing and the rise of service-sector employment.

And that now threatens the kingmaker status of the state that calls itself “the heart of it all.”

Posey concludes:

The link between economics and demographics is at the root of the state’s shrinking electoral power. In 1964, the year Ohio began its long streak of “picking” presidential winners, the state was worth 26 Electoral College votes; in 2016, only 18 will be up for grabs. Contrast that with the Southern swing state of Florida. Counted as only 14 Electoral College votes in 1964, the candidate who wins the Sunshine State in November will carry 29. Ohio’s political power is also compromised as it subsequently loses seats in the US House. From a high of 24 seats during World War II, the state is now left with 16, fewer than during the late 1830s.

Michigan was the only state to lose population in the 2010 Census, but Ohio might not be far behind. “For the last four or five years I’ve been predicting that Ohio’s population would decline for the first time,” said Mark Salling, director of the Northern Ohio Data and Information Service and senior fellow at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs. “It hasn’t quite happened. We continue to have more babies than people leaving the state or dying, but that’s the only reason. Eventually, I see Ohio losing population, which would be a headline.”

The interplay between jobs and population growth is key to understanding Ohio’s weakening electoral position. Salling draws a line between manufacturing and the “spinoff effect” or multiplier effect that those jobs have, producing more employment in the service sector and associated services.

“When manufacturing suffered in terms of employment, it meant that a lot of industries suffered,” he said. “As a result, you get fewer people, fewer bread earners and their families. They move elsewhere to look for jobs, or they’re not coming to Ohio and its cities.”

It’s not difficult to see how Trump could make political headway there. The bigger question is, can anyone else offer Ohioans a credible alternative?

Probably not. I’m not sure anyone is even trying.

Why? Because our present system gets us politicians like Paul LePage.

Thomas Frank sat down for an interview with Kathy Kiely published in Author Thomas Frank Talks Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and His New Book, ‘Listen Liberal’ at Bill Moyers & Company. Frank took Kiely over a number of jumps, but the theme of meritocracy vs. solidarity resonated with me.

One of the things about a meritocracy, and this is a line I repeat many times in the book [Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?], there’s no solidarity in a meritocracy. The guys at the top of the profession have very little sympathy for the people at the bottom. When one of their colleagues gets fired, they don’t go out on strike. They don’t do that. This comes from personal experience. When academic labor force is becoming adjunctified, Uber-ized, whatever you want to call it, there’s no real protest from on high, from the leaders of academia. Here and there, yes people are very sympathetic and they feel bad about it but there’s no organized counter-effort. There’s no solidarity in this group, but there is this amazing deference between the people at the top. And that’s what you see with Obama. He’s choosing those guys.

I’m all in favor of government by expert. That’s very clear. You should have someone running something like the Department of Labor or the EPA or whatever, you should have someone who knows what they’re doing and knows what they’re talking about. There’s no doubt in my mind about that. But if you look at the Obama years at this meritocracy of failure—you know, with these guys at the Justice Department, they can’t figure out how to prosecute a Wall Street executive. They can’t figure out how to enforce antitrust. Or you look at the guys at the Treasury Department who are bailing out banks. This has been a disaster and it has been the best and the brightest who have done it. So you look at that and you start to wonder, maybe expertise is a problem.

But I don’t think so. I think it’s a number of things. The first is orthodoxy which I mentioned. The second is that a lot of the professions have been corrupted. This is a very interesting part of the book, which I don’t explore at length. I wish I had explored it more. The professions across the board have been corrupted—accounting, real estate appraisers, you just go down the list. But the third thing is this. You go back and look at when government by expert has worked, because it has worked. It worked in the Roosevelt administration, very famously. They called it the Brains Trust. These guys were excellent.

They gave us the best administration we’ve ever had, as far as I’m concerned. They were all highly educated, very intelligent people. They weren’t all Continue Reading »

A man whom I considered to be a comedic genius is gone.

I’m running through clips now beginning with his entrance in Willy Wonka. Then on to The Producers; to the first movie I ever saw stoned, Blazing Saddles; followed by Young Frankenstein (two hits in one year, who else does that?); and The Frisco Kid and, and…

I miss him.

So, I am reminded, once again, of my woeful ignorance of the world around me. This morning I began reading about Colin Kaepernick refusal to rise and sing The Star Spangled Banner. Kaepernick said:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

Most, myself included, might read the quote and associate Kaepernick’s protest with the Black Lives Matter movement and civil rights issues in general. We would be wrong in that assumption, however. Kaepernick did not refuse to rise and sing our national anthem because of the general symbology of the song, but rather because Francis Scot Key’s poem—which only became the libretto for a national anthem less than 100 years ago because of anti-union actions—specifically celebrates the re-capture and re-enslavement of Africans during James Madison’s war of aggression against Canada and Great Britain.

Few Americans ever learn more than the first verse of the song—this was a particular point of perturbation for Isaac Asimov—and that poorly.

There are eight stanzas in Key’s poem (grouped in four verses in the song) in The Star Spangled Banner:

First Verse—

Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.
Oh! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Second Verse—

On the shore, dimly seen thro’ the mist of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep.
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?

Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream
‘Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Third Verse—

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footstep’s pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Fourth Verse—

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation,
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n – rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation.

Then conquer we must, for our cause is just,
And this be our motto—“In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

In concluding his essay, Asimov writes:

I hope you will look at the national anthem with new eyes. Listen to it, the next time you have a chance, with new ears.

Even a person as intelligent and extraordinarily well read as Asimov missed the importance of the two lines:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,

You see, the hireling(s) and slave(s) Key wrote about were the 6,000 slaves intentionally freed (and in part enlisted as the Royal Navy Corps of Colonial Marines) by the British forces under Rear Admiral George Cockburn. Great Britain had abolished slavery in 1807 and the Royal Navy was actively interdicting slavers on the high seas.

Andrew Cockburn, a descendant of the admiral wrote:

By 1813, when he first arrived in Chesapeake Bay, Cockburn was forty-one years old and a rear admiral. His mission was straightforward: to inflict as much damage as possible on this economic heartland, thereby dissuading pro-war Democratic-Republicans (as opposed to antiwar Federalists) from their rash attack on the British Empire. “I have no hesitation,” he wrote to a superior officer, “in pronouncing that the whole of the shores and towns within this vast bay, not excepting the capital itself, will be wholly at your mercy, and subject if not to be permanently occupied, certainly to be successively insulted [raided] or destroyed at your pleasure.”

This ruthless scheme, which Cockburn was to follow to the letter, would have been absolutely impossible without first-class intelligence operatives to alert his raiding parties to enemy forces and guide them around the tortuous shoreline. Fortunately, volunteers for such a mission soon appeared: slaves. At first they were single men, eagerly welcomed by the British as the pilots and guides they needed. But the numbers quickly grew as entire families made their way to the ships. At this point the invaders made a crucial decision: they would accept any slave—man, woman, or child—and guarantee they would not be handed back to their owners.
It was a shrewd assault on the young republic, which at the time was really two nations: a free people, intoxicated by their new democracy, and an enslaved people, ill-fed, clad in rags, and routinely brutalized.

Jon Schwarz continues:

Whole families found their way to the ships of the British, who accepted everyone and pledged no one would be given back to their “owners.” Adult men were trained to create a regiment called the Colonial Marines, who participated in many of the most important battles, including the August 1814 raid on Washington.

Then on the night of September 13, 1814, the British bombarded Fort McHenry. Key, seeing the fort’s flag the next morning, was inspired to write the lyrics for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

So when Key penned “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,” he was taking great satisfaction in the death of slaves who’d freed themselves. His perspective may have been affected by the fact he owned several slaves himself.

With that in mind, think again about the next two lines: “And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

The reality is that there were human beings fighting for freedom with incredible bravery during the War of 1812. However, “The Star-Spangled Banner” glorifies America’s “triumph” over them — and then turns that reality completely upside down, transforming their killers into the courageous freedom fighters.

Isn’t actually learning American history fascinating?

Many years ago the great journalist/writer Mike Royko, infuriated by the use of exit polls, encouraged his readers to lie to the pollsters. That was great advice then and I think the advice is still solid the Revolt Against Plutocracy agrees:

Victor Tiffany, co-founder of Revolt Against Plutocracy, emails:

Fellow revolutionary,

The revolution Senator Sanders sparked continues with the candidacy of Jill Stein. Our highest priority in the coming few weeks must be to get her into the presidential debates. How can we do that when she’s currently polling at around only 5 percent?

The same way we turned an idea (Bernie or bust) into a huge, national movement: using mostly the Internet. On social media, on political website comments and using under-utilized emails to friends, relatives and list-servs, convey some version of the following message posted by Rob Kall on Op-Ed News:

Even if you…plan to vote for Hillary, you can help push Hillary and Trump to the left by telling pollsters a white lie–that you plan to vote for Jill Stein.

Keep in mind, the polling operations are paid for by the mainstream media that colluded with Hillary Clinton to rig the elections. Instead of letting them use you, use them.

Talk to [post, message, comment, etc.] anyone you know, who supported for Bernie, who is now planning to vote for Hillary. Explain to them why they should tell pollsters who contact them by phone or email that they will vote for Jill. It will get Jill into the [debates] and that will force Hillary to stay to the left in the race. Jill Will also be able to go after Donald Trump in ways Hillary can’t.

Do not underestimate how effective you can be as a part of the #JillOrBust army. Be creative and convey this message everywhere you can think of. I implore you to make this part of your online time for the next few weeks because if we can get her into the presidential debates, Dr. Stein can make the case to a very large audiance that only she is qualified to end the permanent wars in the Middle East and turn climate change around.

Also, if you have not yet done so, start building email lists of people online. I’ve been doing this for a few years and have two lists, one of hundreds of people in New York and another of people across the nation. I save these in drafts of emails I don’t send but use to copy and paste into BCC and send out alerts to people about a bill or a campaign to support. Find people to trade emails lists with. I’ve copied and pasted the email addresses of professors working in a local university into my NY list.

Remember Thomas Paine’s words: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” We do; we can. We must.

In solidarity,

Victor

So, no one has ever actually asked me, but if a pollster does call, I don’t have to lie, but maybe, to take the side of Democracy against Plutocracy, you should.

Via Mano Singham…

We The People demand:

To the Commission on Presidential Debates:

We, the undersigned, demand that the Presidential debates include all Presidential candidates who have qualified for enough state ballots to be a choice for a majority of voters.

Polls show that 50% of Americans do not identify as either Democrat or Republican. This means that the Presidential debates as currently managed are locking out the diverse voices and views of half of all Americans.

The Commission on Presidential Debates may sound like an impartial, public body, but it is actually a private organization run by the Democratic and Republican parties. When these two establishment parties took over the debates in 1989, the League of Women Voters withdrew its sponsorship, rightly observing that the “unprecedented control” demanded by the Democrats and Republicans would make the debates “campaign-trail charades” that would “perpetrate fraud on the American voter”.

The need for “more voices and choices” can be met by including all candidates who are on the ballots for a majority of voters, a number that has typically ranged from 4 to 6 candidates in total.

Voters have a right to hear directly from their possible choices for the highest office in the land. These choices should reflect the diversity of American political opinion, and not be restricted to two candidates nominated by establishment parties awash in corporate donations and billionaire support.

Please sign the petition and encourage everyone you know to sign also.

You should have seen Buster tree a troll raccoon on our walk this morning.

(He would have captured and dispatched the raccoon who had wandered too far from the safety of the tree if I had not brought him up short on his leash.)

Recent revelations concerning Hillary Clinton and The Clinton Foundation are, at the same time, comically hilarious and tragically disturbing.

Glenn Greenwald, writing in Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation? for The Intercept finds the core when he asks:

Theoretically, one could say that these regimes—among the most repressive and regressive in the world—are donating because they deeply believe in the charitable work of the Clinton Foundation and want to help those in need. Is there a single person on the planet who actually believes this? Is Clinton loyalty really so strong that people are going to argue with a straight face that the reason the Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti and Emirates regimes donated large amounts of money to the Clinton Foundation is because those regimes simply want to help the foundation achieve its magnanimous goals?

I can emotionally understand the loyalty of those still supporting Hillary Clinton for president, but their cognitive dissonance is on the scale of those old-line communists in the United States who stood behind the brutality of Josef Stalin to the end.

My personal theory, as an educator, is that students don’t unlearn, or even forget very much, over the 10 weeks or so of summer vacation; they simply never actually learned the material in the first place. Oh, they may have crammed for exams, and done well, but that is very different from learning

I attended a watch party Wednesday evening and I was underwhelmed. Already people were comparing notes and asking question whether or not Our Revolution would live up the name. Seems we were not alone.

Adam Gabbatt, reporting in Is Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution over before it even began? for The Guardian writes:

The next phase of Bernie Sanders’ political revolution had not begun before it began to unravel. Just days before Wednesday’s launch of Our Revolution, an organisation which aims to build on the momentum of the senator’s Democratic primary campaign, more than half of its staff resigned.

This was not a case of a few volunteers deciding they didn’t have the time to work towards a revolution. This was core staff members in key positions deciding Our Revolution was doomed to failure. Eight people quit – from a staff of 15. The entire organising department went. The digital director, Kenneth Pennington, went too.

For an organisation aiming to organise grassroots volunteers through digital media, this was quite a blow. It landed after Jeff Weaver, who managed Sanders’ primary campaign, was appointed president of the group.

Under the stewardship of Weaver—who has worked on Sanders campaigns for three decades—the Vermont senator won more than 13 million votes, proving an unlikely challenger to the eventual nominee, Hillary Clinton. But even as Sanders was riding a wave of activism and involvement not seen for decades, dissatisfaction with Weaver was spreading.

Younger Sanders staff members were critical of money spent on television ads, funds they felt would be better spent on outreach. Grassroots activists spoke of a lack of coordination between the campaign and volunteers on the ground.

Claire Sandberg, until this week organising director at Our Revolution, was among the most vocal critics. “I left and others left because we were alarmed that Jeff would mismanage this organization as he mismanaged the campaign,” she told the New York Times.

Sandberg said she was concerned about how Our Revolution would raise and spend money, fearing the group would “betray its core purpose by accepting money from billionaires and not remaining grassroots funded and ploughing that billionaire cash into TV instead of investing it in building a genuine movement”.

An anonymous staff member told Politico they joined Our Revolution after promises from Sanders and his wife Jane Sanders—chair of Our Revolution’s board—that Weaver would not be involved.

Weaver’s appointment was not the only thing to turn activists away. Our Revolution has been registered as a 501(c)4 organisation, which means it is able to accept large donations from anonymous donors. Given that a large part of the senator’s appeal in the primary lay in his criticism of the acceptance of anonymous money in politics, this is anathema to many Sanders supporters.

Furthermore, the group is being run by two white men: Weaver and executive director Shannon Jackson. This is worrying to some supporters, given Sanders’ struggle to appeal to minorities. One source close to the project, from a minority background, said they had “concerns about how are these two people qualified to do the kind of work that needs to be done to organise people of color”.

There are also questions over what Our Revolution will actually do. On Wednesday Sanders spoke for 40 minutes. He spent 30 minutes heralding the success of his presidential campaign. Beyond listing the candidates and issues on which he said Our Revolution would focus, operational details were scarce.

Lack of focus is precisely he single greatest flaw in progressive politics.

I saw this even in our smallish group at the watch party Wednesday evening. People were listening intently to see if Bernie would hit their particular hot button or not. Republicans are focused on one goal (despite all the noise about family values, stopping abortions, LGBTQ rights, &c.) and that goal is to become wealthy. Nothing else matter for the people making the decisions, full stop.

Progressives, as I often do, can talk about the broad umbrella of Social Justice and Advocacy, but no one is interested in broad umbrellas. We’re like a family members facing the fatal illnesses of a loved one. We don’t give a flying fuck about financing for all fatal illnesses, we want to know how much money is being spent on our fatal illness.

I don’t know how to fix this. Maybe there is no fix. Maybe the fatal flaw really is fatal.