[Update at 1307 on 12 May: As is to be suspected, Mano Singham perfectly expands on Oliver’s piece in Misunderstanding and misrepresenting science.

THE DANGERS OF MORNING-SHOW SCIENCE…

I am of a generation of journalists who, in the wake of The Pentagon Papers and Watergate, saw our profession as a noble calling, a tradition that comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable. There’s not much of that left, especially at the organizations reduced to small parts of vast global consortia driven by profit, profit and profit. As Ralph Nader discusses in The Need for Progressive Voices:

In 1961, President Kennedy’s Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minow described television as “a vast wasteland.” Perhaps nothing demonstrates that better these days than the rise of Donald J. Trump as a presidential candidate; now the presumptive Republican nominee. Trump’s boisterous carnival barker persona has dominated the airwaves for the entirety of the 2016 election cycle, eclipsing what precious little time remained for the serious issues that affect millions of Americans. CBS president Leslie Moonves recently pulled no punches about the Trump phenomenon, saying it “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Trump is a symptom of a larger problem?profit-driven commercial television has put a stranglehold on our public discourse, highlighting personalized controversy, street (not greater suite) carnage and celebrity entertainment fare over serious matters. The media industry reshaped our precious public commons into a fortress of exclusion that blocks dissenting, innovative and majoritarian viewpoints on matters that address society’s most basic needs. One thing is clear?something’s gotta give.

Agreed. Just what has to give, however, will be a matter of a fight that Nader believes will begin in a little more than two weeks.

On May 23rd, 24th, 25th and 26th 2016 at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. a large gathering of civil society will take place to challenge the entrenched power of the corporate/political complex. The event is called Breaking Through Power. This “Civic Mobilization” will involve thousands of people at Constitution Hall and around the country and connect long-available knowledge to long-neglected action for the necessities and aspirations of people from all backgrounds.

May 24th will be dedicated solely to challenging mainstream media, bringing together authors, documentary filmmakers, reporters, columnists, musicians, poets and editorial cartoonists who will demonstrate the need for higher standards on television and radio, and in print and on the web . Some participants on that day will be: Phil Donahue, Laura Flanders, Eugene Jarecki, Patti Smith, Mark Green, Matt Wuerker and many others.

The major mobilizing action on May 24th will be to create a new advocacy organization called “Voices.” The purpose of Voices is simple?to push for enlarging and enhancing space for serious content in all forms of media. “Voices” will be staffed by public interest lawyers, writers, and traditional and social media specialists. “Voices” will advance long-neglected standards in the 1934 Communications Act which contains the imperative that broadcasters meet “the public interest, necessity and convenience” and other laws under the jurisdiction of the FCC. The Voices staff will make the case for much more air-time on TV and radio and space in print publications for a multitude of subject matter, issues and activities that are now excluded or censored routinely as a result of a business-model of maximum profit above all else.

There is a ground swell of youthful enthusiasm in politics that has not been seen in my lifetime since the 1968 campaign of an earlier anti-war, progressive Democrat: Wisconsin Senator Eugene McCarthy. The present political revolution began, I think, in the Occupy Wall Street movement and has found new energy in the campaign to make Bernie Sanders the next President of the United States.

Nader see’s an opportunity to expand the conversation beyond Bernie. I think he’s right.

Ghost writers are par for the course in politics. Politicians (with the exception, to the best of my knowledge, of President Jimmy Carter) don’t have the time, inclination or skills to write much more than a memo.

So, this news that Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed used a lobbyist to pen his attack on Bernie Sanders before the Georgia primary, doesn’t surprise me. (The comments on the piece, however, are blowing up over the faux column.)Still a story, is a story as Lee Fang relates for The Intercept in Atlanta Mayor’s Column Ripping Bernie Sanders Drafted by Lobbyist, Emails Show.

A few days before the Georgia primary, influential Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed published a column on CNN.com praising Hillary Clinton and ripping her opponent, Bernie Sanders. Reed attacked Sanders as being out of step with Democrats on gun policy, and accused him of elevating a “one-issue platform” that ignores the plight of the “single mother riding two buses to her second job.”

But emails released from Reed’s office indicate that the column, which pilloried Sanders as out of touch with the poor, was primarily written by a corporate lobbyist, and was edited by Correct the Record, one of several pro-Clinton Super PACs.

Anne Torres, the mayor’s director of communications, told The Intercept this week that the column was not written by the mayor, but by Tharon Johnson, a former Reed adviser who now works as a lobbyist for UnitedHealth, Honda, and MGM Resorts, among other clients. The column’s revisions by staffers from Correct the Record are documented in the emails.

Johnson, Torres told us, is a “capable writer,” who managed Reed’s first campaign. Reed “provided verbal edits and feedback to Tharon, but other than that, no one from my office or the mayor’s office wrote this op-ed,” Torres said.

Did Reed believe all that was written in his name? Of course he did. I liken this to the number of people who, when asked to write letters of recommendations for students or others, reply by saying “write the recommendation and I’ll sign it.” Just another case of intellectual laziness.

Motherly love/situational amnesia is the only reason the human race lasted past the first birth.

*Yes, Mother’s Day, not Mothers (or Mothers’) Day.

We’re halfway into the two weeks designated by 350.org for civil disobedience and political actions demanding nations take direct actions to prevent a global meltdown from the burning of fossil fuels. Citizens of Australia took actions in Newcastle as reported by Helen Davidson, writing for The Guardian, in Dozens arrested as anti-fossil fuel protesters join Australian coal blockade

Police have arrested 66 people in anti-fossil fuel protests in the Newcastle, home to Australia’s biggest coal export port.

Hundreds of kayaks and boats blocked the entrance to Newcastle harbour in an attempt to stop coal ships from leaving or entering. Another group blocked train tracks used to transport coal on the Sandgate Bridge in the city’s north west.

The protests are part of several anti-fossil fuel actions happening across 12 countries.

Organisers estimate more than 1,000 people attended the protest in Newcastle, which lies approximately 160km north of Sydney, on Sunday, calling for the government to take action on climate change and wind down the use of fossil fuels.

The Break Free From Fossil Fuels group said it was targeting “some of the most iconic and dangerous fossil fuel projects on the face of the planet”.

In a not surprising twist, the day of action may prove to be a boon for the Australian Green Party.

The Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, who attended the Sunday protest, and said the Coalition government was holding Australia back from making the transition to “a new 21st century clean economy”.

“We stand as Greens with the community on the first day of an election campaign, where you’ll see the two old parties, standing with vested interests saying let’s continue to dig coal out of the ground, to pollute the atmosphere, to make dangerous global warming worse, to lose the Great Barrier Reef, to lose that precious wilderness we all so dearly love, and to hold us back from making that transition that we as a country so desperately need to make.”

Di Natale said the Greens had never been in better shape for an election campaign.

Voters in the United States are also talking more about the Greens here. Many of the supporters of Bernie Sander’s bid for the Democratic Party are already thinking ahead to what they might do if Bernie is denied the nomination. Options include a write-in-campaign or voting for Jill Stein (where my vote went in 2012).

Previously in The Guardian emails… and Keep Carbon In The Ground…

First out of the race (11 September 2015) Rick Perry (his speechwriter, actually) on 22 July 2015 opined about Donald Trump:

…America has been blessed for more than 200 years with magnanimous leadership in the presidency, individuals who were raised beyond their personal limitations to steer the nation through war, depression and disaster to a better future for all Americans.

Each one of these leaders have been repairers of the breach, such as Lincoln who—at the height of the Civil War—insisted on the completion of the Capitol Dome. He meant the world to know our Union endured. And showed it in acts small and large.

Here was a president who ordered hundreds of thousands of men to war, and ultimately, to their deaths.

And yet, once he had won the war and freed the slaves, after so much blood had been spilled, he set out to bind the wounds of the nation, declaring “malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Lincoln was a healing force who rose above great differences to preserve our union. He was a repairer of the breach.

When King George III inquired what George Washington would do upon winning the war, he was told he would return to his Virginia farm.

To which the king responded, “if he were to do so, he would be the greatest man of his age.”

Thousands of years of history had informed the world that to the victor go the spoils, that conquering heroes seize power, and reign with impunity Continue Reading »

So, I’ve found a little time to play with the code beneath Have Coffee Will Write using the WordPress widget Jetpack. The first bit I’ve changed is to add a subscribe function to the top of the sidebar. If you think getting email updates wouldn’t be too intrusive, give the subscription service a shot. You can cancel anytime. Thanks. JH

I’ve posted this video from Jimmy Kimmel elsewhere, but I think what Kimmel, and the very real scientist involved, have to say is bears repeating. Lack of unanimity is not the same as controversy. Right and wrong are not relative equals to be reported and decided upon, Facts are not convenient or inconvenient data points to be weighed and selected in support of a particular agenda; especially when the agenda is driven by greed.

John Abraham, reporting in Peabody coal’s contrarian scientist witnesses lose their court case for The Guardian writes:

In Minnesota, an administrative hearing resulted in a judicial recommendation that will have impacts across the country. It was a case argued mainly between environmental groups (such as Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, and their clients Fresh Energy and the Sierra Club) and energy producers (such as the now-bankrupt coal company Peabody Energy) regarding what a reasonable social cost of carbon should be.

I was called as an expert witness in the case along with respected climate scientist Dr. Andrew Dessler. We were opposed by the well-known contrarians Drs. Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, and William Happer (who has recently received attention related to his charged fees in the case). In full disclosure, Dr. Dessler and I were not paid for our work in the case. I recently wrote about the testimony and provided links to the testimonies submitted for the case. The judge’s recommendations and how they will impact energy decisions in the USA were the keys to this trial.

On April 15th, the Administrative Law Judge decided that the estimated cost of carbon pollution currently used in Minnesota is too low. New knowledge about how fast the climate is changing, how much it will change, and how it will affect societies and economies would be reflected in a larger carbon cost. This leads to a large increase in the estimated cost, from $0.44-4.53 per ton to $11-57 per ton. A summary of the ruling can be found here and the full report is available here.

How was this case won? Well certainly it helps to have science on your side. Without that, even the most expensive expert witnesses struggle. But Peabody’s scientists made errors that were easy to identify and point out to the Judge. Furthermore, the Judge was smart, quickly able to see through nonsense non-science.

More of us are developing the vital ability to do the same.

Sadly, of course, the joke is on all of us…

I graduated from Ohio University in 1984. The knowledge of the irony that I would do so in the year randomly made prophetic by George Orwell was not lost on me or my classmates. There was a certain badness inherent in earning our degrees in that particular year. We believed that we had come out of 1984—even though Ronald Reagan was President and likely to be re-elected that Fall—believing that we had dodged an existential bullet.

How young and foolish we were.

Edward Snowden, writing in ‘Governments can reduce our dignity to that of tagged animals’ for The Guardian expounds:

If harmfulness and authorisation make no difference, what explains the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?

The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it is not seen as a threat, as a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all the disparate components of the institution – not just its head but its hands and feet, every part of its body—must be assumed to have the same power to discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern political monopoly of information control, particularly if we’re talking about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful activities. If you can’t guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world’s unmentionables—including your own—begins to look more like a liability than an asset.

When I read that paragraph I flashed back to 1980 when I returned to college after five years in the Navy. As I depressurized and re-acclimated to civilian life, I formed many of my understandings regarding feminism and one I remember most vividly was the trope that rape is not about sex; rape is about control. What Snowden is saying here is that the surveillance state is about the freedom, the power, to take even the illusion of control away from us, from We The People; to rape.

We don’t have to lie back and accept the inevitable. Snowden continues:

Official wrongdoing can catalyse all levels of insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.

Reaching those individuals, helping them realise that their first allegiance as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the challenge. That is a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government worker today.

I’ve argued that whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It’s not a virtue of who you are or your background. It’s a question of what you are exposed to, what you witness. At that point, the question becomes: “Do you honestly believe that you have the capability to remediate the problem, to influence policy?” I would not encourage individuals to reveal information, even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe they can be effective in doing so, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.

This is simply a pragmatic, strategic consideration. Whistleblowers are outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political force, it is critical that they maximise the amount of public good produced from scarce seed.

What, from Snowden’s particular perspective, must drive the outlier?

When you see that the programme or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you’ve sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the programme. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?

While those in control need to exert control and do so by fostering a general fear of some monster-in-the-closet they label terrorism, they too are afraid, terrified, of losing that control.

They recognise that even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of resources to respond to those more significant threats.

What it really comes down to is the reality that we have a political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism – of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously—than they are of the crime itself.

How dire is the threat? Snowden continues:

Take, for instance, the holy grail of drone persistence, a capability that the US has been pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put any typical signals-collection device on the bottom of it to monitor, unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network addresses of every laptop, phone and iPod, you know not just where a particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route.

Once you know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over several cities, you are tracking the movements not just of individuals but of whole populations.

We become tagged animals.

Snowden concludes:

The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.

And there are more of us than there are of them.

The final question, then, becomes: am I, are you, one of us or one of them?

Bernie writes:

In the United States today, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, 47 million Americans are living in poverty.

Almost 22 percent of American children are poor and we have the highest child poverty rate of almost any major country on earth.

Let’s be clear. Living in poverty doesn’t just mean you don’t have enough money to buy a big screen TV, a fancy laptop, or the latest iPhone. It goes much deeper than that.

Living in poverty means you are less likely to have a good grocery store in your community selling healthy food. Far too often it means you don’t know where your next meal is going to come from. Living in poverty means you are less likely to have access to a doctor, dentist or mental health care provider. It means you have less access to public transportation, which makes it harder to find a job. It means you are less likely to have access to child care.

In the United States of America, poverty is often a death sentence.

Yesterday, I spoke about poverty in McDowell County, West Virginia — one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in America. In 2014, over 35 percent of the residents in McDowell lived in poverty, including nearly half of the children. The roads are crumbling and only 6 percent of adults have a college education. Less than two-thirds have graduated high school. It has the lowest life expectancy for men in the entire nation. I hope you’ll watch part of my speech on poverty and share it with friends and family on social media.

Poverty is an issue we must address. In 2011, the American Journal of Public Health found that 130,000 people died in just one year alone as a result of poverty.

This is not an issue we can just sweep under the rug and hope it will go away. Because it won’t.

And when I talk about it being too late for establishment politics and economics, this is what I mean. When I talk about thinking big and outside the box, about rejecting incremental change, I am talking about the millions of Americans who live in poverty who have been tossed out, left behind, and abandoned by the rich and powerful. We need to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.

Here’s what we need to do:

1. Rebuild our country’s crumbling infrastructure. A $1 trillion investment in our infrastructure will create at least 13 million jobs all over America – jobs that cannot be outsourced.

2. We must rewrite our disastrous trade policies that enable corporate America to shut down plans in places like West Virginia and move them to Mexico, China, and other low-wage countries.

3. We can create 1 million jobs for disadvantaged youths through legislation I introduced with Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

4. We need to increase the wages of at least 53 million American workers by raising the minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour.

5. At a time when women workers earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns, we need to sign the Paycheck Fairness Act into law. Equal pay for equal work.

6. We need to make health care a right for every man, woman, and child through a Medicare for All single-payer system.

7. We need to treat drug addiction like a mental health issue, not a criminal issue.

8. We need to ensure every worker in this country has at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, two weeks of paid vacation, and one week of paid sick days.

9. We need to impose a tax on Wall Street to make public colleges and universities tuition free while substantially reducing student debt.

10. At a time when half of older workers have no retirement savings, we’re not going to cut Social Security, we’re going to expand it so people can retire with dignity and respect.

No president can do all of these things alone. We need millions of Americans to begin to stand up and fight back and demand a government that represents all of us. That is the political revolution.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

More…

Jimmy Kimmel adds his two cents…

Bernie writes:

Moments ago [2133 on 3 May, JH] the news networks declared us the winner of yet another state – our 18th of the primary season: Indiana.

For the past several weeks, the corporate media has counted us out of this election. The political and financial establishment of this country have been vocal in their desire for us to go away. To get in line.

Today, the voters had another idea.

Every victory we earn is extraordinarily important for our political revolution. Not just because of the delegates we earn, but because each win and all the work that goes into that effort sends an unmistakable message to the establishment of this country that we will never stop fighting for the values we share. I say we keep fighting. Are you with me?

Adding one more contribution to our campaign sends a powerful message that we will fight for the values we share all the way through the Democratic convention and beyond.

The next states up are West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon. They are all places we have a chance to do very well. I am in this fight through the Democratic convention. Thank you for adding your contribution and standing with me.

In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders

Revolutionaries are a tough bunch…

As Dan Roberts and Ben Jacobs, writing in Bernie Sanders pulls off shock victory over Hillary Clinton in Indiana for The Guardian report:

Bernie Sanders threw a last-minute hurdle in front of Hillary Clinton’s march toward the Democratic party nomination on Tuesday by clinching a surprise victory in the Indiana primary.

Despite trailing by an average of seven points in opinion polls and losing a string of bigger, more diverse states on the east coast, Sanders once again proved his appeal to disaffected midwest voters by pulling off his 18th victory of 2016, according to Associated Press projections.

Sanders seemed on track to win a narrow majority of the 83 delegates on offer. With 93% reporting, Sanders had 52.7% of the vote to Clinton’s 47.3%.

Sanders said: “The Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over. They’re wrong. Maybe it’s over for the insiders and the party establishment, but the voters in Indiana had a different idea.”

You tell’m Bernie.

The Sanders campaign hopes that Indiana will mark one last turning point in a Democratic race characterised by a series of surprise comebacks that have prolonged Clinton’s otherwise relentless path toward the nomination.

He is well placed to pull off similar wins in West Virginia on 10 May and Oregon on 17 May, before a final showdown next month in California, whose 546 delegates present the biggest prize of the contest.

My $800 (so far) have been well spent: To the last primary, to the last vote: we fight, we fight, we fight, we fight, WE FIGHT, WE FIGHT…!

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap from China. On The Writing On The Wal—the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar—I continue my singular work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

WHO SHOULD HANDLE WALMART SECURITY…? When your job is security, every person looks like a security threat. No. I’m not talking about the Transportation Security Administration (thank gawd I don’t fly), I’m talking about retail security… Keep reading…

WHIPPING THE HOMOPHOBES INTO A FRENZY… I think Walmart figured out a while ago that being on the wrong side of the GLBTQ Rights struggle is bad for business. A tiny number of homophobic bigots who still believe that Walmart is their place to shop… Keep reading…

CAN HIGH TECH SAVE EVERYDAY LOW PRICES…? In terms of operating costs, virtual trumps bricks-and-mortar. Walmart has invested in, and fought long hard battles for, actual locations where customers have to travel to to buy merchandise. These… Keep reading…

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE WALMART EMPIRE… So, we’ve written hundreds of posts about the Walton family, their peers and their hirelings, but we’ve never focused on the people the way the folks at The Walmart 1%, The People Behind The Walmart Empire… Keep reading…

DUCK AND COVER…? REALLY WALMART…? I’ve written before applauding Walmarts stance on GLBTQ rights, and only last Friday I again said that Walmart is on the right side of this issue. That is why Tom Tillison’s piece surprised me a bit because he … Keep reading…

AND THE STUPID-CRIMINAL AWARD GOES TO… I don’t often write about crime and Walmart, although I make an exception when bribes are involved, but occasionally a story pops up that is just to hilarious to ignore. Such is the case of Demitichius… Keep reading…

WALMART’S SILENCE IS GETTING NOTICED… The time for Walmart to get on the right side of bathroom use by transgender customers is past. Every day that goes by only worsens the effect of the inevitable decision to follow the lead of Target and other… Keep reading…

TARGET IS RIGHT ON TRANS CUSTOMERS… Let Walmart know that you think Target (and others) are right in not discriminating against transgender customers’ use of their bathrooms and that you support Target’s stance by informing Walmart headquarters—… Keep reading…

Previously…

Bill McKibben writes:

Late last week, I got the interesting news that right wing operatives from the fossil fuel industry are mounting an impressive campaign against me (as well as a handful of other high-profile climate activists).

Apparently I’ll now have video trackers following me wherever I go; hired researchers are digging through fifty cartons of my papers at the university where they’re housed; and they’ll be running a six-figure digital advertising campaign to smear my reputation.

I have three takeaways from this:

1. It’s not me they’re after, it’s you. I’ve been writing and speaking for the better part of forty years, and never attracted this kind of notice before. But you’ve built a movement that’s starting to inflict real pain on the industry: Just in the last couple weeks, the Constitution and NED pipelines were both blocked in the northeast; ditto the Tongue River coal train in Montana; over sixty students have been arrested occupying the offices of universities to call for fossil fuel divestment; and on and on.

2. No need to waste sympathy on me. It’s not fun being in their crosshairs—and I don’t look forward to see how they twist my words —but it’s not the end of the world. Right now, we should be keeping in mind the people who are taking real risks every day to take a stand — people like Berta Cáceres, who was murdered for her activism two months ago in Honduras, or the farmers in the Philippines recently killed in a brutal police crackdown at a protest, or the thousands of people around the world who will be risking arrest as part of the Break Free mobilization these next couple weeks.

3. Above all, let’s not be distracted. That’s their goal—to get folks thinking about absolutely anything except the climate crisis, the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. February and March were record-hot months in the history of our planet, but May is going to be a record-hot political month for the fossil fuel industry.

Look, what we’re learning is this: When we fight, we win. It’s working. They’re fighting back. Let’s not back down.

If you haven’t already signed up to be part of one of the Break Free actions around the country, you can do that here.

And if you can’t make it to an action in person, sign up to help keep tabs on what’s going on around the world—so that we can turn all this watching around, and help keep each other safe.
With great thanks for the solidarity near and far,

Bill McKibben
350.org

Ralph Nader writes:

What are you going to do about it?
Throw in the towel?
Or organize to take charge as befits “We the People”?

Join me, Phil Donahue, Jim Hightower and Patti Smith. Plus scores of the top public interest organizers in America. We’re organizing a Left/Right Coalition to fight back against the corporate state duopoly.

May 23-26 at Constitution Hall in Washington DC.

We call it: Breaking Through Power with Civic Action.

Get in on the ground floor with your fellow Americans.

Join us now at Breaking Through Power.

See you at Constitution Hall.

Ralph Nader

Team Bernie writes:

Indiana votes tomorrow. Then comes West Virginia next week, and Oregon and Kentucky the week after that. We believe we can perform quite strongly in each of those states.

We’re fighting hard for every vote and every delegate in every remaining contest, because every state should have their chance to weigh in on the choice of a presidential nominee—as well as the future direction of the Democratic party.

If you support the idea of reclaiming our democracy from the billionaire class, can we count on you to help out this week and keep our movement going strong?

FIND A VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITY NEAR YOU

CALL VOTERS IN THE UPCOMING STATES ON THE BERNIE DIALER

Every vote we win and every delegate we send to the convention not only moves us closer to the nomination, but also moves our party and our country closer to the agenda we’re fighting for.

The pundits and the political establishment are all hoping our political revolution will dissolve, and that we’ll just go away. But that’s just not going to happen.

Instead, we’re going to keep fighting to raise the minimum wage, make public college tuition-free, expand Social Security, address climate change, and create good-paying jobs by investing in our public infrastructure. We just need the courage to reject the status quo and keep fighting for our values. Will you join us?

In solidarity,
Team Bernie

Mike DeBonis, reporting in Default at hand, Congress faces new pressure to act on Puerto Rico for The Washington Post writes:

Hours before Puerto Rico missed hundreds of millions of dollars of bond payments, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Monday issued a new and urgent call for Congress to pass legislation allowing the territory to restructure the $72 billion it owes to creditors.

In a letter to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Lew connected the island’s fiscal crisis to the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which has spread through the Caribbean and was recently confirmed to have claimed its first life on U.S. soil — a 70-year-old Puerto Rican man who died in February from a bleeding disorder linked to Zika.

“This is not just a matter of financial liabilities and litigation,” Lew wrote. “Hospitals continue to lay off workers, ration medication, reduce services, and close floors. Moreover, despite the intensifying threat from the Zika virus, financial constraints have made it extremely difficult to counteract. Unsealed septic tanks, abandoned homes, cemeteries, and piles of old tires, where mosquito larvae grow, for example, must all be treated, but the government is struggling to pay for the work to be done.”

[Puerto Rico debt rescue plan engulfed in Great Recession ‘bailout’ politics]

The Government Development Bank, which acts as a fiscal agent to Puerto Rican municipalities, owed $422 million to bondholders by the close of business on Monday. It paid interest but no principal Monday on those loans, though a group of credit unions agreed to forego $33 million of payments in exchange for new bonds that expire in a year. Some GDB creditors said Monday they would be willing take a significant loss and defer upcoming payments, but it could be impossible to get all of those creditors to agree to such a plan. The island is pushing for a court-managed restructuring created by act of Congress to force a swift and orderly process.

Monday’s default pales in comparison to the expected default on July 1, when $2 billion worth of debt service payments come due.

Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States.

I wonder what The Donald would do?

Previously…

On Saturday I donated another $100 to Bernie’s campaign, bringing my total to $800. I can live on that for a month, hell, I have lived on that for a month in the not distant past. I’ve never given a fraction of that to any politician and I’ve never donated a penny for any presidential candidate in my life. Yet, I still made the donation.

I’m sure that most people would think I was throwing money down a rat hole, I would be better off buying $800 in lottery tickets. I think most people people don’t understand.

There has never been a candidate in my lifetime like Bernie Sanders. If I live another 40 years I seriously doubt we will see another like him; unless we win this year. Winning this year is vital in too many ways to list.

Bernie gets that.

Yesterday Bernie:

…acknowledged “an uphill climb” ahead of him in the Democratic nomination race on Sunday, but vowed to continue battling against Hillary Clinton despite his diminishing chances of catching her.

In a press conference to mark the one-year anniversary of an insurgent campaign that few ever imagined, he also revealed plans for a new series of mega-rallies in California and renewed calls on the party’s handpicked superdelegates to change their allegiances before this summer’s national convention.

The Vermont senator conceded that in order for such appeals to make a difference, he would also have to win a majority of the remaining “pledged delegates”, whose votes are fixed according to election results. He would require him to win 65% of those 1,083 in remaining states to have a chance.

“That is admittedly, and I do not deny it for a second, a tough road to climb, but it is not an impossible road to climb and we intend to fight for every vote in front of us and every delegate remaining,” Sanders told reporters.

“It is virtually impossible for Hillary Clinton to reach a majority of convention delegates by June 14, which is the last day a primary will be held, with pledged delegates alone,” he added. “She will need superdelegates to take her over the top at the convention in Philadelphia.

“In other words the convention will be a contested contest.”

The Red Tails captured the sentiment best…