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Thomas Frank on How Democrats Went From Being the ‘Party of the People’ to the Party of Rich Elites

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Democrats have gone from the party of the New Deal to a party that is defending mass inequality.

By Tobita Chow

Source: In These Times

The Democratic Party was once the party of the New Deal and the ally of organized labor. But by the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it had become the enemy of New Deal programs like welfare and Social Security and the champion of free trade deals. What explains this apparent reversal? Thomas Frank—best known for his analysis of the Republican Party base in What’s the Matter with Kansas?—attempts to answer this question in his latest book, Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

According to Frank, popular explanations which blame corporate lobby groups and the growing power of money in politics are insufficient. Frank instead points to a decision by Democratic Party elites in the 1970s to marginalize labor unions and transform from the party of the working class to the party of the professional class. In so doing, the Democratic Party radically changed the way it understood social problems and how to solve them, trading in the principle of solidarity for the principle of competitive individualism and meritocracy. The end result is that the party which created the New Deal and helped create the middle class has now become “the party of mass inequality.” In These Times spoke with Frank recently about the book via telephone.

The book is about how the Democratic Party turned its back on working people and now pursues policies that actually increase inequality. What are the policies or ideological commitments in the Democratic Party that make you think this?

The first piece of evidence is what’s happened since the financial crisis. This is the great story of our time. Inequality has actually gotten worse since then, which is a remarkable thing. This is under a Democratic president who we were assured (or warned) was the most liberal or radical president we would ever see.  Yet inequality has gotten worse, and the gains since the financial crisis, since the recovery began, have gone entirely to the top 10 percent of the income distribution.

This is not only because of those evil Republicans, but because Obama played it the way he wanted to. Even when he had a majority in both houses of Congress and could choose whoever he wanted to be in his administration, he consistently made policies that favored the top 10 percent over everybody else. He helped out Wall Street in an enormous way when they were entirely at his mercy.

He could have done anything he wanted with them, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt did in the ‘30s. But he chose not to.

Why is that? This is supposed to be the Democratic Party, the party that’s interested in working people, average Americans. Why would they react to a financial crisis in this way? Once you start digging into this story, it goes very deep. You find that there was a transition in the Democratic Party in the ‘70s, 80’s and ‘90s where they convinced themselves that they needed to abandon working people in order to serve a different constituency: a constituency essentially of white-collar professionals.

That’s the most important group in their coalition. That’s who they won over in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. That’s who they serve, and that’s where they draw from. The leaders of the Democratic Party are always from this particular stratum of society.

A lot of progressives that I talk to are pretty familiar with the idea that the Democratic Party is no longer protecting the interests of workers, but it’s pretty common for us to blame it on mainly the power of money in politics. But you start the book in chapter one by arguing there’s actually something much deeper going on. Can you say something about that?

Money in politics is a big part of the story, but social class goes deeper than that. The Democrats have basically made their commitment [to white-collar professionals] already before money and politics became such a big deal. It worked out well for them because of money in politics. So when they chose essentially the top 10 percent of the income distribution as their most important constituents, that is the story of money.

It wasn’t apparent at the time in the ‘70s and ‘80s when they made that choice. But over the years, it has become clear that that was a smart choice in terms of their ability to raise money. Organized labor, of course, is no slouch in terms of money. They have a lot of clout in dollar terms. However, they contribute and contribute to the Democrats and they almost never get their way—they don’t get, say, the Employee Free Choice Act, or Bill Clinton passes NAFTA. They do have a lot of money, but their money doesn’t count.

All of this happened because of the civil war within the Democratic Party. They fought with each other all the time in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. One side hadn’t completely captured the party until Bill Clinton came along in the ‘90s. That was a moment of victory for them.

Bill Clinton’s presidency is what progressives usually cite as the time when things went bad. But there’s a trend that goes back to the ’70s, right?

Historians always cite the ’68 election as the turning point. The party was torn apart by the controversy over the Vietnam war, protesters were in the streets in Chicago and the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey went on to lose. Democrats thought this was terrible, and it was. So they set up a commission to reorganize the party, the McGovern Commission.

The McGovern Commission basically set up our modern system of primaries. Before the commission, we didn’t have these long primary contests in state after state after state. Primaries are a good thing, as were most things the McGovern Commission did.

But they also removed organized labor from its structural position of power in the Democratic Party. There was a lot of resentment towards labor during the Vietnam War. A lot of unions took President Johnson’s side on Vietnam. There was also this sense—which I think was correct at the time—that labor was a dinosaur, that it was out of touch and undemocratic and very white.

There were a lot of reasonable objections to organized labor at the time. The problem is, when you get rid of labor in your party, you also get rid of issues that matter to working people. That’s the basic mistake that Democrats made in the ’70s. Of course, labor still is a big part of the Democratic coalition—it gives them their money, it helps out at election time in a huge way. But unions no longer have the presence in party councils that they used to. That disappeared.

One of the most shocking quotes in the book is from Alfred Kahn, an advisor to Jimmy Carter, who said, “I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off.” He then basically says that unionized workers are exploiting other workers.

Isn’t that amazing? He’s describing a situation in the 1970s. There was all this controversy in the 1970s about labor versus management—this was the last decade where those fights were front and center in our national politics. And he’s coming down squarely on the side of management in those fights.

And remember, Kahn was a very important figure in the Carter administration. The way that he describes unions is incorrect—he’s actually describing professionals. Professionals are a protected class that you can’t do anything about—they’re protected by the laws of every state that dictate who can practice in these fields. It’s funny that he projects that onto organized labor and holds them responsible for the sins of another group.

This is a Democrat in an administration that is actually not very liberal. This is the administration that carried out the first of the big deregulations. This is the administration that had the great big capital gains tax cuts, that carried out the austerity plan that saw the Federal Reserve jack its interest rates sky high. They clubbed the economy to the ground in order to stop “wage inflation,” in which workers, if they have enough power, can keep demanding higher wages. It was incredible.

What’s the content of the ideology of the professional class and how does it hurt working people? What are their guiding principles?

The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be. With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.

If you look at the last few Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Obama, and Hillary Clinton as well, their lives are a tale of educational achievement. This is what opened up the doors of the world to them. It’s a party of who people who have gotten where they are by dint of educational accomplishment.

This produces a set of related ideas. When the Democrats, the party of the professionals, look at the economic problems of working-class people, they always see an educational problem, because they look at working class people and say, “Those people didn’t do what I did”: go and get advanced degrees, go to the right college, get the high SAT scores and study STEM or whatever.

There’s another interesting part of this ideology: this endless search for consensus. Washington is a city of professionals with advanced degrees, and Democrats look around them there and say, “We’re all intelligent people. We all went to good schools. We know what the problems are and we know what the answers are, and politics just get in the way.”

This is a very typical way of thinking for the professional class: reaching for consensus, because politics is this ugly thing that you don’t really need. You see this in Obama’s endless efforts to negotiate a grand bargain with Republicans because everybody in Washington knows the answers to the problems—we just have to get together, sit down and make an agreement. The same with Obamacare: He spent so many months trying to get Republicans to sign on, even just one or two, so that he could say it was bipartisan. It was an act of consensus. And the Republicans really played him, because they knew that’s what he’d do.

To go back to your point about education: At one point you quote Arne Duncan, who was Obama’s secretary of education, saying that the only way to end poverty is through education. Why can’t that work?

The big overarching problem of our time is inequality. If you look at historical charts of productivity and wage growth, these two things went hand in hand for decades after World War II, which we think of as a prosperous, middle-class time when even people with a high school degree, blue-collar workers, could lead a middle class life. And then everything went wrong in the 1970s. Productivity continued to go up and wage growth stopped. Wage growth has basically been flat ever since then. But productivity goes up by leaps and bounds all the time. We have all of these wonderful technological advances. Workers are more productive than ever but they haven’t benefited from it. That’s the core problem of inequality.

Now, if the problem was that workers weren’t educated enough, weren’t smart enough, productivity would not be going up. But that productivity line is still going up. So we can see that education is not the issue.

It’s important that people get an education, of course. I spent 25 years of my life getting an education. It’s basic to me. It’s a fundamental human right that people should have the right to pursue whatever they want to the maximum extent of their individual potential. But the idea that this is what is holding them back is simply incorrect as a matter of fact. What’s holding them back is that they don’t have the power to demand higher wages.

If we talk about the problem as one of education rather than power, then the blame goes back to these workers. They just didn’t go out and work hard and do their homework and get a gold star from their teacher. If you take the education explanation for inequality, ultimately you’re blaming the victims themselves.

Unfortunately, that is the Democratic view. That’s why Democrats have essentially become the party of mass inequality. They don’t really have a problem with it.

So really, the solution would have to be solidarity and organized power.

That was an essential point that I try to make in Listen Liberal: that there is no solidarity in a meritocracy. A meritocracy really is every man for himself.

Don’t get me wrong. People at the top of the meritocracy, professionals, obviously have enormous respect for one another. That is the nature of professional meritocracy. They have enormous respect for the people at the top, but they feel very little solidarity for people beneath them who don’t rise in the meritocracy.

Look at the white-collar workplace. If some professional gets fired, the other professionals don’t rally around and go on strike or protest or something like that. They just don’t do that. They feel no solidarity because everything goes back to you and whether or not you’ve made the grade. If somebody gets fired, they must’ve deserved it somehow.

I have my own personal experience. Look at academia over the last 20 years. They’re cranking out these Ph.D.s in the humanities who can’t get jobs on tenure track and instead have to work as adjuncts for very low pay, no benefits. One of the fascinating parts about this is that, with a few exceptions, the people who do have tenure-track jobs and are at the top of their fields, do very little about what’s happened to their colleagues who work as adjuncts. Essentially this is the Uberizing of higher education. The professionals who are in a position of authority have done almost nothing about it. There are academics here and there who feel bad about what’s happened to adjuncts and do say things about it, but by and large, overall, there is no solidarity in that meritocracy. They just don’t care.

Do you think there’s a connection between the fact that the Democratic Party has turned against workers and the rise of Donald Trump?

Yes. Because if you look at the polling, Trump is winning the votes of a lot of people who used to be Democrats. These white, working-class people are his main base of support. As a group, these people were once Democrats all over the country. These are Franklin Roosevelt’s people. These are the people that the Democrats essentially decided to turn their backs on back in the 1970s. They call them the legatees of the New Deal. They were done with these guys, and now look what’s happened—they’ve gone with Donald Trump. That’s frightening and horrifying.

But Trump talks about their issues in a way that they find compelling, especially the trade issue. When he talks about trade, they believe him. Ironically, he’s saying the same things that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are saying about trade, but for whatever reason people find him more believable on this subject than they do Hillary Clinton.

Do you think that the rise of the Bernie campaign could herald a new era in the history of the Democratic Party?

I hope so. Both Trump and Bernie are turning their respective parties upside down. What Bernie is doing is very impressive. I interviewed him a few years ago and have always admired him. I think he’s a great man. To think that he could beat a Clinton in a Democratic primary anywhere in this country, let alone many primaries, was unthinkable a short time ago. And he’s done it without any Wall Street or big-business backing. That is extraordinary. It shows the kind of desperation that’s out there.

He has shown the way, and whether he gets the nomination or not (he probably won’t), there’ll be another Bernie four years from now. And there’ll also be another Trump. The Republican Party is being turned on its head much more violently than the Democrats. Hillary will probably get the nomination. I live in Washington, D.C., and I spend time around Hillary-style Democrats. They really think that they’ve got this thing in the bag. And I don’t just mean her versus Bernie. I mean the Democratic Party winning the presidency for the rest of our lives. From here to eternity. They can choose whoever they want. They could nominate anybody and they would win. They think they’re in charge.

One of your villains from the ’70s is Frederick Dutton, who wrote a book about how the Democratic Party needed to realign itself. You have a quote from him saying, “Every major realignment in U.S. political history has been accompanied by the coming of a large new group into the electorate.” You’re very critical of how he uses that idea in the ‘70s. But if you look at the newer voters attached to the Bernie campaign, it looks like the Democratic Party is experiencing something like that now.

Yes, in both cases you’re talking about a generational shift. That’s what he meant in 1971. He was talking about the counterculture and the “Now Generation” and the idea that they would come into the electorate and demand a different kind of politics—specifically his kind of politics.

Everybody always sees this new group that’s coming in as supporting what they want. That’s what he thought. I have a certain amount of contempt for that. Many years ago I wrote a book about the counterculture and how it was used for this purpose—specifically by the advertising industry. But Bernie’s doing the same thing. He’s using it for his own purposes.

Millenials’ take on the world is fascinating. Just a few years ago, people thought of them as very different. But now they’re coming out of college with enormous student debt, and they’re discovering that the job market is casualized and Uberized. The work that they do is completely casual. The idea of having a middle-class lifestyle in that situation is completely off the table for them.

Every time I think about these people, it burns me up. It makes me so angry what we’ve done to them as a society. It really gives the lie to Democratic Party platitudes about the world an education will open up for you. That path just doesn’t work anymore. Millenials can see that in their own lives very plainly.

So I’m very excited that they’re pro-Bernie. They really are the future.

 

Tobita Chow is chair of The People’s Lobby, an independent political organization based in Chicago, and co-author of “The Movement We Need,” a pamphlet on analysis and strategy for the progressive movement. He has been involved in faith-based community organizing on the South Side of Chicago since 2009, and is a leader in the “Moral Mondays Illinois” campaign against state budget cuts. He is an MDiv student at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

Jan Kounen on Visionary Ayahuasca

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(Editor’s note: In honor of the 52nd birthday of director Jan Kounen (Blueberry, Other Worlds and 99 Francs), we’re sharing this Reality Sandwich interview with a focus on Kounen’s latest book Visionary Ayahuasca.)

By Benton Rooks

Source: Reality Sandwich

I spoke to acclaimed filmmaker Jan Kounen (Blueberry, 2004) recently on art, consciousness, and his most recent book Visionary Ayahuasca. Like many other RS readers I am a huge fan, so it was a pleasure to speak to him.

Visionary Ayahuasca is a really refreshing book on the subject because it comes from someone who has engaged in over 400 ceremonies with the sacred medicine over many years. The wisdom shines through from that experience level and permeates the text. 

Why did you decide to structure Visionary in a non-linear format? I think it works really well because the reader can see the true juxtaposition from your earlier pre-aya self. Is it because you feel the experience of aya is experienced in non-linear terms?

I think that ayahuasca—both the teaching and journey—are fractals, a kaleidoscopic unfolding narrative.

Sometimes you have 15 ceremonies in a row and you only get what was the purpose at the last one. For me it’s a bit like a puzzle because sometimes you only discover the picture you are making when you put in the last piece.

I’m a filmmaker, so I created non-linear structures in films. This just allows me to tell a story slightly differently, so I’m used to learning in this way. 

Do you think that darker experiences with ayahuasca test the strength of the psyche so that the soul can know the healing power of the plant? Is the infamous purge always necessary or something that goes away in time or after more practice? 

I don’t think that there is any specific role of ayahuasca’s dark side necessarily, there is just the role of the medicine to put you in a better balance with yourself and the world.

So the dark side we are facing through ayahuasca, which acts as a mirror, can be coming from many directions simultaneously; bad food, physical illness, fears and trauma, self esteem issues, inflated ego, cultural implants, etc.

If you look at ayahuasca as an energetic medicine, all dark experience are really cleaning operations, re-establishing into the being a good balance (physical, spiritual, emotional, mental).

In other words, you don’t see in the normal state of consciousness how much of you inside is a mess (at least mine is), but you basically have the best possible healer with you, so you kind of purge through these dark visions.

So when you have the dark visions you ask the medicine to evacuate it, to vibrationally cleanse it in order to help you be rid of it. You might purge, you might not—especially in later journeys—but when the visions are gone then the next day you will feel like a new born. 

Can you explain how working with these kinds of plant medicines have caused you to view your role as a filmmaker differently, or how it has effected your overall view of art and inspiration? 

For me as a filmmaker, you’re projecting through a film, ideas, topics, concepts, emotions, rhythms, cognitive information.

Ayahuasca over a long period of use changes you holistically as a human being, so naturally it changes your relations to all of those realms at once. So it changed my approach to cinema, too.

You have to watch my pre-ayahuasca films, and my post ayahuasca films in order to see the changes I guess, but I look at my work differently now, more energetically.

A film, a painting, a piece of music, words, contain energy. So the question becomes; what energy do you want to propel into society?

In Visionary Ayahuasca there’s an amusing anecdote concerning peyote.

What do you see being the central qualitative differences between aya and other plant medicines? 

Peyote is a different experience, more sensitive and bodily than visionary. I had an incredible moment with peyote that I describe in my book. 

I have dieted on many varieties of Amazonian plants through the Shipibo way, it’s complementary to Ayahuasca.

Most Amazonian plant medicines function in healing. Some of them you have to be very cautious with because they are dangerous, Toé (Datura) for example, and they all work differently. For example some, like pignon blanco, are not inherently psychoactive, but will instead work to magnify the visual component of your dreams. 

The quest in this case may be about finding the plant that you can have a good relation with, then a respected relation with love and caution can develop.

It’s a love story, and like anything you can have ecstatic love and drama sometimes equally.  

The role of the healer is to aid in these encounters, to help you find the right plants that are willing be your ally. 

What are your thoughts on neotribalism or neopaganism and the aspects of Western hegemony in re-appropriation of South American or shamanic practices in general?

Even though there is sincere and legitimate healing happening, there seem to be stereotypes of naive tourists who do want more of an ayahuasca vacation quick fix, and this image has also been magnified by mainstream media.

I suppose it’s the natural movement of the world, the crossover and dispersion of all things in global culture. In a way it’s probably logical to get to that stage in our culture.

But I did my films and books basically for 2 reasons:

The first is that I recognized the knowledge of indigenous cultures is way ahead of the West currently in the exploration of the inner world, the invisible world, and the nature of consciousness.

The second is simply to give some information to my fellow compatriots in the West about these experiences.

We are all still like children in these realms, but the wisdom and mystery of the teachers is there, too.

Concerning Westerner’s beliefs; I do not know of them. Life is short and I decided to concentrate on exploring those realities with the Shipibo, through their science and medicine. A life time of drinking ayahuasca may not be enough learning anyway!

This is a speculative question but, do you think that ayahuasca as we know it today was ever used by the past by any cultures outside of South America, or by those with European ancestry?

I’m thinking particularly of European witchcraft lineages which tended to have an extensive knowledge of visionary plants. Usually these were taken specifically to cure illness or in general to heal the mind. Scholars like Claudia Müller-Ebeling and Christian Ratsch have also speculated about this. 

Of course. It’s evident for me.

We’ve had the knowledge of the plant world maybe more directly in the past, and we do still have many master plants in Europe. 

A lot of this has been destroyed by religious cults under the notion of “progress”, but the scientific evidence for healing properties of plants is all over the globe and is still preserved in books as you say.

Visionary plants do seem to be encoded at the foundation of all religions, that’s the paradox; the plants still exist, but the knowledge about all all of the more rare plants might still be in danger of disappearing.

What would you say to those that think ayahuasca visions are hallucinations or mere tricks of the mind?

For instance, do you believe in astral projection, remote viewing, divination and other aspects of trans-subjective mass visions such as two or more people experiencing the exact same visions of spirits? There have been reports of said spirits being also verified by those that did not drink in ceremony.

Marlene Dobkin De Rios, John Perkins, and other scholars have documented all of this phenomena as being possible amongst the indigenous, too.

Ayahuasca visions are called tricks of the mind?

I don’t want to sound rude, but these sorts of thoughts usually do come from Westerners—the so-called non believers from the indigenous point of view—who have not yet taken this medicine.

If a person has taken a good dose of ayahuasca, if your mind and body are ready and prepared, and if you have the visions, the question of that same person may become the next morning; Ayahuasca visions, are they tricks or messages from God?

When I started writing the book I was over 100 ceremonies, I’m now over 400. In 16 years there is still one thing relevant for me: 

You witness a lot of crazy stuff in ayahuasca ceremonies!

I’ve had sessions where life becomes magic and timelines explode, so in this sense it feels like anything is possible for me.

Nature is said to be an integrated communication system between species, and in that way it allows for access to non visible reality. The indigenous have the key, so we are lucky that some are STILL willing to share that wisdom with us.

As Arthur C Clarke has said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

What if?

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By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

What if, every moment were meaningful? Every thought no matter how banal, ever word no matter how mundane. Every action, no matter its intention sends reverberations of meaning out into time and space. Interacting with the thoughts, words and actions of others. With the world of the senses, the infinite worlds above and below and the ineffable creations beyond contemplation.

What if this is true right now? As you sit here reading these words? What if your problems, the things going on in your relationships, with your family, friends and acquaintances, in your community and nation have meaning beyond that we generally ascribe to them? And what if this were a show, and inscrutable and infinite entities beyond our ability to sense had access to our every thought, could see our reality from outside of time – cycling back and forth thru lives and eons with some cosmic remote – and were observing us as if we were the most popular reality show ever?

If all this were true, would it make you look at your life any differently? Live with the understanding that each moment is a precious gift? That these brief, fleeting lives of ours are as ephemeral as cirrus clouds in the stratosphere; only a brief and whimsical flowering amidst the bounteous and infinite glory of eternal creation.

If every moment is meaningful and there is more to creation than our eyes and ears and hands can interpret, them that must mean that there is more to us, too. That life is precious. That each soul has worth. That no matter how unimportant and worthless we each might think we are, our personal qualities are exactly that unique expression of the infinite and eternal act of creation that gives each life and body worth.

I have worth. You matter. We have value. See how long you can carry that thought today.

Life, is priceless.

 

Why Can’t The Nation and the Left Deal With Election Theft?

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By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

Source: Reader Supported News

here are two things we all need to know about the upcoming 2016 election:

    1. Millions of likely Democratic voters have already been stripped from the voter rolls in critical states like Ohio. The key reporting on this has been done by the great Greg Palast, who has shown that a computer program coordinated by the Republican secretary of state of Kansas is being used in some two dozen states to steal from a substantial percentage of the citizenry their right to vote. The raw numbers are high enough that they could have a significant impact on the presidential, US Senate, House and many other elections this fall. The ACLU has now sued Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, over the stripping of two million citizens from Ohio’s voter rolls.
    1. There is no way to verify the official tally on the electronic machines on which the majority of Americans will vote this fall. Nearly all the machines are a decade old, most are controlled by a single company (ES&S, owned by Warren Buffett) and the courts have ruled that the software is proprietary, making the vote counts beyond public scrutiny. In fact, they are beyond all independent monitoring altogether. In many key swing states (including Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Arizona) GOP governors and secretaries of state will have a free hand to flip the vote count to whatever they want it to be without detection or accountability. This could turn control of our government over to the GOP come November, as it did in 2000 and 2004.

These two critical markers of the upcoming national election are at center stage in our compendium The Flip & Strip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft (www.freepress.org / www.solartopia.org), which we’ll be publishing at the end of April.

For some reason many on the left have had a hard time accepting these realities. But they’re in fact far more critical than the question of who will make the better Democratic candidate.

In the interim, the usually solid Josh Holland has published a piece at The Nation with which we must take issue. It challenges writings that have put forward the idea that Hillary Clinton might be stealing the primaries from Bernie Sanders.

To avoid the circular firing squad in which the left indulges every election year, we should make it clear that we are both members of the Green Party. We prefer Bernie to Hillary, but like Jill Stein most of all. We hope Bernie at some point will establish a substantial string of grassroots training camps so the thousands of highly active young people who are supporting him will convert those energies to great long-term community organizing.

We are most concerned about the possibility of a GOP president come November. (For what it’s worth, we currently lay the highest odds of that nominee being the absolutely terrifying Paul Ryan. Ryan has said he won’t campaign for the nomination, but he has NOT said he’ll refuse it at a convention where he’ll be holding the gavel. His pockets will be stuffed with Koch cash. Enough said.)

We plead guilty to writing a piece at Reader Supported News pointing out that the exit polls show Bernie doing far better than the official vote count. Josh dismisses the reliability of exit polls, along with our mention of those in Germany. Suffice it to say that exit polling is the most reliable way we have of monitoring the vote count. In Germany they are usually within 1% of the official tally.

Here they are corrupted after the original compilations. They’re generally post-rigged to conform to the final official vote count, which is often pre-rigged. What matters is the original raw data, which we feel after much study is the gold standard for knowing how the public actually voted.

Of course that data can be messed with along the way. But at this point it’s the best we’ve got. And the original data can be hard to get. When statistician Ron Baiman requested original data from big-time pollster Warren Mitofsky (since deceased) Mitofsky told to him to “go fuck yourself.”

For some reason Josh drags “conspiracy theory” into the mix, with a lengthy soliloquy on 9/11. Neither of us writes about 9/11, though we know plenty of people who do. We find much of the official story not credible, but that’s about it at this point.

However, history warns us to be discerning about so-called conspiracy theories. Josh paints them all with a broad brush when he says they “tend to fall apart under the weight of their own internal illogic.”

But at the risk of rolling some eyeballs, here are (briefly) five that have proved indisputably true: Spain did NOT torpedo the battleship Maine in 1898, a false charge the led to a terrible war (the US Navy has confirmed the Maine blew up from the inside); the Lusitania WAS carrying munitions in 1915, as Germany argued; the Gulf of Tonkin incident NEVER happened, as confirmed by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara; Richard Nixon DID treasonably subvert Vietnam peace talks in 1968; and there were NO WMDs in Iraq.

Maybe we can leave the Mexican War; Pearl Harbor; the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK; and the “October Surprise” timing of the release of hostages from Iran in 1980-1981, etc., for another discussion.

About the elections of 2000 and 2004, we are way beyond conspiracy theory. That the voter rolls were stripped in numbers exceeding 90,000 throughout Florida 2000, and the vote count electronically flipped in Volusia County at the key moment, are simply beyond dispute. So is the reality that had the Supreme Court not stopped the recount, Gore would have won.

In Ohio 2004, it’s also beyond dispute that more than 300,000 voters were stripped from the registration rolls from mostly Democratic urban areas, and that the vote count was flipped by 6.7% from Kerry to Bush between 12:20 and 2 a.m. on machines in a basement in Chattanooga where the servers for Karl Rove and the Republican National Committee also resided. Thousands of Ohioans were deliberately robbed of their vote with the stripping of precincts and denial of voting machines and back-up paper ballots in African-American and student strongholds. In an election with an official victory margin of 118,775, more than 250,000 votes remain uncounted to this day. Thousands of provisional ballots were also pitched in the trash, as they already have been in this primary season, and will be again in November.

Imagine a world in which, instead of George W. Bush, Al Gore had been inaugurated as the rightfully elected president in 2001, or John Kerry in 2005. It’s easy if you open your eyes to what actually happened in those elections, and terrifying if you think about what could happen this year.

For some reason, Josh also takes us into the purported mind of a Hillary operative who would never think of rigging a primary election because she was winning anyway.

This a bit hard to follow. But let’s just say that the exit polls have indicated Bernie doing better than the official vote count, that (according to Richard Charnin) Bernie won all the hand-counted precincts in Massachusetts but lost all the machine-counted ones, and that all the caucuses have been extremely messy and open to all sorts of manipulation by both sides.

Far more important to say is that the voting machines this fall will be significantly more vulnerable to being flipped than ever before, because they are now nearly all at least ten years old. Some are decrepit enough to have been used to play PacMan or the University of Michigan fight song in public displays.

For us, the most significant event of the primary season has been the 5-hour lines in Arizona and the one-hour lines in Wisconsin. We are less concerned about whether Hillary did this to Bernie than we are worried that these will become the defining moments on the rigged path to a GOP victory in November.

Josh, if you’re reading this, we repeat our invitation to come on our radio shows (http://prn.fm/hosts-harvey-wasserman/ and http://www.talktainmentradio.com/shows/fightback.html).

Meantime, how about a piece on the “strip and flip” realities both the Democrats and the Greens will face come November? Whether it’s Hillary, Bernie, or Jill, as things stand now we are certain to see deliberately engineered long lines that will disenfranchise countless young, African-American. and Hispanic voters. We also know that in certain key swing states, the electronic vote count will come out however the hell the governor wants it to.

To you this may be conspiracy theory. But remember the Maine.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored six books on election integrity, including the upcoming Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft (www.freepress.org / www.solartopia.org). Bob’s Fitrakis Files are at www.freepress.org. Harvey’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of US History will be out soon at www.solartopia.org.

Poisoned Agriculture: Depopulation and Human Extinction

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: RINF

There is a global depopulation agenda. The plan is to remove the ‘undesirables’, ‘the poor’ and others deemed to be ‘unworthy’ and a drain on finite resources. However, according to Rosemary Mason, the plan isn’t going to work because an anthropogenic mass extinction is already underway that will affect all life on the planet and both rich and poor alike. Humans will struggle to survive the phenomenon.

A new paper by Rosemary A Mason in the ‘Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry’, indicates that a ‘sixth extinction’ is under way (the Holocene extinction, sometimes called the Sixth Extinction, is a name describing the ongoing extinction of species during the present Holocene epoch – since around 10,000 BCE). In her paper, ‘The sixth mass extinction and chemicals in the environment: our environmental deficit is now beyond nature’s ability to regenerate’, she argues that loss of biodiversity is the most urgent of the environmental problems, as biodiversity is critical to ecosystem services and human health. And the main culprit is the modern chemical-intensive industrialised system of food and agriculture.

Mason asserts there is a growing threat from the release of hormone-disrupting chemicals that could even be shifting the human sex ratio and reducing sperm counts. An industrial agricultural revolution has created a technology-dependent global food system, but it has also created serious long-run vulnerabilities, especially in its dependence on stable climates, crop monocultures and industrially produced chemical inputs. In effect, farming is a principal source of global toxification and soil degradation.

Without significant pressure from the public demanding action, Mason argues there could little chance of changing course fast enough to forestall disaster. The ‘free’ market is driving the impending disaster and blind faith in corporate-backed technology will not save us. Indeed, such faith in this technology is actually killing us.

Since the late 1990s, US scientists have written in increasingly desperate tones regarding an unprecedented number of fungal and fungal-like diseases, which have recently caused some of the most severe die-offs and extinctions ever witnessed in wild species and which are jeopardizing food security. Only one paper dared to mention pesticides as being a primary cause, however.

Mason cites a good deal of evidence to show how the widespread use on agricultural crops of the systemic neonicotinoid insecticides and the herbicide glyphosate, both of which cause immune suppression, make species vulnerable to emerging infectious pathogens, driving large-scale wildlife extinctions, including essential pollinators.

Providing evidence to show how human disease patterns correlate remarkably well with the rate of glyphosate usage on corn, soy and wheat crops, which has increased due to ‘Roundup Ready’ crops, Mason goes on to present more sources to show how our over-reliance on chemicals in agriculture is causing irreparable harm to all beings on this planet. Most of these chemicals are known to cause illness, and they have likely been causing illnesses for many years. But until recently, the herbicides have never been sprayed directly on food crops and never in this massive quantity.

The depopulation agenda

Mason discusses how agriculture and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) fit into a wider agenda for depopulating the planet. She notes that on the initiative of Gates, in May 2009 some of the richest people in the US met at the home of Nurse, a British Nobel prize-winning biochemist and President (2003–10) of Rockefeller University in Manhattan, to discuss ways of tackling a ‘disastrous’ environmental, social and industrial threat of overpopulation. The meeting was hosted by David Rockefeller Jr. These same individuals have met several times since to develop a strategy in which population growth would be tackled.

The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) was involved in extensive financing of eugenics research by the National Socialists (Nazis) during and after World War and was in league with some of the US’s most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy élite families, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics’, the systematic killing off of ‘undesired bloodlines’.

RF funded the earliest research on GMOs, which Mason regards as part of the depopulation agenda (of course, apart from the adverse health impacts of GMOs, Monsanto owns the ‘epicyte gene’ which causes sterility in males). The RF funded the earliest research on GMOs in the 1940s and effectively founded the science of molecular biology.

Mason cites Steven Druker to show the fraud behind GMOs and how governments and leading scientific institutions have systematically misrepresented the facts about GMOs and the scientific research that casts doubt on their safety. Druker has shown that GMOs can have severe health impacts, which have been covered up.

The Royal Society is the preeminent scientific body within the UK that advises the government. It has misrepresented the facts about GMOs and has engaged in various highly dubious and deceptive tactics to promote the technology.

Druker wrote an open letter to RS as it has an obligation to the British public to provide a public response and ‘put the record straight’ on GMOs. Although Sir Paul Nurse’s presidency of Rockefeller University terminated in 2010, after he assumed the Royal Society presidency, Mason notes that Nurse is said to have maintained a laboratory on the Rockefeller campus and has an ongoing relationship with the university.

She asks: is that why Sir Paul was unable (or unwilling) even to discuss GMOs with Steven Druker? Was he sent to London by the Rockefeller Foundation to support the UK Government in their attempt to bring in GM crops? The UK Government and the GM industry have after all been shown to be working together to promote GM crops and foods, undermine consumer choice and ignore environmental harm.

Mason then goes on to discuss the impact of glyphosate residues (herbicide-tolerant GM crops are designed to work with glyphosate), which are found in the organs of animals, human urine and human breast milk as well as in the air and rivers. She documents its widespread use and contamination of soil and water and notes that the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer’s assessment of glyphosate being a 2A carcinogen (probably carcinogenic in humans) is unwelcome news for the agrochemical industry. She also notes that Roundup usage has led to a depletion of biodiversity and that loss of biodiversity is also correlated with neonicotinoids. However, despite the evidence, the blatant disregard concerning the use of these substances by regulatory agencies around the world is apparent.

To provide some insight into the impact on health of the chemical-intensive model of agriculture, Mason shows that in the US increases in Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, breast cancer, oesophageal cancer, congenital anomalies and a growing burden of disability, particularly from mental disorders are all acknowledged.

She claims that plans are under way to depopulate the planet’s seven million plus people to a more manageable level of between 500–2000 million by a combination of means, including the poisoning and contamination of the planet’s food and water supplies via chemical-intensive industrialised agriculture. Mason also notes that health-damaging GMOs are being made available to the masses (under the guise of ‘feeding the poor’), while elites are more prone to eat organic food.

We may be gone before planned depopulation takes hold

Although Mason cites evidence to show that a section of the US elite has a depopulation agenda, given the amount of poisons being pumped into the environment and into humans, the thrust of her argument is that we could all be extinct before this comes to fruition – both rich and poor alike.

In concluding, she states that the global pesticides industry has been allowed to dominate the regulatory agencies and have created chemicals of mass destruction that can no longer be controlled. She has some faith in systems biology coming to the fore and being able to understand the complexity of the whole organism as a system, rather than just studying its parts in a reductionist manner. But Mason believes that ultimately the public must place pressure on governments and hold agribusiness to account.

However, that in itself may not be enough.

It is correct to highlight the poisonous impacts of the Rockefeller-sponsored petrochemical ‘green revolution’. It has uprooted indigenous/traditional agriculture and local economies and has recast them in a model that suits global agribusiness. It is poisoning life and the environment, threatening food security across the globe and is unsustainable. The ‘green revolution’ was ultimately a tool of US foreign policy that has been used in conjunction with various institutions like the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation. GMOs represent more of the same.

In this respect, Mason follows the line of argument in William F Engdahl’s book ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation’, which locates the GM issue and the ‘green revolution’ firmly within the context of empire. Engdahl also sees the Rockefeller-Gates hand behind the great GMO project to a sinister eugenicist strategy of depopulation.

Mason’s concerns about depopulation therefore should not be dismissed, particularly given the record of the likes of the Gates and Rockefeller clans, the various covert sterility programmes that have been instituted by the US over the decades and the way agriculture has and continues to be used as a geopolitical tool to further the agendas of rich interests in the US.

To understand the processes that have led to modern farming and the role of entities like Monsanto, we must appreciate the geopolitics of food and agriculture, which benefits an increasingly integrated global cartel of finance, oil, military and agribusiness concerns. This cartel seeks to gain from war, debt bondage and the control of resources, regardless of any notions relating to food security, good health and nutrition, biodiversity, food democracy, etc.

Food and trade policy analyst Devinder Sharma notes the impacts in India:

“India is on fast track to bring agriculture under corporate control… Amending the existing laws on land acquisition, water resources, seed, fertilizer, pesticides and food processing, the government is in overdrive to usher in contract farming and encourage organized retail. This is exactly as per the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as the international financial institutes.”

In Punjab, India, pesticides have turned the state into a ‘cancer epicentre‘. Moreover, Indian soils are being depleted as a result of the application of ‘green revolution’ ideology and chemical inputs. India is losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of the indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is become deficient in nutrients and fertility.

And now, there is an attempt to push GM food crops into India in a secretive, non-transparent manner that smacks of regulatory delinquency underpinned by corrupt practices, which suggests officials are working hand in glove with US agribusiness.

As smallholders the world over are being driven from their land and the GMO/chemical-industrial farming model takes over, the problems continue to mount.

The environment, the quality of our food and our health are being sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit and a type of looting based on something we can loosely regard as ‘capitalism’. The solution involves a shift to organic farming and investment in and reaffirmation of indigenous models of agriculture. But ultimately it entails what Daniel Maingi of Growth Partners for Africa says what we must do: “… take capitalism and business out of farming.”

It must also entail, according to Maingi, investing in  “… indigenous knowledge and agroecology, education and infrastructure and stand(ing) in solidarity with the food sovereignty movement.”

In other words, both farmers and consumers must organise to challenge governments, corrupt regulatory bodies and big agribusiness at every available opportunity. If we don’t do this, what Mason outlines may come to pass.

 

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer : you can support his writing here.

Hillary’s Neocon Problem

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By Gerald Sussman

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Hillary Clinton has a dark history in foreign policy. Indeed, if the Nuremberg principles were applied evenly, her name would certainly be on the docket, along with her former boss in the White House, who is actually less of a hawk than she. When Donald Trump publicly expressed a willingness to negotiate with Russia over international conflicts, she referred to such an idea as putting “Christmas in the Kremlin.”  She’s red-baited Bernie Sanders for his support for the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions back in the 1980s. Clinton basically backs not “political realism,” but the more imperial tradition of neoconservative “American exceptionalism,” a chauvinist mindset by which the US sets the political, economic, and military priorities of the world and the places and times of its interventions, sometimes with allied support, sometimes without, at its own discretion.

Hillary is a product of her husband’s alignment with Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the right wing shift of the party, which moved the Democrats away from its moorings in organized labor, the New Deal, civil rights, and the Great Society. Bill Clinton’s successful election undoubtedly inspired the formation of “New” Labour in Britain, which likewise broke with its party history in the labor movement. In the 1990s, then MP Tony Blair, his shadow government chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown, and his chief pollster Philip Gould came to America as apprentices of the Clinton presidential campaigns to study their public relations and other electioneering tactics. This became part of New Labour’s successful “Third Way” victorious strategy in 1997. Back then, Anthony Howard, writing in the Times of London, said that Clinton’s New Democrats “lighted the path” for Blair’s New Labour. Blair partnered with Clinton and the DLC in taking a more militarist stance toward Saddam Hussein, which paved the way for Bush’s and Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Bill Clinton’s and the DLC’s legacy candidate is Hillary. And what better way to prove her cojones, in case anyone thought a woman president might turn out to be a negotiator and peacenik, than to pick on Russia and reignite the Cold War. Despite the Russians’ brilliant mix of negotiation – warding off a US invasion of Iran, getting the US off Assad’s back with the disposal of his chemical weapons stash – and their effective military intervention against ISIS, Obama, Clinton, and now Kerry will not relent in their hostility. The US neocon inner circle cannot countenance a balance of power arrangement with the Kremlin, disregarding Russia’s status as the second most militarily powerful country in the world. Clinton has called Putin a dictator, the favorite term of disgrace in American ruling circles, except when it comes to America’s allies in the Gulf states, Erdogan, and the long list of authoritarian friends the US has backed over the entire course of the postwar era. Indeed, Putin may be a strongman of sorts, and an extremely popular one in his own country, but is far less of an authoritarian than his predecessor, ” Boris Yeltsin, who ruled by decree and whom Hillary’s husband lauded and financed as a genuine, if quite inebriated, democrat.

Was Hillary in on Bill’s political choices? Recently speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Clinton’s secretary of labor Robert Reich said that Bill never made an important decision without consulting the first lady. What are the programs to which Hillary can claim advisory credit during her husband tenure? NAFTA, welfare reform (“ending welfare as we know it,” said Bill), balancing the budget (inflicting austerity measures), the 1994 crime bill (“three strikes and you’re out”), bank deregulation (a sonata for the Great Recession). All of these projects, says author Thomas Frank, were for working Americans and people of color absolute disasters. And one might add to his list the expansion of NATO and the assault on Yugoslavia.

As secretary of state, Hillary backed CIA director Petraeus’ plan to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, from which Obama eventually backed away, thanks to Russia’s intervention and defense of Syria’s sovereignty. As a good neocon soldier for American exceptionalism, Clinton aligns herself with whatever appears at the moment to be the “national interest” center of political gravity (promoting the oil industry, arms sales, the pro-Zionist alliance, divide and rule aid to opponents of secular nationalism, right-to-protect military and economic interventions). The distraction over her emailgate and the Benghazi investigation hides the real crimes of her active support for the bombing of Libya, the overthrow of the government, and the resulting chaos and ISIS organizing in the country, not to mention her backing for the Honduran coup d’etat. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates says that it was Hillary who pushed Obama into the decision on Libya, for which the president now publicly expresses regret, calling the present condition of the country (his words) “a shit show.”

Her champions who cheer her work with women and children ignore the thousands of women and children in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East, who were slaughtered under her leadership in the State Department. Speaking on regime change, even a right-wing former Pentagon analyst, Michael Maloof, didn’t believe it was appropriate to attack Iraq. “Now with Libya,” he says, “it’s the same. And Hillary Clinton was very much responsible for that.”

If she becomes president, what can be expected of her on domestic policy? She’ll be a good team player – that is, the neocon team – and may even get something accomplished, such as privatizing part of social security and medicare, which was always part of the DLC agenda, and working more closely with the oil companies. Among her other achievements during her years in the State Department, according to investigative journalist, Lee Fang, was her creation of a separate bureau, with more than 60 staff, whose focus was on energy resources. Traveling the world, Clinton used her position, partnered with Chevron, to promote the practice of fracking in developing countries.

With the power couple in the White House, their assets already worth well over $100 million, and with a Congress being mostly a millionaires’ club, no serious tax increase on the rich can be expected. Indeed, the White House will be more of a revolving door for government officials and staff moving back and forth between the corporate world and “public service.” Open Secrets.org found 84 revolving door personnel working for Hillary, more than on any other politician’s staff: “the greatest number of staffers who either came to Capitol Hill after representing private interests or left the member’s staff for a lobbying position.”

Her march to the White House relies on over 400 superdelegates pledged to her – a number of them also wearing the hat of corporate lobbyist – rather than to the democratic voice of the people, Even if nominated and then elected, Hillary, lacking credibility about her authenticity, will not be a popular president. Nearly half of Democrats don’t trust her (56% express trust vs. 81% for Bernie). And a new AP-GfK poll reveals that 55% of all Americans hold a negative opinion of her. Under her presidency, and with the return of the first man, American politics will continue to be business as usual.

 

Gerald Sussman is a Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University

 

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Trump and Hillary Refuse to Explain Why They Both Share the Same Address in Delaware

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By Claire Bernish

Source: AntiMedia

As it turns out, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump share something pertinent in common, after all — a tax haven cozily nested inside the United States.

This brick-and-mortar, nondescript two-story building in Wilmington, Delaware would be awfully crowded if its registered occupants — 285,000 companies — actually resided there. What’s come to be known as the “Delaware loophole” — the unassuming building at 1209 North Orange Street — has become, as the Guardian described, “famous for helping tens of thousands of companies avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in tax.” 

Reportedly dozens of Fortune 500 companies — Coca-Cola, Walmart, American Airlines, and Apple, to name a few — use Delaware’s strict corporate secrecy laws and legal tax loopholes by registering the North Orange Street address for official business.

“Big corporations, small-time businesses, rogues, scoundrels, and worse — all have turned up at the Delaware address in hopes of minimizing taxes, skirting regulations, plying friendly courts or, when needed, covering their tracks,” the New York Times’ Leslie Wayne described in 2012. “It’s easy to set up shell companies here, no questions asked.”

While the legitimacy of taxes as a concept may be up to personal interpretation, what matters in Clinton’s use of the so-called Delaware loophole, in particular, is her constant harping on the need for corporations and elite individuals to pay their fair share. In other words, Clinton’s employment of North Orange Street amounts to a telling, Do As I Say, Not As I Do. And, as the Guardian notes, both of “the leading candidates for president – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have companies registered at 1209 North Orange, and have refused to explain why.”

As Rupert Neate explained for the Guardian, being registered in the tiny state allows “companies to legally shift earnings from other states to Delaware, where they are not taxed on non-physical incomes generated outside of state.”

In fact, some have claimed — all revelations of Panamanian documents aside — the use of tax-friendly locations inside the U.S. makes it the biggest tax haven in the world, with Delaware, alone, costing other states some $9 billion in lost taxes over the past decade. Clinton has repeatedly touted the needs for tax transparency and to shut down foreign havens with similar loopholes.

“Some of you may have just heard about these disclosures about outrageous tax havens and loopholes and superrich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere,” Clinton told the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO annual Constitutional Convention earlier this month. “We are going after all these scams and make sure everyone pays their fair share here in America.”

Oh, the irony.

According to Neate, a Clinton spokesman explained, “ZFS [Holdings, LLC] was set up when Secretary Clinton left the State Department as an entity to manage her book and speaking income. No federal, state, or local taxes were saved by the Clintons as a result of this structure.”

Why, if what the spokesman claims to be true, would Clinton bother using an address in Delaware?

Of the 515 companies Trump officially registered with the Federal Election Commission, “We have 378 entities registered in the state of Delaware,” the billionaire told the Guardian, “meaning I pay you a lot of money, folks. I don’t feel guilty at all, OK?”

Delaware’s incredibly business-friendly structure that allows for such a crowded address is completely legal, though the ability to create shell corporations lends to shady dealings and is “a magnet … which individuals and corporations can use to evade an inestimable amount in federal and foreign taxes,” as a report by the Institute on Taxation and Foreign Policy has described.

Still, Clinton’s constant moralizing on tax transparency — and her spokesperson’s claims she hasn’t benefited from the North Orange Street address — proves, yet again, her stances offer little in the way of a solid foundation.

Blood Money: Four More Years of Drug War Horror with HRC

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By Chris Floyd

(Empire Burlesque)

The Drug War, like the Terror War, is essentially a vast machine for profiteering by the purveyors of weapons and tools of repression. Like the Terror War, the Drug War demonstrably exacerbates the problems it purports to address, and has led to widespread chaos, death and state corruption of almost unfathomable levels. And Hillary Clinton, almost certain to be the next president, is deeply complicit in both of these malevolent enterprises.

Clinton’s extensive and eager involvement in the genuinely insane hyper-militarizataion of American policy in the so-called War on Terror is well-attested. Indeed, she boasts of it, trumpeting how she urged a reluctant Obama into destroying Libya, for example: a “great victory” which she famously celebrated by crowing over the rape and murder of Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died!” The neocons who pressed for the war of aggression against Iraq — which Clinton supported — are now flocking to her banner, as are the war profiteers and their Wall Street allies. And why not? Clinton is the most hawkish Democratic candidate since Henry Jackson. The blood money will continue to flow like the Nile in flood under her watch.

But Clinton’s role in the Drug War is perhaps less well-known. Jesse Franzblau remedies this with an excellent article at CounterPunch, noting her instrumental role in the slaughterfest and corruption feast that the Drug War has spawned in Mexico. Franzblau writes of the $2.5 billion Merida Initiative:

Negotiated behind closed doors in the last years of the Bush administration, the plan was originally proposed as a three-year program. Yet Hillary Clinton’s State Department pushed aggressively to extend it, overseeing a drastic increase of the initiative that continues today.

Much of this aid goes to U.S.-based security, information, and technology contracting firms, who make millions peddling everything from helicopter training to communications equipment to night-vision goggles, surveillance aircrafts, and satellites.

This aid comes in addition to the direct sales of arms and other equipment to Mexico authorized by the State Department, as Christy Thorton pointed out in a 2014 New York Times op-ed. Those sales reached $1.2 billion in 2012 alone, the last full year of Clinton’s tenure. Indeed, as the Mérida Initiative has grown, Mexico has become one of the world’s biggest purchasers of U.S. military arms and equipment.

But while sales have boomed for U.S.-based contractors, the situation in Mexico has badly deteriorated. The escalation of U.S. counter-drug assistance in the country has paralleled a drastic increase in violence, fueling a drug war that’s killed more than 100,000 people since 2006.

Turning Mexico into a major fountain of war profits: quite another accomplishment for a secretary of state whose skills have been lavishly praised by no less than Henry Kissinger, her close friend and advisor. Franzblau goes on to lay out, in grim detail, how Clinton’s State Department, openly flouting U.S. law, increased its cooperation with Mexican military and law enforcement units known to be perpetrating horrific human rights abuses:

Human Rights Watch reported in 2011, for example, on widespread cases of torture in Guerrero going back to 1994. The group noted regular abuses by police and military forces, including “cases of homicide, torture, and extortion” overseen by the judicial police chief in the northern part of the state. The same report highlighted strong evidence of the involvement of military officials from Chilpancingo in cases of kidnapping and disappearances in 2010, as the U.S. embassy was clearing officials for training from the same military base.

The payoff for these illegalities has been sweet for the future president:

Notably, several of the contractors that profited from U.S. security assistance in Mexico — such as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies Corporation, which owns Sikorsky — reportedly contributed to the Clinton Foundation. And according to the transparency group Open Secrets, Clinton currently tops the list of all 2016 presidential candidates in campaign contributions from the military contracting industry.

By the end of Clinton’s first term in 2021, we will be in the 20th year of the Terror War — and the 50th year of the Drug War. How many more lives, how many more communities, how many more countries will be laid waste by these inhuman engines of greed and power — and their “progressive” champions — in that time?