Despite there being no actual sources, an array of mainstream media falsely reported that House Democrats ‘booed’ Bernie Sanders in a close-door meeting the other day.
Once again, a massive smear against Bernie Sanders has occurred in the mainstream political news with no actual citation for the claim that presidential hopeful was ‘booed’ at a House Democrat meeting in Washington.
CNN reported “roughly a dozen members booed him inside the room” according to “three Democrats who attended the meeting”, yet doesn’t name who reported this.
They go on to say that House Democrats, Rep Steny Hoyer told reporters he was sitting in the front row during the meeting with Sanders and didn’t hear anyone booing, and that Rep Gerry Connolly tweeted “Bernie was respectfully received by Caucus. Some disagreements, yes, but a friendly venue” and “Sanders was reflective and thoughtful in responses. Expressions of disagreement are NOT booing.”
Despite this, other “news” outlets are also spreading the lie.
Politico wrote, “Some Democrats booed Sanders” while not reporting who or how many.
The L.A. Times said “boos erupted” despite having no sources for this claim.
The Washington Post also claimed booing without any sources.
When using simple critical thinking skills, one can easily deduce that no booing actually occurred since nobody is saying who did the booing and nobody is giving their name to the press besides two people who said there was no booing. (Three, if you count Sanders himself).
Just hours before Hillary Clinton’s first joint campaign appearance with President Obama, FBI director James B. Comey stated that he does not recommend criminal charges against the former Secretary of State.
Despite calling Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for classified emails “extremely careless”, Comey said today that he does not recommend filing criminal charges against the presumptive Democratic nominee. Comey said that an ordinary government official could have faced at least an administrative sanction. He also said there was no evidence that she or her lawyers had intentionally deleted or withheld any emails.
The FBI questioned Clinton on Saturday, only a couple days after it was reported that former president Bill Clinton had held a meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch who is responsible for the government’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Lynch later said she would take the FBI’s lead on whether or not to prosecute Hillary.
Hillary had denied that her husband’s meeting with Lynch had anything to do with the email investigation, but critics are extremely skeptical. Not only has Hillary withheld transcripts from speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, but she even withheld roughly 50,000 pages of emails that she claimed were personal and had nothing to do with work, according to the New York Times.
5. Unforeseen Events Surrounding Hillary Clinton Criminal Allegations
Given the fact that nobody really knows what’s in Julian Assange’s upcoming Wikileak release of Hillary Clinton’s email server, the fact that the FBI still has not indicted Clinton on espionage charges, and the fact that there’s multiple lawsuits targeting Clinton in the works regarding her role in voter suppression throughout the Democratic primary, there really isn’t any reason to believe that nothing will happen and Hillary will simply continue on as the nominee after July 25th.
That being said, the system *IS* rigged in Hillary’s favor to be the presidential nominee in the Democratic party. She had over 400 superdelegates on her side over a year ago before the primary even started, has every mainstream media outlet and Wall St. on her side, and she’s been brushing off allegations against her as “conspiracy theories” for decades already. There’s no reason to believe that she can’t come out on top, at least as the Democratic nominee, which leaves Bernie Sanders with only about two feasible options left: Run as an Independent or on the Green party ticket with Jill Stein.
4. Running With Jill Stein on the Green Party Ticket
Stein has extended more than just an olive branch to Bernie Sanders by saying she would welcome a Green Party run with Sanders on the ticket, to which Sanders replied on a KABC-TV 7 News interview, “Right now, our goal is to win the Democratic nomination.” Salon speculates that his avoidance of answering the question means he’s leaving the door open, having this to say in early June:
“Sanders leaving the door open to a Sanders-Stein ticket comes at a time when polls show unprecedented support for a candidate to challenge Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This week NBC found that 47% of voters would consider a third-party candidate if Clinton and Trump were the major-party nominees. In the last week, two other polls found a large minority will vote for a third party this year. Schoen Consulting found 20% of voters would vote for a third party against Clinton and Trump with 14% undecided; Data Targeting Inc. found 21% would do so with 14% undecided.”
This may actually be Bernie’s best chance at winning the presidency since the Green party is already making up about 8% of the voter pool.
In a viral Facebook post that has since been removed, an avid Bernie supporter stated he had heard from a friend who was heavily involved in the Sanders campaign that they had already filed the necessary paperwork for getting permission to run as a write-in candidate. Unfortunately, this theory was debunked by the guy who wrote this post himself and said it was “speculation” which amounted to misinformation and most likely isn’t true, which I found to be a great big bum-out. This guy could also have lied to me for the sake of damage control after accidentally letting the cat out of the bag. However, some folks have stated that they called certain Boards of Elections to find out if Sanders had filed as an independent or a write-in where he needed to and was told he hadn’t. Again, more speculation from the more paranoid types have concluded that the BOE’s can often lie as well. Aren’t politics great?!
One thing is for sure, though: if it’s true that by February 2016 the Bernie Sanders’ campaign managed to get permission from all 50 states to be on the ballot as an independent or allow write-in votes, we could be looking at one heck of a general election!
Sanders has said repeatedly that his goal is to transform the Democratic party into a party that reflects progressive values, even going so far as to say he would not run as an independent if he loses the Democratic nomination and would vote for Hillary in November if the election is Hillary v. Trump. But he’s also a master politician with decades of experience on winning elections, with many people on social media calling him a “chess master” of political games.
It could be that, despite Bernie’s insistence on integrity and keeping promises, he may end up changing his mind and running as an independent after all. This idea has been floated since before his campaign and goes back to his roots as an Independent who has successfully campaigned for and won many Mayoral and Senate seats.
As Politico’s Daniel Strauss put it, flipping enough superdelegates to Bernie Sanders by July 25th is a “moonshoot” that would “require an astonishing feat of political engineering” — but is Sanders capable of pulling it off?
When Jeff Weaver told CNN’s Jake Tapper that superdelegates don’t vote until July 25th, he had to repeat himself a few times because Tapper just couldn’t wrap his head around why Sanders would continue. It’s most likely because Sanders understands that a lot can happen in a month, and things don’t exactly look good for Hillary Clinton regarding criminal allegations.
There’s enough evidence of improper conduct by the DNC, voter suppression, and even rigged voter machines to convince Bernie supporters that she’s not an honest politician, but how to get superdelegates to vote for Bernie? Most would say “Via his platform” but, unfortunately, the DNC already struck down an amendment proposed by Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison to demand a raise of the minimum wage to $15/hr and opposing the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) at a vote of 6 in favor to 8 not. This (if not the entire primary season) is a foreshadow to how the superdelegates are going to vote at the convention and most likely means Bernie will not successfully flip enough of them to win the nomination.
Editor’s note: This article is part of our collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from WGBH that next airs on Tuesday, June 28 on PBS and online at pbs.org. The show features fact-based debate on major issues of the day, without the shouting.
Organ transplantation saves lives. People with end-stage kidney disease who receive a transplant tend to live much longer than those who undergo dialysis. A kidney from a living donor will last from 12 to 20 years, on average, compared to eight to 12 years for a kidney from a deceased donor.
But there is a shortage of organs. In the United States, the wait list for kidneys alone is around 100,000. Those waiting for kidneys make up most of the 120,000 people awaiting organ donation. The need for kidneys has led some to ask: Would purchasing organs be a solution?
‘Should organs be sold?’ is the question Point Taken debates June 28 at 11 p.m. E/10 p.m. C on PBS.
Since 1988, approximately three of every four kidneys for transplantation have come from deceased donors, the rest from living donors who give one of their kidneys to a relative, loved one or even a stranger. In the United States, live donation seems quite safe. A recent study found that kidney donors have only a slightly higher absolute risk of developing end-stage kidney disease than healthy non-donors.
What might we do to alleviate the shortage of kidneys in the U.S.? One positive step would be to adopt an opt-out system of deceased organ donation like one now in place in Spain, where the rate of organ donation is highest of any country. The default in this system is donation at death when organs are viable, but everyone has well-publicized opportunities to opt out of donation. As it stands, U.S. citizens must now opt in to deceased donation, for example, during driver’s license renewal. The rate of donation in the U.S. is about midway among nations that are tracked.
Unfortunately, changes in deceased donation practices are unlikely to eliminate shortages. Some physicians, lawyers and bioethicists have proposed regulated markets in live “donor” kidneys. Surely a lot more people will be willing to sell a kidney, assuming the price is right, than to donate one, their argument goes.
Yet purchasing kidneys is not only prohibited by international norms, it violates U.S. law. The only country where a legally approved market in kidneys exists is Iran. But market proponents insist that legal prohibition of commerce in kidneys is a grave mistake.
Are the proponents right? The answer depends in part on moral argument. In conducting this argument, it is important to steer clear of two implausible absolute positions.
One position, put forth by market opponents, is that a person’s selling an internal body part is always wrong. Perhaps the best known philosophical proponent of this view is the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. We are obligated always to act in a way that expresses respect for the dignity of humanity, Kant held. He believed that all of us, no matter where on the spectrum of talent, wealth, happiness, or others’ regard we may be, have a worth beyond price.
Kant maintained that a person’s selling one of his internal parts – the example he gives is selling a tooth to be transplanted into another’s mouth – is always wrong, apparently because this action fails to express proper respect for the seller’s own dignity. The action always sends a false message, Kant seems to have believed: that the seller himself has a mere price.
But, as I have tried to show, it is implausible to maintain that every time a person sells one of his internal parts, he is sending such a message. A kidney is not a person. In some contexts, someone could surely sell a kidney (or a tooth) and not thereby convey that he himself has a mere price. For example, suppose a senator sells one of her kidneys in order to raise money for a charity. In our cultural context, she surely wouldn’t thereby be signaling that she herself has mere price!
Another questionable absolute position, put forth by market proponents, is that buying internal body parts from informed, voluntary and autonomous sellers is always right – that is, morally permissible.
Consider this: One way to buy someone’s kidney would be to buy her. Would it be morally permissible for you to buy as a slave a mother who has put herself up for sale in order to get money to educate her kids? The position in question implies that your buying her would be right, assuming roughly that she is mentally competent, informed of her action’s consequences and under no threat from others to undertake it. But many of us believe that your buying her would be wrong. In Kantian terms, it would express disrespect for the mother’s dignity by treating her as having mere price.
Black markets already have led to misery
The implausibility of these absolute positions regarding selling and buying of internal organs suggests that the moral permissibility of markets for organs is a complex and context-dependent issue.
According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 10,000 black market operations involving purchased human kidneys now take place per year. Vendors in such markets, who are typically very poor, undergo serious psychological and physical harms. According to recent research, Bangledeshi kidney sellers “suffered from grave sadness, hopelessness, and crying spells, and experienced social stigma, shame, and isolation for selling their body parts …” A study in Chennai, India found that over 85 percent of sellers reported a decline in health after kidney removal and that 80 percent would not recommend that others in similar circumstances sell a kidney.
Proponents of kidney sales insist that regulated markets would not have these dismal effects on vendors. Proposals for such markets incorporate provisions aimed at ensuring the safety of sellers and recipients, for example, through thorough donor screening processes and proper postoperative care.
As I have argued elsewhere, even full compliance with the rules of a regulated market would fail to ensure its ethical acceptability. The existence of such a market might harm poor people. For example, aggressive debt collectors might force the poor to sell the fungible assets they always carry with them: their kidneys.
It is naïve to assume that regulated markets would be well-regulated markets. If the United States legalizes markets in kidneys, would not other countries follow, among them some who have had an active illicit trade? These countries, including Brazil, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, seem to have high levels of corruption and thus ineffective regulatory infrastructures. It is reasonable to worry that the kinds of harm that accrue to kidney vendors in unregulated markets would also befall them in some regulated markets.
Whether we should adopt a regulated market in kidneys turns not only on moral argument, but also on whether doing so would actually increase supply. A recent systematic review of studies found support for the hypothesis that offering financial incentives for blood does not increase its supply. Of course, effects of payment might differ for blood and for kidneys. Nevertheless, for all we know market exchange of kidneys might “crowd out” giving associated with altruism. People who would otherwise have donated an organ might refrain from doing so if providing one has connotations not of moral virtue but of financial interest.
It remains unclear how much regulated markets would actually increase supply. In any case, such markets should prompt ethical concern, especially regarding their impact on the very poor. Most of us reject the idea that the end justifies the means: we believe that some means would be wrong to take even to a good end like increasing the supply of kidneys for transplant. Under present societal conditions, markets would, I suspect, be among such ethically unacceptable means. They do not warrant our support.
In a scathing overview of how Brexit demonstrates the failures of the global economy, presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders pens an op-ed for the New York Times
“Surprise, surprise. Workers in Britain, many of whom have seen a decline in their standard of living while the very rich in their country have become much richer, have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children.” — Bernie Sanders, New York Times
In his usual onslaught of alarming statistical data, the U.S. Senator from Vermont, and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders tells the DNC to focus on the real issue that matters above all else: economic inequality. While many critics of Brexit are focused on the xenophobic aspect of the historic vote last Friday, they may fail to see how economic inequality activists like him would take a stance against the EU at this time, but they would basically be blind to say so.
Senator Bernie Sanders isn’t supporting neo-nationalism. He’s simply using Brexit as the most current example of how difficult life has become for ordinary people throughout the world.
He points to how, in America, nearly 60,000 factories have shut down over the past 15 years or so, disintegrating more than 4.8 million factory jobs along with it, attributing this disasterous change to free-trade agreements that have repeatedly encouraged corporations to move their operations to the cheapest bidder overseas. He accurately explains how the average male worker in the United States today actually makes $726 less than he did in 1973, and points out the even worse downgraded salary for females who make $1,154 less than they did in 2007.
In another article today, we examined how the Brexit could effect America, but Bernie really sums it up by saying,
That increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere. Incredibly, the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population — around 3.6 billion people. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99 percent. The very, very rich enjoy unimaginable luxury while billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.
Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States? You bet it could.
Prime Minister David Cameron announced early Friday that he will step down in three months’ time.
Unwinding the union will be a messy process that will take months, if not years, and have broad political and financial impacts.
The pound dropped in value on the London exchange early Friday morning.
Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called the Brexit “a great thing.”
We asked three American scholars of the EU to tell us what Americans should know about the vote.
Mabel Berezin, Cornell University
Brexit: Neo-Nationalism wins, Europe loses
Britain voted to leave the EU by a slim margin – but not as slim as one would expect. The headlines are already blaring with words such as surprising, shocking, earthquake.
Should we be surprised?
Only if we look at Britain without comparing it to its European neighbors.
Up until 2014, Britain was relatively free of the neo-Nationalist parties that were gaining traction across the continent. It had its flirtation with right wing parties, but they had virtually no electoral salience. But then the UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage made Euroskepticism its calling card. It had support from movements such as Britain First, which took up the anti-migration theme and left UKIP to speak mainly about Europe. In the spring 2015 European Parliamentary elections, UKIP was the leading party.
However, if we look comparatively across the continent, the results are less surprising. National referenda have not been kind to EU.
In 2005, both France and the Netherlands voted to reject the proposed European Constitution. Greece voted in summer 2015 to reject a debt restructuring plan proposed by the EU. In spring 2016, the Dutch voted in a minor referendum against extending trade benefits to the Ukraine.
Citizens of European states do not like the EU. They have not been pro-Europe for at least the last 10 years – if ordinary citizens ever were.
The triple crises of 2015 – debt, refugees and security – hit the continent hard.
British citizens were surely looking at their neighbors across the channel and not liking what they saw. Given this context, David Cameron’s decision to put membership in EU to a popular vote was an extreme and foolish political miscalculation.
The ultimate cost may be the collapse of EU. Marine Le Pen, National Front leader in France, has been calling for Frexit for a long time. Other countries may follow Britain’s lead.
Analysts argued that the Brexit campaign revealed a chasm between locals and cosmopolitans. They saw two Britains – a highly educated and mobile group and an older place bound group left behind by globalization. Ironically, this vote will only reinforce that division in the U.K. and across Europe.
Mabel Berezin is a Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. She is the co-editor of Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age and the author of Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe.
Terrence Guay, Pennsylvania State University
Britain’s summer of discontent reflects worst of times
European stock markets were jittery at the open. REUTERS/Russell Boyce
The Brexit outcome is, to those who voted “remain,” a Shakespearean tragedy.
The U.K.’s relationship with the institution created by its European neighbors has long been fraught with seeds of discontent. Squabbles over payments to the EU’s budget, complaints by small businesses about regulations emanating from Brussels, opposition to the expansion of policy-making beyond trade, worries about handling financial crises and anger over immigration both from other member states and lands beyond finally delivered the result that the “leave” campaign sought.
While virtually every analyst expected a close outcome, the result is shocking financial markets and companies. Eventually the dust will settle, currency and stock markets will stabilize, and a “negotiated divorce” will take place over the next two years.
This will be an important time for U.S. companies to reassess their European strategy and operations. U.S. companies have US$588 billion invested in the U.K. That represents 23 percent of U.S. corporate investment in the EU. Now the U.K. is likely to see its position diminish as a favored launching pad to enter the European market. With trade barriers, mainly tariffs, likely to rise for products exported from the U.K. to the 27 other EU countries, the U.K. will be a less desirable location for U.S. firms.
Perhaps more important will be the disappearance of London’s voice in EU matters that are of concern to U.S. commercial and foreign policy interests.
London’s position on financial services regulations issues more closely match Washington’s than any other European country. These include imposition of sanctions on Russia, relations with the Middle East, and the still-under-negotiation Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – which is now almost certainly dead as a result of the Brexit vote.
It is all but certain that the U.K. will be a less valuable ally to U.S. interests, not just in Europe but globally. By the end of future President Clinton’s or Trump’s second term in the White House, the phone number for 10 Downing St. will be farther down on the president’s call list.
Terrence Guay is clinical professor of international business at the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. This year he published European Competition Policy and Globalization with co-author Chad Damro.
Peter Harris, Colorado State University
With Brexit, new challenges for U.S. grand strategy
U.S. grand strategy has just been dealt a double whammy.
Not only has America’s strongest ally in Europe just voted to relinquish its seat at the table in Brussels, but the new reality of Brexit means that decision-makers in Washington will now be having to fight fires in Europe instead of catering to more pressing geopolitical exigencies.
The U.S. has long depended on a united, strong and vibrant Europe to help anchor the rules-based international order that it hopes will persist long into in the 21st century. And since joining the European Economic Community in 1973, Britain has been an effective ally in the service of this goal, always a reliable proponent of an enlarged European Union organized around liberal economic principles.
Without London as an interlocutor, the U.S. will have to undertake the costly endeavor of shifting its diplomatic footprint from London to Berlin, Paris or Brussels. How to push through the free trade deal between the U.S. and EU? How to make sure that Europe does not bend in the face of Russian predation? Britain is now far less able to help deliver on such issues.
Even more worrying from the U.S. perspective, however, is the potential that more EU nations will begin to contemplate leaving the organization. This danger should not be underestimated: The EU has malcontents across the continent, and even pro-EU leaders can find themselves consenting to plebiscites against their better judgment. After all, David Cameron pledged a referendum on Brexit in January 2013 only as a gambit – ill-judged, it now seems – to placate restive Eurosceptics within his party.
All of this comes at an incredibly bad time for U.S. strategic planners, who are in the midst of an ambitious “pivot” to Asia that they see as critical to safeguarding the international security architecture of the Western Pacific and wider world. For them, disunity in Europe is an unwanted, costly and tragically unnecessary distraction.
Peter Harris is an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University. He recently published “All Brexit is Local” in National Interest magazine.
Unfortunately, this theory was debunked by the guy who wrote this post himself and said it was “speculation” which amounted to misinformation and most likely isn’t true, which I found to be a great big bum-out. This guy could also have lied to me for the sake of damage control after accidentally letting the cat out of the bag. However, some folks have stated that they called certain Boards of Elections to find out if Sanders had filed as an independent or a write-in where he needed to and was told he hadn’t. Again, more speculation from the more paranoid types have concluded that the BOE’s can often lie as well. Aren’t politics great?!
