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.
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.
As the suspense grows and grassroots organizers get ready to head to Philly on July 25th, there’s been a considerable amount of speculation that Bernie Sanders is planning something major for the Democratic National Convention..
Mainstream media outlets have all but abandoned Bernie Sanders as a potential Democratic nominee for president in 2016, but are they right to dismiss him so soon? Our investigation says no — here’s why.
First, there seems to be a few conflicting but hope-inspiring reports from people close to the Sanders campaign that the seasoned politician has more than just a couple cards up his sleeve. While perusing a heavily trafficked Bernie Sanders Facebook group, I came upon the following post:
Despite Hillary Clinton being dubbed the “presumptive nominee” (a title the Associated Press came up with, and which the mainstream media then took and ran with), she did not actually win the 2383 delegates she needs yet, since superdelegates don’t vote until July 25th. But another major factor is the fact that California ballots have still not finished being counted. As of right now, both San Francisco and Los Angeles have flipped from Hillary to Bernie since the CA primary ended on June 7th. What’s most important, however, is not how Bernie Sanders could flip superdelegates either before or at the convention in July, but what Sanders might do as a plan B. Or a plan C. Or a plan D. Or a plan E (and yes there may actually be a plan E!).
Click ‘Next’ below to explore five ways Bernie Sanders could still run successfully as a presidential candidate:
In what some are calling convenient timing, a top suspect in a bribery case involving Clinton Foundation donors and the former United Nations General Assembly President has suddenly died of asphyxiation from a barbell
John Ashe, 61, was pumping iron in his Westchester, New York home when authorities say he dropped a barbell on his own throat, crushing his larynx, according to the local medical examiner, reports CNN. The autopsy report will take around 16 weeks to complete.
This report comes as a shock to many, including the U.S. government who believes Ashe to have been complicit in accepting and facilitating more than $1.3 million in bribes from Chinese billionaire business magnate Ng Lap Seng, a major Clinton Foundation donor. Ashe was awaiting trial and was set to testify on his role in the scandal soon.
Ashe was amid plea negotiations, according to a letter sent to U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick last month from Ashe’s lawyer, Jeremy Schneider, which raises suspicion on whether or not his death is in fact an accident or a murder conducted on behalf of associated parties.
Ashe was accused last year by United States federal authorities of turning his powerful UN position into a “platform for profit” along with Francis Lorenzo, the ambassador to the UN for the Dominican Republic, who’s been accused of helping Ng pay bribes to Ashe and others political figures in the Caribbean.
This event comes just two months after RT America ran a story outing Clinton Foundation donors who have shown up in the Panama Papers document leak:
“A new report by McClatchy, one of more than 100 journalism outlets with access to the leaked documents, reveals a number of Clinton donors and associates used Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, “global provider for legal and trust services,” for their offshore accounting.”
Ng Lan Seng, currently incarcerated in the U.S. on charges of bribery in the John Ashe case, has close ties to the Clinton family and the Democratic National Committee, not only being a major donor to the Clinton Foundation in recent times but also pleading guilty to a felony for illegal contributions to the DNC in a Democratic fund-raising scandal towards the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency and the beginning of Al Gore’s presidential campaign. In 1998, a Senate committee reported Ng, of Macau, China, sent $1.1 million to Little Rock, Arkansas restaurateur, Yah Lin, who in turn contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee for years on Ng’s behalf. Ng’s relationship with the Clintons is well documented as he had visited the White House 10 times from 1994 to 1996 and had his photograph taken with President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, as seen in the attached photo from ABC News. Ng was also, according to court papers, served in July 2014 with a subpoena to appear Sept. 17, 2014 in connection with an unrelated investigation, but never showed up.
USA Today reports on Ng’s recent incarceration,
At a bail hearing Saturday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Richenthal described Yin, a U.S. citizen, as Ng’s right-hand man in his U.S. operations, someone who played a key role in transmitting funds.
The prosecutor said Yin spoke to law enforcement after his Saturday arrest, admitting he transmitted money on Ng’s behalf to pay people to do unlawful things, though Yin interrupted the prosecutor, saying: “That is not true,” according to a hearing transcript.
Federal Defender Sabrina Shroff, representing Yin, said at the hearing that her client, educated in the United States with family here, may have served as Ng’s “mouthpiece” but the cash and the investments were not Yin’s.
“He doesn’t know what Mr. Seng is doing with the money at the end of the day,” Shroff said.
Ng’s arrest occurred in September of 2015 and spurred the investigation into John Ashe when authorities discovered Ng had, according to Manhattan federal court papers, smuggled over $4.5 million into the United States over several years with the excuse that he had used the money for gambling and buying paintings from art dealers. According to the New York District Attorney Preet Bharara and the FBI, Ng and Yin were previously arrested on September 19, 2015, based on a separate complaint alleging that Ng agreed to make false statements to Customs and Border Protection officers about the true purpose of the cash that Ng and Yin had brought into the U.S. from China since 2013.
Once again, MSNBC pretends that Bernie Sanders is done with his campaign, twisting what he said out of context in order to spread disinformation and urge him to concede (Hint: he’s not conceding before July 25th).
If you didn’t think a “reputable” news source like MSNBC could stoop to the level of Fox News this year, you’re naive.
This entire presidential election season has been riddled with a media blackout against Bernie Sanders of unprecedented proportion, blowing the minds of millennials and re-igniting the call to revolution by Baby Boomers and Generation Xers who believe in his message that crony capitalism and an eroding middle class has got to stop. Between ridiculously large super PACs and a hidden agenda predetermined since at least early 2015, when superdelegates were polled to the tune of almost 100% of them pledging for Hillary Clinton before the race even started, it’s obvious that the mainstream media has been bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign.
That’s why, when asked if he would vote for Hillary Clinton in November to defeat Trump and Bernie Sanders gave a hypothetical “yes” to the newscasters at MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, I was not shocked to see the channel immediately post “BREAKING NEWS — SANDERS: ‘YES’ I’LL VOTE FOR HILLARY CLINTON” at the bottom of the screen. This is the sort of sound bite they’ve been foaming at the mouth for since long before the California primary and, in their minds, they finally got it.
What did he actually say? In the video below, you can see he was clearly talking about voting for her to beat Donald Trump, not because he wants her as president. He clearly goes on to explain his stance in detail, even saying,
“My job is to fight for the strongest possible platform in the Democratic convention and, as we speak, in St. Louis that is going on right now. And that means a platform that represents working people, that stands up to Big Money interests. I don’t want to parse words. What I am trying to do right now is to make sure that the Democratic Party becomes a party that represents working people, not Wall Street, that is prepared to have an agenda speaks to the need of creating millions of jobs, raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, dealing with climate change, dealing with pay equity.”
And even after saying this, they STILL pressured him for an answer to whether or not he would be officially conceding. He answered in his well-recognized firm and asserted political stance with,
“Why would I want to do that when I want to fight to make sure we have the best platform that we possibly can, that we win the most delegates that we can. The goal of our campaign was to transform this nation.”
The sad part is that any loyal fans of the news station tuning in without their volume up wouldn’t have heard Sanders go on to explain how, right now, the importance should be on turning the Democratic Party in a party that actually represents the people.
What’s worse is that the newscasters asked if he thought the “disunity” within the party would put Hillary at a disadvantage against Donald Trump in the general election. The REAL ISSUE here is within the Senator’s answer to the question, an issue they really don’t seem to care much about,
“You talk about ‘disunity’, I’m talking about involving the American people in the political process and wanting to have a government and a party that represents all of us. When you have disunity, what we’re talking about is kids can’t afford to go to college, or leaving college $50,000 in debt, people dying because they don’t get to a doctor when they should. Talk about disunity is the fact that we have 47 million people living in poverty.”
WATCH: Get the context for Bernie’s conversation about fixing the DNC, restoring the middle class, and the negative effects of corporate globalization in the video below:
The newscasters have a hard time moving on from Bernie’s answer, and that’s because they don’t want to talk about what he’s talking about. All they care about is ratings, and that’s because they make more money than the average working class American. This attitude from the mainstream media makes Bernie’s very presence only that much more defiant and strengthens his platform. They are giving him a medium in which to reach a very large audience, something they’ve barely done over the course of the 2016 primary season.
Lars Beniger
Lars is a freelance journalist, part-time activist, copywriter and technical writer residing in the Manhattan, New York area. For 7 years, Lars has reported on current events, political spars, technology and environmental issues.
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?!
sent $1.1 million to Little Rock, Arkansas restaurateur, Yah Lin, who in turn contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee for years on Ng’s behalf. Ng’s relationship with the Clintons is well documented as he had visited the White House 10 times from 1994 to 1996 and had his photograph taken with President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, as seen in the attached photo from 