Bernie Sanders Vision

AIPAC Is Helping Fund Anti-Bernie Sanders Super PAC Ads in Nevada

Ryan Grim, Akela Lacy

 

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is helping to fund a Super PAC launching attack ads against Sen. Bernie Sanders in Nevada on Saturday, according to two sources with knowledge of the arrangement. The ads are being run by a group called Democratic Majority for Israel, founded by longtime AIPAC strategist Mark Mellman. 

The Nevada attack ads, which will air in media markets in Reno and Las Vegas, follow a similar spending blitz by DMFI ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Like the ads that aired in Iowa, the Nevada ads will attack Sanders on the idea that he’s not electable, Mediaite reported. 

DMFI spent $800,000 on the Iowa ads, while the spending on the Nevada ads remains private. AIPAC is helping bankroll the anti-Sanders project by allowing donations to DMFI to count as contributions to AIPAC, the sources said. As is typical with most big-money giving programs, the more a donor gives to AIPAC, the higher tier they can claim — $100,000 level, $1 million level, and so on — and the more benefits accrue to them. A $100,000 donor gets more access to members of Congress at private functions, for instance, than someone who merely pays AIPAC’s conference fee. A $1 million donor gets still more, which means that it is important to donors to have their contributions tallied. There is also status within social networks attached to one’s tier of giving. The arrangement allows donors to give directly to DMFI, which is required to file disclosures naming its donors, without AIPAC’s fingerprints. 

Rachel Rosen, a spokesperson for DMFI, said she was unaware of any AIPAC encouragement to donate to the organization. “As far as we know, what you are suggesting is completely untrue,” she said. “But because we are a separate organization, we can’t know exactly what other organizations are doing. Therefore, we are the wrong address for the the specific questions you ask — they need to [be] directed to AIPAC.” 

AIPAC denied the arrangement. “AIPAC is not and has not been involved in the ad campaigns of any political action committee,” spokesperson Marshall Wittmann wrote in an email. “The accusation that AIPAC is providing benefits to members for donating to fund these political ads or this political action committee is completely false and has no basis in fact.”

In the past, AIPAC enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress. But as it’s cozied up to the GOP in recent years and taken a harder right-wing stance on Israel policy, reflecting a rightward drift in Israel, more Democrats are cutting ties with the group and tacking further left. AIPAC’s faltering relationship with Democrats was the initial spur for Mellman’s new organization, founded by donors and operatives linked to AIPAC. 

On Wednesday, Rep. Betty McCollum slammed AIPAC as trafficking in “hate speech” for a recent social media ad campaign that warned that “radicals in Congress” presented a threat “maybe more sinister” than the Islamic State, along with photos of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and McCollum. Representatives of AIPAC spent Wednesday and Thursday on Capitol Hill apologizing in private meetings with House Democrats for those ads, claiming that they were made by AIPAC’s Democratic digital firm (though how that shifts responsibility from AIPAC is unclear). Omar, Tlaib, and McCollum were not invited to — nor even aware of — those meetings, despite being the subjects of the ads, Tlaib and Omar told The Intercept.

Sanders has long been one of the most outspoken critics of unconditional U.S. support for Israel and has become an even sharper critic of the alliance during his 2020 campaign. He said in October that he would condition military aid to Israel on changing its settlement policy, and redirect some military aid to humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. DMFI sent a fundraising email in January attacking Sanders for that comment. While Sanders would certainly be more sympathetic to Palestinians than any president in U.S. history, he tends to qualify support for Palestinian rights by first prioritizing Israel’s security.

DMFI’s anti-Sanders ads that aired in Iowa in the week leading up to the caucuses had nothing to do with Israel or the Middle East. Instead, they focused on his label as a democratic socialist and his recent heart attack. Following that ad buy, Sanders raised $1.3 million in one day. 

The DMFI ads have been controversial and represent one of the first Super PAC interventions by a Democratic group against a Democratic presidential candidate in the post-Citizens United era. (Hillary Clinton in 2016 had the benefit of the group Correct the Record, which was legally a Super PAC and attacked Sanders. The group  coordinated with the Clinton campaign, rather than operating independently, yet that coordination went unpunished.) But the revelation that AIPAC has been encouraging donors to fund DMFI suggests how seriously the lobby is taking Sanders’s candidacy and that it is willing to intervene in the Democratic primary. On Thursday night, news leaked that a Super PAC connected to the Democratic group EMILY’s List had been contemplating an attack ad against Sanders. In a statement, the group said the ad had not been approved and that it would support whichever candidate won the Democratic nomination.

Big-money groups are doing all they can to ensure that Sanders doesn’t become the nominee, however, and after the Iowa caucuses, DMFI boasted that its ads had left a mark on Sanders. “Now that almost all of the Iowa results are in, the incredibly close race shows that DMFI PAC’s ad blunted Senator Sanders’ momentum,” the group wrote to its email list after some of the results were in. “The network entrance poll proves it. Among those who decided which candidate to support before DMFI PAC’s ad aired, Sanders was in first place by a 6 point margin. However, among those who made a decision while the ad was airing, Sanders came in 5th, 10 points behind the leader.” 
Conservative writer Jonathan Tobin, in a recent piece for Ha’aretz, discussed AIPAC’s posture toward Sanders in a recent column headlined, “AIPAC Must Stop Bernie Sanders — at All Costs.” 

In the lead up to the Iowa caucus, the Democratic Majority for Israel, a year-old political action group and super PAC, invested heavily in negative ads aimed at derailing the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Mark Mellman, the veteran Democratic strategist who leads the group, told me that its efforts – which are funded by the party’s leading pro-Israel donors – helped steer late deciding voters away from the Vermont Democratic Socialists.
It’s in that context that the AIPAC Facebook ads that so offended Democrats must be seen. For centrist pro-Israel Democrats, the problem with Sanders is not just that he is the most critical toward Israel of all the Democrats. It’s that the left-wing activist base that is fueling his candidacy is also largely hostile toward the Jewish state. Sanders is backed by Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich), who are supporters of the BDS movement and are accused of using anti-Semitic language and tropes in their criticisms of Israel’s supporters.

DMFI denies that it has any link to AIPAC, but Mellman’s firm, the Mellman Group, has close ties with AIPAC and consulted for the lobby group’s dark-money cutout, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, as part of Mellman’s work to defeat former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2015. CFNI paid the Mellman Group $241,439 that year. 

Mellman’s firm has also consulted for AIPAC’s educational group, the American Israel Education Fund, which organizes congressional trips to Israel. The Mellman Group was AIEF’s second-largest contractor in 2015, receiving $1.3 million for “program research.” AIEF’s biggest contractor that year was a travel business owned by Sheldon Adelson, a far-right Israel advocate and mega-donor to the GOP. 

At least 11 of DMFI’s 14 board members have links to AIPAC as well, having either worked at, spoken to, volunteered for, or donated to the group, The Nation reported in December.

AIPAC’s annual conference is in March. A coalition of progressive groups, including the left-leaning Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow, the Working Families Party, MoveOn, and Indivisible, launched a campaign this month to pressure presidential candidates not to attend. So far, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has committed to skip this year’s conference. During a town hall in New Hampshire this month, Sanders told a student that he didn’t think he was going but had “no objection.” He, Warren, and several other candidates skipped it last year.
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Is this the new Democracy?  Who decides who leads the country? People or Money?

Bernie Explains the Trump-Putin Summit

Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders Isn't Radical, He's Popular! The Public Agrees With Him on Healthcare & Taxes

Transcript:
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. That’s pretty unusual in the political system. Maybe there are two of them in the world, you know. But he’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat.

His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower, who said, in fact, that anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn’t belong in the American political system. That’s now considered very radical. The other interesting aspect of Sanders’s positions is that they’re quite strongly supported by the general public, and have been for a long time. That’s true on taxes. It’s true on healthcare. So, take, say, healthcare. His proposal for a national healthcare system, meaning the kind of system that just about every other developed country has, at half the per capita cost of the United States and comparable or better outcomes, that’s considered very radical. But it’s been the position of the majority of the American population for a long time. So, you go back, say, to the Reagan—right now, for example, latest polls, about 60 percent of the population favor it. When Obama put through the Affordable Care Act, there was, you recall, a public option. But that was dropped. It was dropped even though it was supported by about almost two-thirds of the population.

You go back earlier, say, to the Reagan years, about 70 percent of the population thought that national healthcare should be in the Constitution, because it’s such an obvious right. And, in fact, about 40 percent of the population thought it was in the Constitution, again, because it’s such an obvious right. The same is true on tax policy and others. So we have this phenomenon where someone is taking positions that would have been considered pretty mainstream during the Eisenhower years, that are supported by a large part, often a considerable majority, of the population, but he’s dismissed as radical and extremist. That’s an indication of how the spectrum has shifted to the right during the neoliberal period, so far to the right that the contemporary Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. And the Republicans are just off the spectrum. They’re not a legitimate parliamentary party anymore. And Sanders has—the significant part of—he has pressed the mainstream Democrats a little bit towards the progressive side. You see that in Clinton’s statements. But he has mobilized a large number of young people, these young people who are saying, "Look, we’re not going to consent anymore." And if that turns into a continuing, organized, mobilized—mobilized force, that could change the country—maybe not for this election, but in the longer term.

DNC leaders call for rules reform after 2016 primary revelations

By David Weigel

The top two officials in the Democratic National Committee have pledged to reform the party in the wake of revelations that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign got a special joint fundraising agreement before she won the 2016 nomination. Yet even as they tried to get past the story, kicked off by former DNC chair Donna Brazile’s upcoming memoir, DNC Chairman Tom Perez and Deputy Chairman Keith Ellison took slightly different views as to what needed to change.

In an email to DNC members last night, Perez said that the party had already begun reforming its primary rules to ensure “that 2020 will be a transparent process,” and that “even a perception of impropriety — whether real or not — is detrimental to the DNC as an institution.” The DNC’s charter, he pointed out, required total neutrality in primaries.

But Perez sidestepped the growing criticism of the 2016 JFA for Clinton’s campaign — which, according to Brazile, allowed the Democratic front-runner’s campaign veto power over some party decisions.

“The joint fundraising agreements were the same for each campaign except for the treasurer, and our understanding was that the DNC offered all of the presidential campaigns the opportunity to set up a JFA and work with the DNC to coordinate on how those funds were used to best prepare for the general election,” Perez said. “Since then, both of those joint fundraising committees have been shut down.”

Perez did not respond to the criticism of former staff and supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who argued yesterday that the JFA was slanted toward Clinton, and that the party gave her special treatment. In an interview, former Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said that the JFA, by its nature, benefited the candidate who could set up high-dollar fundraisers, and that the DNC did not help Sanders organize large donors.

“Who are the wealthy people Bernie was going to bring to a fundraiser?” Weaver asked. “They never set up a single event.”

In his statement, released separately from Perez’s, Ellison did not get into the weeds of the 2015 arrangement. But he did call specifically for the DNC to change its rules to specify that no future campaign could get a favorable JFA.

“We must heed the call for our party to enact real reforms that ensure a fair, open and impartial nominating process in elections to come,” Ellison said. “I’m committed to working with Chairman Perez to make the DNC more transparent and accountable to the American people, whether that’s by ensuring that debates are scheduled far ahead of time or by guaranteeing that the terms of joint fundraising agreements give no candidate undue control or influence over the party.”

The DNC will meet next month to hear recommendations from a “unity commission” that has met four times, in four cities, to research problems with the primary process and debate reforms. Multiple state Democratic chairs are lobbying specifically for new language in the party bylaws about JFAs, an issue that might be forced at a later meeting.

Bernie Sanders To Democrats: This Is What a Radical Foreign Policy Looks Like

By Mehdi Hasan

Bernie Sanders, now the most popular politician in the United States by a country mile, has long been obsessed with breaking up big banks and getting Medicare for all Americans. He can speak for hours about the evils of income inequality and the grotesquerie of the “billionaire class.”

On foreign policy? Not so much. 

Yet this week, the independent senator from Vermont finally delivered his major foreign affairs speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, part of the Green Foundation Lecture series. Winston Churchill gave his “Sinews of Peace” speech at Westminster College — in which he famously introduced the world to the concept of “The Iron Curtain” — as part of this lecture series in 1946. Mikhail Gorbachev’s memorable 1992 account of how the Cold War ended was also part of this series. Thus, on the basis of his appearance in Fulton, you might say that Sanders is now playing in the Foreign Policy Big Leagues. 

Beforehand, he sat down with me to talk through his thinking on global affairs. 

“I think what we have to do is take a hard look at where we are today in terms of foreign policy, and where we have been for many years,” Sanders tells me when I go to meet with him in his Senate office in Washington, D.C. the day before his big speech in Missouri. “And I think the main point to be made is that no country, not the United States or any other country, can do it alone.  That if we’re going to address the very deep and complicated international issues that exist, we need to do it in cooperation.”

The senator is tieless, in a crumpled navy suit and light blue shirt. His shock of white hair is, as usual, unruly. He looks distracted and exhausted, perhaps the result of having spent the previous week pitching his landmark Medicare for All single-payer bill to Congress and to the country. 

“Many of my colleagues, Republican colleagues, here in the Senate, for example, disparage the United Nations,” he says, sitting across the table from me, in front of a wall of Vermont tourism posters. “While clearly the United Nations could be more effective, it is imperative that we strengthen international institutions, because at the end of the day, while it may not be sexy, it may not be glamorous, it may not allow for great soundbites, simply the idea … of people coming together and talking and arguing is a lot better than countries going to war.”

I ask him how such rhetoric differs from past statements in defense of the U.N. and of international cooperation offered by leading Democrats, such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

“Excuse me.” Sanders doesn’t like to be interrupted. “Let me just talk a little bit about where I want to go.” 

The senator makes clear that “unilateralism, the belief that we can simply overthrow governments that we don’t want, that has got to be re-examined.” After referencing the Iraq War — “one of the great foreign policy blunders in the history of this country” — the senator touches on another historic blunder which, to his credit, few of his fellow senators would be willing to discuss, let alone critique. “In 1953, the United States, with the British, overthrew [Mohammed] Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran – and this was to benefit British oil interests,” he reminds me. “The result was the shah came into power, who was a very ruthless man, and the result of that was that we had the Iranian Revolution, which takes us to where we are right now.”

Does he regret not speaking with such passion, bluntness, and insight on international affairs during his failed primary campaign against Clinton? He shakes his head. “No, I think we ran the kind of campaign that we wanted to run.” There’s a pause. “But I think that foreign policy is clearly very, very important.”

During the Democratic presidential primaries, politicians and pundits alike agreed that Sanders had a foreign policy deficit. “Foreign policy,” wrote David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s foreign affairs doyen, “is the hole in Sanders’s political doughnut.” Patrick Leahy, Sanders’s fellow senator from Vermont, was only a tad more diplomatic in an interview with the New York Times. “It’s not the subject he gravitates to, that’s fair to say,” acknowledged Leahy.

A long-promised set piece speech on foreign policy during the campaign never came, and the Sanders campaign website lacked a foreign policy page for the first few months of his candidacy. Some of the figures identified by the senator as outside advisers on national security issues later claimed to hardly know him.

His discomfort with the topic is palpable, but the truth is that the 76-year-old Sanders is far from a foreign policy neophyte. In the 1980s, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he was an outspoken critic of U.S. interventions in Latin America, becoming the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to visit Nicaragua and meet with President Daniel Ortega (which earned him the soubriquet “Sandernista”). He even went on honeymoon to the Soviet Union in 1988, as part of his effort to establish a sister city program between Burlington and Yaroslavl.

Since 1991, Sanders has served in Congress, as a member of the House and then the Senate, debating and voting on military action, foreign treaties, trade deals, arms sales, international aid, and climate change agreements. Few critics have paused to consider the fact that a President Sanders would have arrived in the White House in January 2017 with far more foreign policy experience under his belt than Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. (Oh, and of course former reality TV star Donald J. Trump.) 

Nevertheless the impression persists that Sanders is out of his depth when it comes to the outside world. Perhaps in anticipation of another presidential bid in three years time, the Vermont senator has been taking steps to correct that impression. So far this year, Sanders has hired Matt Duss, a respected foreign affairs analyst and former president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), as his foreign policy adviser, and has given speeches at the liberal Jewish lobbying group, J Street, where he condemned “Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories” as being “contrary to fundamental American values,” and at the centrist Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, where he rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin for “trying to weaken the transatlantic alliance.”

Last week, my colleague Glenn Greenwald penned a column in The Intercept headlined, “The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result.” Greenwald argued that Clinton’s “advocacy of multiple wars and other military actions” pushed some swing voters into the arms of both Donald Trump and third-party candidates, such as Jill Stein. I ask Sanders whether he agrees with this analysis.  
“I mean, that’s a whole other issue. And I don’t know the answer to that.”


I persist. Surely he’d concede that foreign policy was a factor in Clinton’s defeat?
He doesn’t budge. “I want to talk about my speech, not about Hillary Clinton.”

So foreign policy plays no role in elections?

“The answer is, I don’t know,” he responds wearily. “You can argue that somebody would say, ‘Well Bernie Sanders was too soft on defense, I’m not gonna vote for him because he’s not prepared to bomb every country in the world.’ Do you know how many voters I’ve lost because of that? We don’t know, that’s speculation.” (Not quite: Greenwald cited an academic study published earlier this year which argued “that had the U.S. fought fewer wars, or at least experienced fewer casualties, Clinton would have … won the election.”)

I ask him if there is a foreign policy equivalent to Medicare for All — that is, a radical progressive policy proposal that Sanders intends to campaign on and make mainstream.

“I wouldn’t look at it like that,” he tells me. “Anyone who thinks there is a simple solution in dealing with all of the horrific and longstanding conflicts in the world would be mistaken … Where we’ve got to be radical is to understand we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues.” 

Despite once having hung a picture of legendary antiwar activist Eugene Debs in his congressional office, Sanders is not a pacifist. He backed NATO’s air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. Yet he opposed the Iraq War and voted against the arming and training of Syrian rebels. So, I wonder, does he have his own test that has to be met before the United States should use force? 

The senator makes it clear to me that, in his view, military action should be a last resort, except in cases of genocide. “I think there has to be a legitimate understanding that American interests are being threatened. Obviously if someone was going to wage war against the United States, attack the United States, there is very good reason to respond.” He continues: “When you’re looking at genocidal situations, where people are being slaughtered right and left … we need international peacekeeping force to address that.”

Earlier this week, the president of the United States made what some might call a genocidal threat at the U.N. in New York: “If [the U.S.] is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

I remind the senator that both Obama and Trump came to office pledging to meet with their North Korean counterparts — yet Obama never did while Trump is now busy mocking Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man.” Does Sanders think a meeting between the two heads of state would be of value?

The senator says he would not object to “face-to-face meetings done in good faith” — rather than as cynical photo opportunities — and says that “in general, discussions and face-to-face meetings” are worthy of support. 

So, to be clear, would he support a U.S. president sitting down with the leader of North Korea to try and resolve the nuclear crisis? He shrugs. “Could I see that? Yeah, I could see that, yeah.”

One foreign policy issue, however, on which Sanders has attracted criticism from members of his own left-wing base is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Some pro-Palestinian progressives have accused him of giving Israel a pass. In an interview in April, for example, Sanders dismissed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; he also signed his name to a controversial letter attacking the U.N. for having an “anti-Israel agenda.”

Nonetheless, it is undeniable that in recent years the Vermont senator, who is Jewish and briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel in the 1960s, has taken a more pro-Palestinian position on the conflict and, specifically, against the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. “There comes a time when … we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time,” he told Clinton during a Democratic primary debate in April 2016.

These days, unlike other members of Congress, Sanders has no qualms about identifying, and decrying, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But does he accept that the United States is complicit in Israel’s occupation, through its military aid and arms sales? And does he also accept, therefore, that the occupation of the Palestinian territories will never end until the U.S. stops arming and funding the Jewish state?

“Certainly the United States is complicit, but it’s not to say … that Israel is the only party at fault,” he tells me. However, he adds, “in terms of Israeli-Palestinian relations the United States has got to play a much more even-handed role. Clearly that is not the case right now.”

Would he, therefore, ever consider voting to reduce U.S. aid to Israel — worth at least $3bn per annum — or U.S. arms sales to the Israeli military?

“The U.S. funding plays a very important role, and I would love to see people in the Middle East sit down with the United States government and figure out how U.S. aid can bring people together, not just result in an arms war in that area. So I think there is extraordinary potential for the United States to help the Palestinian people rebuild Gaza and other areas. At the same time, demand that Israel, in their own interests in a way, work with other countries on environmental issues.” He then, finally, answers my question: “So the answer is yes.”

It is — by the depressingly low standard of modern U.S. politics — a remarkable and, dare I say it, radical response from Sanders. “Aid to Israel in Congress and the pro-Israel community has been sacrosanct,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted earlier this year, “and no president has seriously proposed cutting it since Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s.”


Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom, who is constantly compared to Sanders, grabbed headlines in May after urging Britons in a speech, to “be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working” and to draw “connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.” In the past, the Labour leader has labelled NATO a “danger to world peace” and called for engagement with groups, such as the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, and Hamas. 

You might say Corbyn is a genuine radical on foreign policy. Is the more cautious Sanders willing to match the Labour leader’s rhetoric on terrorism and the West’s response to terrorism? Does he, for example, think the United States has lost the so-called war on terror?

“Well, no, that’s too general of a question,” he replies dismissively. “I think you best deal with terrorism by trying to understand the root causes of those problems: the massive poverty that exists, the lack of education that exists, that when you drop a drone, for example, that kills innocent men, women, and child, that it only forms more antagonism toward the United States.”

I ask about the role of Saudi Arabia in allegedly supporting and funding terrorism. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers, lest we forget, were Saudi citizens. So is it an ally or enemy of the United States?

“It is not just that many of the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia,” he says, “what I think is more significant is their … continuing to fund madrasas and to spread an extremely radical Wahhabi doctrine in many countries around the world. And they are funding these mosques, they’re funding the madrasas, and they are fomenting a lot of hatred.”

Sanders wants the United States to pivot away from blind, uncritical support for the Gulf kingdom. He even seems to suggest that the United States should embrace the Saudis’ mortal enemy: the Iranians.

So could this be his foreign policy equivalent of Medicare for All? Trying to end almost four decades of hostility and mistrust between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Without firing a shot? It would be a dramatic and historic shift in approach. During the presidential primaries, Sanders was attacked for suggesting that the U.S. should “move as aggressively as we can to normalize relations with Iran.”

Yet, almost two years later, he isn’t afraid to make the case again. “I think that one of the areas that we have got to rethink, in terms of American foreign policy, is our position vis-a-vis Iran and Saudi Arabia,” he tells me, leaning forward in his chair. “For whatever reason — and I think we know some of the reasons having to do with a three-letter word called oil — the United States has kind of looked aside at the fact that Saudi Arabia is an incredibly anti-democratic country and has played a very bad role internationally, but we have sided with them time and time and time again, and yet Iran, which just held elections, Iran whose young people really want to reach out to the West, we are … continuing to put them down.”


While Sanders has “legitimate concerns … about Iran’s foreign policy” he wants a more “even-handed” approach from the United States to the “Iran and Saudi conflict.”

So I try to pin him down on the nature of the U.S.-Saudi relationship and ask again: Does he or does he not consider Saudi Arabia to be ally of the United States in the so-called war on terror?

He pauses. “Do I consider them an ally? I consider them to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism, so I can’t … No, they are not an ally of the United States.”

Wait, maybe this is the foreign policy Medicare For All — downgrading diplomatic ties with one of the world’s worst regimes. Distancing Washington from Riyadh. But could Sanders really pull it off? Help persuade his fellow senators, on both sides of the aisle to depart from the decades-long bipartisan consensus on Saudi Arabia as a key U.S. ally? In June, the senator joined four Republicans and 42 Democrats to try and block a $510 million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia. They were defeated — but by only six votes.

Greeted by a cheering crowd of students Thursday and awarded an honorary degree by the college in advance of his speech, a stern Sanders denounced the global war on terror as “a disaster for the American people” because it “responds to terrorists by giving them exactly what they want.”

He also offered a rousing defense of Obama’s key foreign affairs legacy: the Iran nuclear deal. “We must protect this deal,” Sanders told his audience, citing the nuclear agreement as an example of “real leadership” on the part of the United States.

Over the course of an hour on Thursday, the independent senator offered an unashamedly progressive, diplomacy-oriented, non-militarized vision of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century: “The goal is not for the United States to dominate the world. … Our goal should be global engagement based on partnership, rather than dominance.

At a time when the U.S. president is beating the drums of war, threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea and tear up the Iran nuclear deal, it is both refreshing and admirable to hear a leading U.S. politician speak in this direct way. Sanders tells me that he wants a “serious discussion about foreign policy” — which, shamefully, is something his Democratic colleagues in the Senate have yet to agree to. For example, he points to a vote in the Senate on Monday, which authorized a whopping $80 billion annual increase in Pentagon spending. “Is that really a wise investment?” he asks.


“I dare say,” he adds acidly, “that most of the people who voted for this huge increase in military spending really would not be able to tell you exactly why it is needed.” 

Only four Senate Democrats joined Sanders to vote against the bill. Why does he think the rest of them voted for it?

“You’ll have to ask them,” is the curt rejoinder. 

Some of his critics on the left, however, don’t think Sanders goes far enough. Writing in July, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic castigated Sanders over his “relative silence on Obama’s foreign policy” and his “fairly conventional foreign policy thinking throughout his Washington career.” Such critics tend to want to see a full-throated, Noam Chomsky-style denunciation of U.S. imperialism from Sanders — and they want to see it yesterday. 

Interestingly, in 1985, Sanders invited Chomsky to speak in Burlington City Hall, introducing him to the crowd as “a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America” and saying he was “delighted to welcome a person who I think we’re all very proud of.” In 2016, when I interviewed Chomsky for my Al Jazeera English show, UpFront, the veteran philosopher and foreign policy critic heaped praise on Sanders as a “decent, honest” politician with “the best policies.”

I ask Sanders if, three decades later, he still agrees with Chomsky’s blistering critique of U.S. foreign policy across the board, including his provocative description of the United States as a “rogue state.”


Sanders cuts me off before I can finish my question. “OK, I get it. Noam Chomsky has played an extraordinarily important role. I am a United States senator. We live in different worlds.” He quickly — and conveniently — changes the subject. “Bottom line is I think we need to rethink foreign policy … and that means dealing with issues like income and wealth inequality, which is not only an American issue, it is a horrific global issue.” 

Sanders is now in his element and on a roll. “We have six of the wealthiest people who have more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. We need to deal with the issue of climate change, because if we don’t get our act together internationally on that, we may not have much of a planet left for our children and our grandchildren.” 

Let’s be clear: On foreign policy, Sanders does not go as far in a left-wing direction as his old friend Noam Chomsky or even his U.K. counterpart Jeremy Corbyn. But his renewed interest in foreign policy and his willingness to break with the established consensus could be among his most radical acts yet.

“Where we’ve got to be radical,” Sanders tells me, “is to understand that we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues. Where we have got to be radical and forceful, in an unprecedented way, is to force debate and discussion on the causes of international conflict – and certainly, we have not been doing that, and we need more American leadership to do that.”

Donald Trump’s EPA Team Will Be Run by Fossil-Fuel Industry Advocates

By Lee Fang and Naomi LaChance

Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he wants the Environmental Protection Agency to be run by Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a longtime ally of the oil and gas industry who has led litigation efforts to overturn the EPA’s rules to address climate change.

As a state attorney general, Pruitt was caught sending a letter to regulators that was drafted by lobbyists working for Devon Energy, a major drilling company. As Pruitt joined a lawsuit against rules opposed by the fracking industry, he simultaneously courted industry donors, including billionaire fracking executive Harold Hamm, who served as the co-chair of Pruitt’s 2013 election campaign.

Pruitt has questioned the role of human-made pollution in causing climate change, writing for the National Review this year that the “debate is far from settled.”

The Pruitt announcement was by immediately criticized by environmentalists. Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized the nomination of “a climate change denier” who “has worked closely with the fossil fuel industry to make this country more dependent, not less, on fossil fuels.” Robert Verchick, the president of the Center for Progressive Reform, called the pick “a clear indication that the administration plans a full-throated assault on environmental protections.”

The nomination comes on the heels of other industry-friendly staff announcements. Earlier this week, the Trump transition team revealed that a former mining industry lobbyist as well as think tank fellow who denies human-made climate change are among the team members now reshaping the EPA to fit the president-elect’s agenda.

George Sugiyama, one of the new EPA transition team members, was the chief counsel for Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the lawmaker best known for his claim that climate change is “hoax” and that scientific research tying greenhouse-gas emissions to the warming planet have been refuted by the Bible. Before working for Inhofe, Sugiyama was paid to lobby on environmental regulations on behalf of the National Mining Association.

David Kreutzer, another hire for the Trump EPA transition, is an economist and think tank official who has been a vocal critic of environmental regulations and climate change science. “Global warming is for real in that we’ve had global warming since the end of the last Ice Age,” he told C-SPAN’s Steve Scully last year.

As a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a group funded by foundations controlled by Koch Industries and other fossil fuel firms, Kreutzer has co-published several papers in which he casts doubt on federal policies aimed to fight climate change. In a paper from April that calls climate change an “unlikely problem,” Kreutzer and his colleagues argued that Obama’s EPA policies are were “favoring elites and undermining the fairness of our economic system.”

This year alone he has criticized carbon dioxide caps, solar power, and fuel regulations. His main critique is that they are too costly and give the government too much power. Kreutzer has advocated several times for more domestic oil drilling. In 2008, he recommended in congressional testimony that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be drilled for oil.

During the election, Trump also selected Myron Ebell, an official at the Competitive Enterprise Institute — another think tank that relies on donors such as Devon Energy and Koch Industries — to work on leading the handoff at the EPA. Like his Trump colleagues, Ebell has long campaigned against any type of action to curb greenhouse gas pollution. Though he’s not a scientist, Ebell has made a career out of questioning the science around global warming, working at a fossil fuel industry group formed in 1997 “to dispel the myths of global warming exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.” He has said that global warming is “nothing to worry about.”

Bernie Sanders: Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump

By Bernie Sanders
Source: The Washington Post
 
Today, about 1,000 Carrier workers and their families should be rejoicing. But the rest of our nation’s workers should be very nervous.

President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly announce a deal with United Technologies, the corporation that owns Carrier, that keeps less than 1,000 of the 2,100 jobs in America that were previously scheduled to be transferred to Mexico. Let’s be clear: It is not good enough to save some of these jobs. Trump made a promise that he would save all of these jobs, and we cannot rest until an ironclad contract is signed to ensure that all of these workers are able to continue working in Indiana without having their pay or benefits slashed.

In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to “pay a damn tax.” He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad?

In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.

Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives. Even corporations that weren’t thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be reevaluating their stance this morning. And who would pay for the high cost for tax cuts that go to the richest businessmen in America? The working class of America.  

Let’s be clear. United Technologies is not going broke. Last year, it made a profit of $7.6 billion and received more than $6 billion in defense contracts. It has also received more than $50 million from the Export-Import Bank and very generous tax breaks. In 2014, United Technologies gave its former chief executive Louis Chenevert a golden parachute worth more than $172 million. Last year, the company’s five highest-paid executives made more than $50 million. The firm also spent $12 billion to inflate its stock price instead of using that money to invest in new plants and workers.

Does that sound like a company that deserves more corporate welfare from our government? Trump’s Band-Aid solution is only making the problem of wealth inequality in America even worse.
I said I would work with Trump if he was serious about the promises he made to members of the working class. But after running a campaign pledging to be tough on corporate America, Trump has hypocritically decided to do the exact opposite. He wants to treat corporate irresponsibility with kid gloves. The problem with our rigged economy is not that our policies have been too tough on corporations; it’s that we haven’t been tough enough.

We need to re-instill an ethic of corporate patriotism. We need to send a very loud and clear message to corporate America: The era of outsourcing is over. Instead of offshoring jobs, the time has come for you to start bringing good-paying jobs back to America.

If United Technologies or any other company wants to keep outsourcing decent-paying American jobs, those companies must pay an outsourcing tax equal to the amount of money they expect to save by moving factories to Mexico or other low-wage countries.  They should not receive federal contracts or other forms of corporate welfare. They must pay back all of the tax breaks and other corporate welfare they have received from the federal government. And they must not be allowed to reward their executives with stock options, bonuses or golden parachutes for outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries. I will soon be introducing the Outsourcing Prevention Act, which will address exactly that.

If Donald Trump won’t stand up for America’s working class, we must.

 

Bernie Sanders Calls for Trump to Ax Bannon; Urges New Admin to Reject Racism, Sexism & Homophobia

AMY GOODMAN: Across town at George Washington University, Senator Bernie Sanders also gave his first major address since the election. Sanders, who challenged Clinton in the Democratic primary, has emerged as one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. On Wednesday, he was named to a leadership post in the Senate—chair of outreach, a new position—and was reappointed ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee. During his speech, Senator Sanders called on Trump to rescind his decision to make Steve Bannon his chief strategist. Bannon is the former head of Breitbart News.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: This country, as you all know, since our inception, has struggled to overcome discrimination of all forms. And that is racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. For hundreds of years, extraordinarily brave people have stood up, and some of them have died in the struggle, to end discrimination in America. And I say to Mr. Trump, from the bottom of my heart, and I know I speak for millions of fellow Americans: Mr. Trump, we are not going backwards in terms of bigotry; we’re going to go forward in creating a nondiscriminatory society. And in that regard, I call upon Mr. Trump to rescind the appointment that he made of Mr. Bannon. A president of the United States should not have a racist at his side. Unacceptable.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Bernie Sanders speaking Wednesday. But his speech was not solely an attack on Donald Trump. The Vermont senator said he hopes to work with the president-elect on a number of issues.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Mr. Trump said, unlike many Republicans, the vast majority of the Republicans, he said we—he will not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Now, I believe we should expand Social Security. I believe in a Medicare-for-all program. But that is what he said. And pay attention to see what he now does. The question that will be resolved, pretty quickly, is whether or not everything that he was saying to the working families of this country was hypocrisy, was dishonest, or whether he was sincere. And we will find that out soon enough. But, number one, no cuts, says Mr. Trump, to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Trump says he wants to invest a trillion dollars in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. That is a good sum of money. That is exactly what we should be doing. And we could create millions of good-paying jobs if we do that. Mr. Trump, that’s what you said on the campaign trail. That’s what we look forward to seeing from you.

Now, I happen to believe that the federal minimum wage of seven and a quarter today is a starvation wage, that it should be raised to $15 an hour, a living wage. Mr. Trump did not say that, but what he did say is we should raise the minimum wage to 10 bucks an hour. Not enough, but a start. And we will hold him to those words.

Mr. Trump said that Wall Street, dangerous, doing bad things. He wants to re-establish Glass-Steagall legislation. I look forward to working with him.

Mr. Trump said he wants six weeks of paid maternity leave. Well, every other major country on Earth has, I think, at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, but this is a start. This is a start. We look forward to working with him, if he is honest about that.

Mr. Trump said throughout his campaign, a cornerstone of his campaign, he wants to change our disastrous trade policies. As somebody who voted against every one of these trade policies, I look forward to working with him to make that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders speaking Wednesday night in Washington. Though he’s being referred to as one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, he caucuses with the Democrats. When we come back from break, we’ll look at how Sanders and the Democratic Party plan to deal with a Trump presidency. Stay with us.