Political commentary – Page 6 – The Progressive Democrat

Why Obama Should Stand Up to the Saudis

By Dana E. Abizaid

With much of the US press focused on the daily images of barbarity coming out the lands occupied by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the brutal practices of the real Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, receive scant attention. The reasons for this are as sickening as they are obvious: a major oil supplier to the West and a nation that casts itself as the mortal enemy of Shia Iran has been courted and coddled by the US since the end of WWII to keep domestic gas prices low.

The United States maintains a special relationship with the Saudi Dynasty that contradicts every ideal America stands for. Nobody should hold his breath waiting for the US media or government to finally and thoroughly expose the draconian policies of the desert kingdom, but President Obama does have the opportunity in one case to pressure the Saudis into granting amnesty to Ali-Mohammad al-Nimr and thereby earn a small part of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. In a recent interview with the Guardian, al-Nimr’s mother pleaded that Obama has the power to “interfere and rescue my son.”

The Saudi government convicted al-Nimr – 17 at the time – of possessing firearms while protesting for Shia rights in 2012. But it is clear that is not the only reason the young man is sentenced to be beheaded and crucified. His uncle is the prominent dissident Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr who has also been sentenced to death for criticizing the Saudi State.

If the United States is ever to devise and implement an effective Middle East policy a reevaluation of its relationship with Saudi Arabia will be essential. Standing up for al-Nimr is vital in this regard. By pressuring the Saudis to pardon al-Nimr, Obama can win three immediate victories important to this reevaluation. First, he could portray himself as a seeker of justice in the spirit of his Nobel. Second, he could win some goodwill amongst those Shia the Saudis have repressed for generations. Lastly, his actions could open a dialogue in the US media that might educate the American public to crimes that are committed with its tacit support.

Since the US media and government rarely reprimand the Saudis, the American people have little understanding of the grave human rights abuses that take place daily in the kingdom. According to Amnesty International, the Saudis executed 102 people in the first six months of 2015. Death by sword beheading – often public – is the preferred punishment for adultery, homosexuality, and witchcraft (basically, not having radical Sunni Wahhabi beliefs). Children and the mentally handicapped do not escape the sword.

Why Saudi Arabia Gets Away With Murder

The kingdom is set to execute a young man for participating in the Arab Spring as a 17-year-old—and the Obama administration has admitted it’s not going to do a thing about it.

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr Image via Facebook — Ali Mohammed al-Nimr
Image via Facebook

By Jay Michaelson

An Islamic regime in the Middle East may soon behead a young man and hang his corpse up for display. ISIS? Iran? No—America’s ally Saudi Arabia. And because it’s the Saudis, the Obama administration’s silence has been deafening.

In 2012, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was a 17-year-old pro-democracy activist in the Arab Spring. After harsh government crackdowns, protests turned violent, particularly in Qatif, a majority-Shiite region in majority-Sunni Saudi Arabia. Al-Nimr was arrested, along with others, and charged, at first, with relatively low-level political crimes related to the protests, such as “going out to a number of marches, demonstrations, and gatherings against the state and repeating some chants against the state.”

But then al-Nimr’s uncle, a prominent Shiite cleric, began giving fiery sermons against the regime. He, too, was arrested, on more serious charges of inciting sectarian strife, aiding terrorists, and “insulting Gulf leaders and scholars.”

Suddenly, the younger al-Nimr’s charges were increased as well, to include the capital crimes of attacking police and sheltering criminals. According to al-Nimr’s father, the teen was tortured until he confessed, and he was subsequently sentenced to death.

Al-Nimr would, however, be the first solely political prisoner to be executed in Saudi Arabia in some time—and based on flimsy evidence, an allegedly coerced confession, and acts of political dissidence committed when he was 17. How could such a thing happen, without a peep of protest from the United States?

Because it’s Saudi Arabia.

As outrageous as killing a kid for political activism may be, al-Nimr is just the latest collateral damage in our long, troubling marriage of convenience with the House of Saud. We need the Saudis for the fight against ISIS, for oil, and for providing some semblance of stability in the most unstable region on the planet. As my colleague Michael Tomasky wrote in January, we’re stuck with Saudi Arabia, because as bad as the Saudis are, the alternatives are worse.

Adding insult to injury, Saudi Arabia was just named to a UN Human Rights panel—only a subsidiary committee, and part of a regionally based rotation, but outrageous nonetheless given the country’s appalling human rights record.

Bernie Sanders Is About as Radical as Harry Truman

By Robert Kuttner

The mainstream media continues to be shocked that Bernie Sanders keeps gaining traction against frontrunner Hillary Clinton. However, if you look at what Sanders actually stands for, it is well within the mainstream of what used to be the Democratic Party.

Ever since Jimmy Carter, it has been evident that much of the Democratic electorate, and for that matter much of the country, is more progressive in its core values than what Democratic presidents have been offering. As big money has crowded out grass-roots democracy, the policies that people crave are simply not on offer.

So there is a pent-up demand for a candidate who can articulate popular frustrations. The fact that a 74-year-old, self-described socialist transplant from Brooklyn to Burlington, Jewish no less, is the surging vessel of these demands only tells you how deeply felt they must be.

But Bernie is no more radical than, say, Harry Truman, FDR or LBJ (when he was thinking about domestic policies). My friend Peter Dreier, a few months ago, performed a real service when he compared key Sanders positions with public opinion generally.

As Dreier reported, overwhelming majorities of Americans support a higher minimum wage: 74 percent think corporations have too much influence; 73 percent favor tougher regulation of Wall Street; 58 percent support breaking up big banks; 79 percent think the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes; 85 percent favor paid family leave; 80 percent of Democrats and half the public generally support single-payer Medicare for all; well over 70 percent of Americans support workers’ right to unionize; and on and on.

No wonder Sanders is gaining ground.

Republicans have been disparaging Democrats as socialists — even centrist ones like Barack Obama — ever since FDR. So if this be socialism, let’s make the most of it.

Nate Silver: Trump Has About 5% Chance Of Winning

Statistician and writer Nate Silver joins Anderson Cooper to share his evaluation of the Trump campaign.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: You might have noticed, we talked a bit about polls around here, so does Donald Trump, so do all kinds of candidates whether they’re gaining or boasting or slipping and complaining. For better or worse, polling drives the conversation right now and a new conversation started comes out pretty much daily.

Our next guest made his reputation by picking the right polling data and using it much more — well to make much more accurate predictions, extremely accurate predictions. Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight.com joins us tonight to talk about what the numbers can and can’t say right now about the state of the race.

So it’s really fascinating because you put the chance of Donald Trump or Ben Carson actually getting the GOP nomination and put it around 5 percent.

NATE SILVER, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT: Maybe about 5 percent each, somewhere around there.

Why Surprising Numbers of Republicans Have Been Voting for Bernie Sanders in Vermont

If [Sanders] ends up being the Democratic nominee for president, his GOP opponent is going to have a very hard time beating him.

United States Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont

By Thom Hartmann

Ann Coulter knows who she wants to be the Democratic nominee for president, and who that person is, well, it may surprise you.

She wants Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, and thinks that if Bernie gets the nod, he’ll beat whoever the Republicans come up with to run against him.

You won’t hear me say this often, but Ann Coulter is right.

If Bernie Sanders ends up being the Democratic nominee for president, and it looks more and more every day like he will be, his Republican opponent is going to have a very hard time beating him.

And that’s because of all the Democratic candidates running, Bernie Sanders has the best chance of capturing Republican votes.

Bernie Sanders, a socialist in good company

Bernie Sanders at a town hall in Manchester, N.H. on Saturday. (Dominick Reuter/Reuters)

By Harold Meyerson

Bernie Sanders has been getting a bum rap from people who purport to be his fellow progressives. He’s been chastised for not supporting open borders: Totally open immigration, the Vermont senator told Vox’s Ezra Klein, was “a Koch brothers proposal” that would erode the “concept of the nation state.” He’s been accused of downplaying the effects of racism by emphasizing the effects of classism — a more valid criticism to which Sanders, after his initial, grumpy response to protesters last month, has responded more recently by highlighting the racism of many police practices. Some critics have added that Sanders’s allegedly blinkered vision stems from his decades in nearly all-white Vermont, or from his admiration for the social democracies of nearly all-white Scandinavia, or from the purported racial blindness of social democracy itself.

To fault Sanders for failing to support open borders, however, is to hold him to a standard that no present-day elected official in any nation I know of has met. Like his fellow liberals and, polling shows, most Americans, Sanders supports offering citizenship to those immigrants, documented and not (excepting those who’ve committed serious crimes), who are already here, and stopping the efforts to deport them. Like most Americans, Sanders clearly supports the continuation of legal immigration.

Bernie Sanders Is a Loud, Stubborn Socialist. Republicans Like Him Anyway.

His achievements include the bipartisan VA reform bill: “Frankly, without him, I don’t think we would have gotten it done.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders(Win McNamee/Getty Images)

By Sarah Mimms

In the Senate, Bernie Sanders should be all alone.

Sanders is constantly ribbing Republicans in his trademark condescending Brooklyn-accented tone. He offers up legislation that’s so far to the left that it couldn’t get a vote even under Majority Leader Harry Reid. He’s the curmudgeon in the Senate Democratic conference, rarely satisfied with how far his leadership will go to pursue progressive policies, and not afraid to vote ‘nay’ when his leaders come up short. And none of his Senate colleagues, on either side of the aisle, think he could ever be elected president of the United States; most of them even believe he shouldn’t be.

But rather than earning the frustration and ire of his peers in the vein of other Senate hard-liners such as Sen. Ted Cruz, Sanders has managed to be respected—even liked—by much of the chamber, according to members on both sides of the aisle. The Vermont independent actually has much more in common with Sen. Tom Coburn, the now-retired “Dr. No,” whose hard-line opposition killed many bills in the Senate but also earned him the respect of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

Sanders also has been able to work well with his colleagues. He’s passed bipartisan legislation and forged strong relationships with members of both parties in nearly 25 years on Capitol Hill. But most of all, members say, even when Sanders is ideologically an outlier, he lets others know where he stands. He’s not the type to suddenly stab a colleague in the back. And that’s earned him respect both on and off the Hill.

“A lot of people here talk about what they believe in, but they don’t act on it,” Sen. Mark Warner said. “He always acts on what he believes. … We can agree or disagree, but you know where he stands.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including Sanders himself, point to last year’s deal to improve the disastrous, scandal-ridden Veterans Affairs Department as a highlight. After weeks of negotiating with a cadre of Republican colleagues, Sanders helped pass the deal on a 91-3 vote in the Senate. “In a pretty dysfunctional Congress I helped pass, in a bipartisan way, the significant veterans bill, which increases health care to veterans and lowers waiting times, and I’m proud of that,” Sanders said. “That was a significant step forward.”

Why Is Socialist Bernie Sanders So Popular?

Berniemania! Why Is Socialist Bernie Sanders So Popular? – The New York Observer

Brooklyn-born, Vermont-fueled, Bernie Sanders promises a revolution if he’s somehow elected president next year. Does Hillary have to watch her back?

(Illustration: Josh Gosfield/New York Observer)

Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, violates most laws of American politics. He proudly calls himself a socialist, a label vilified by Republicans and avoided by most Democrats. He is not outwardly charming; he rarely glad-hands and his speeches are often mirthless. Like a modern day Jonathan Edwards, who found Eugene V. Debs rather than Jesus Christ, he thunders about the dying middle class and oligarchies eroding democracy. Cross him, like one camera-holding man who yapped at him in Keene to take a position on the Edward Snowden affair, and earn a stern rebuke. Why wouldn’t he answer the man’s question? “Because you’re rude, and you’re shouting out things and I don’t really like that,” Mr. Sanders groused.

Despite a thorny approach to retail campaigning, Mr. Sanders’ quest for the White House is on an upswing. Last week, a Wisconsin Democratic Party straw poll showed Mr. Sanders trailing Ms. Clinton only 49 to 41 percent among delegates. On Observer.com, Brent Budowsky wrote, “There is a very real prospect that Mr. Bernie Sanders wins an outright victory in the Iowa caucus.” Donations are flooding in; he raised $1.5 million in the 24-hour period after he announced his candidacy in early May. He has since raised cash from more than 100,000 individual donors.

For a long time, Mr. Sanders’ unbridled liberalism was out of vogue. The Clintons, slashing the welfare rolls and deregulating Wall Street, ruled the booming 1990s. The Soviet Union collapsed; some socialists had lost a lodestar, though Mr. Sanders firmly insisted it was the democratic socialism of the Scandinavian countries, and not the authoritarianism of Russia, that he extolled.

A Sanders supporter in Keene underscored this point, gently chastising a reporter for asking whether an avowed socialist could win over voters nationwide.

“He’s a democratic socialist, like another celebrated Jewish socialist—Jesus,” he said.

Still, after a one-term African-American senator with a funny name rose from nowhere to whip Hillary Clinton, the Sanders faithful are suddenly asking, And why not Bernie? What seems more far-fetched: Barack Hussein Obama, around 2007, becoming leader of the Free World or a socialist Jew (a member of Congress for 24 years and former mayor, to boot) becoming president in 2016? (Never mind Mr. Obama was telegenic and three decades younger.)

A crisis for seniors who rely on Social Security

By Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) - 06/10/15 05:31 PM EDT Photo credit: Greg Nash — By Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) – 06/10/15 05:31 PM EDT Photo credit: Greg Nash

It seems every time we talk about the long-term future of Social Security, many in Washington start clamoring to raise the retirement age or propose other ways to trim Social Security’s modest benefits. Those calling for cuts are missing the dire state of retirement security for the typical American. Traditional pensions have become a thing of the past, and stagnant wages are making it harder and harder to put aside savings. For the two-thirds of retirees who rely on Social Security for a majority of their income, there is not a Social Security crisis, there is a retirement crisis. That is why we must preserve and enhance the one program Americans have always been able to count on.

Just the other week I sat down with seniors in Glastonbury, Conn., to discuss our nation’s retirement crisis. These men and women hail from all walks of life: veterans, small-business owners, homemakers and machinists. They’ve built and rebuilt this country through wars and recessions. I spoke with one man who spent his life as a lineman, his fingers now crooked and gnarled from a lifetime helping to usher America into the Digital Age. Can we really in good conscience ask the millions of men and women, who have already given so much, to keep pushing well past their breaking point? How does it make sense to push the retirement age ever higher or cut benefits at a time when people need them most?

We can shore up Social Security for future generations without needlessly slashing benefits for people like those seniors in Glastonbury or their children and grandchildren. That is why I have been joined by more than 60 of my colleagues in putting forth H.R. 1391, the Social Security 2100 Act.

Rather than cut benefits or hike the retirement age, this proposal would increase benefits across the board. It would provide a better cost-of-living adjustment that would reflect the true cost seniors incur, such as higher medical expenses. It would also ensure that those who have paid into the system won’t retire into poverty by increasing minimum payments. Because more seniors are working into their retirement years, this proposal provides a tax cut to 11 million beneficiaries by raising the level of income individuals and couples can earn before their Social Security benefits are taxed. All of these provisions will strengthen and enhance Social Security for current beneficiaries and generations to come.

The Social Security 2100 Act keeps the system solvent for the next 75 years and beyond, according to the independent analysis of the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary, and does so without cutting benefits or contributing a dime to the deficit.

How do we do this? First, we ask individuals making more than $400,000 a year to contribute into Social Security in the same way as the rest of us. Currently, those with earnings above $118,500 no longer have to pay into the system. To put it another way, LeBron James has made his yearly contribution to Social Security by about lunchtime on New Year’s Day.

Second, we slowly introduce an increase to the contributions both workers and employers make. Over the span of 25 years, it would mean an additional 0.05 percent each year. A worker making $50,000 a year would pay an additional 50 cents per week each year to Social Security.

‘Don’t Underestimate Me’: Bernie Sanders Knows a Thing or Two About Winning

Senator Bernie Sanders (AP/ John Locher)

By John Nichols in The Nation

Burlington, Vermont— For the first century after the founding of the Grand Old Party in 1854, Republicans dominated the politics of the state of Vermont like no other. For more than 100 years, Vermont Republicans won every major race for every statewide office. Republican presidential candidates from John Fremont in 1856 to George H.W. Bush in 1988—with the single exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964—won the Green Mountain State. For one of Vermont’s US Senate seats, an unbroken Republican winning streak continued from before the Civil War to the beginning of the 21st century.

Only in 2006 was the Senate seat streak broken with the election of a candidate who was not a Republican.

His name was Bernie Sanders.

Of all the announced and potential contenders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, none has a longer track record of taking on tough races, beating incumbents, and upsetting the political calculus. Sanders has won 14 elections in Vermont, including ten straight races for the US House and US Senate as the most politically successful and longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.