Monday Reads: The Tell-tale Heart

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good Morning!

Back in the days of radio there was a show called “The Shadow” that started out by asking “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”  My mom and dad used to listen to it back in the day and would talk about it ever so often.  When they started releasing what few tapes they had of the shows I ordered some from the Minnesota NPR catalog to hear the answers for myself.  I used to listen to them in the car when I was driving about the Midwest on my way to some consulting gig in a small town. It was better than what passes for music in the middle of no where.

My mother always used to use a series of pop references from radio/TV shows or some old Irish wives’ tale and missives to shame me into good behavior.   When I used to ask about that evil lurking in the hearts of my playmates I would frequently get this one.  “Character wills out, Kathryn Jean.  Character always wills out.”

We Americans have all kinds of sayings that come from pop references and all kinds of family backgrounds that basically demonstrate that you can tell a lot about a person not only by what emanates from their heart and out of their mouths but also what’s clearly demonstrated in their actions.  The reason that I’m remembering all of this at the moment is the current state of affairs in the Democratic Primary campaign for the Presidency this year.  I’m going to start out with something BB sent me because it’s a pretty good example of how to judge hearts by listening to a long list of actions.

Hillary Clinton spoke last night  at the 60th annual NAACP Fight for Freedom Fund dinner near Detroit Michigan.  The program opened up with young people holding signs that reading “America looks like me” while reading a Langston Hughes poem “Let American be America Again”.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

A preacher introduced Clinton by listing her long and lengthy history–starting at her time at Wellesley–actively fighting for racial justice and equality.    Her speech was filled with wonky and inspirational goodness.  She even referenced the poem.

“We have to face up to a painful reality. More than a half a century after Rosa Parks sat … race still plays a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind,” she told the crowd of nearly 10,000 people at the 60th annual NAACP Fight for Freedom Fund dinner at Cobo. “I want you to know that I get it and I see it. And it’s important that we have this conversation. For many white Americans, it’s tempting to believe that systemic racism is largely behind us. But anyone asking for your vote has a responsibility to see things as they actually are, not as we wish them to be.”

You can listen to her speech here.   Hillary Clinton’s list of activism and achievements on the social justice front is really impressive.  Any reference to anything she has accomplished is impressive which is why I still reel at the idea of a gadfly senator from Vermont publicly announcing that she has bad judgement and is not qualified for the office she now seeks. This comes from a man that was unemployed way into his 40s and living off his wife until he was elected mayor of a backwoods city in a backwoods state.  His words echo that of Carly Fiorina which doesn’t surprise me at all.  Clinton has a long list of accomplishments and a long list of living her values as a social justice advocate.  The preacher mentioned her decades of actions for racial justice.

“Character, not circumstance, makes the person.”
Booker T. Washington

I always ask Sanders supporters why they think that he is the voice of the powerless when the current voting records show exactly who votes for him and who votes for her. It’s obvious that the most disenfranchised in our country back Hillary Clinton.  It’s not because we’re Southern or low information. If we’re women, it’s not because of our vaginas. It’s not because we’ve been misled because of our race or circumstances or because we’re some how confused.  It’s because we look at the history of actions and try to match them to the words.

It’s extremely weird that we do know what Hillary Clinton was paid in speeches as well as every other detail of the Clinton’s personal finances and foundation’s finance.  All of these things have been publicly reported.  What we know about the Sanders family fortune–and he’s a millionaire so in my poor ol’ southern white woman ways that’s a damned fortune–is clouded behind failure to disclose.   We’ve heard some really hinky stuff. Some of it has been dug up by right-leaning sources because no one else will do it openly.  First, we know that the Sanders campaign does the old small town political grifting trick.  He puts his family on his payroll.  The source is spurious but the campaign finance records from which it was gleaned is not.  Also, this link is from Vanity Fare who quotes the r-w site.

According to an investigation by the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, Sanders’s spouse of 27 years, Jane O’Meara Sanders, and his stepdaughter, Carina Driscoll, both drew sizable salaries from Sanders’s House campaigns between 2000 and 2004. Public records examined by the online paper reportedly show O’Meara Sanders was paid “more than $90,000 for consulting and ad placement services” between 2002 and 2004, while Driscoll received $65,000 from the campaign over the course of four years.

But while it’s not unheard of for campaigns to bring family members on board, the Free Beacon’s revelations about Sanders’s wife’s tenure as the president of Burlington College will certainly raise eyebrows. During her time there, the college paid nearly $500,000 to the Vermont Woodworking School, run by Driscoll, for classes, according to the Free Beacon. The college also reportedly paid tens of thousands of dollars to an all-inclusive Caribbean resort run by Jonathan Leopold, the son of a family friend, for a study-abroad program. Between 2009 and 2011, when O’Meara Sanders stepped down, Burlington College paid around $68,000 to the resort. The Free Beacon reports that payments to both the woodworking school and the resort stopped soon after she left.

It sort’ve makes one wonder wtf are in those detailed taxes that we never see and also wtf is in the now stalled FEC reports?   Let me use this Fortune article to show this man basically doesn’t have the same problems as you and me. Bernie Sanders is in the top 4% of income earners.    Do his poor donors know this?  Also, his donations represent a huge, cumulative amount and he’s outspent every one in the race for mostly rallies and ads. Who is against using big money in campaigns?
What qualifies as big money exactly? I’d argue that no matter what the source, spending an obscene amount of money to include trips to Rome for friends and family on a private plane, hiring your wife as a campaign adviser, and enriching your campaign staff’s ad placement service to be freaking shady. I don’t care where you got your damned money. It went out there and it was in amounts that blew every one out of the water while enriching your damned family and friends.  What kind of freaking socialist does that?

And yet, by dint of his success as an anti-capitalist politician, Sanders has managed to make a quite comfortable living. While Sanders wouldn’t describe himself as rich, the scourge of the 1% has income that puts him in the top 3.8% of American households, according to CNBC.

Just as Sanders has managed to accumulate significant assets and pull down a six-figure income while being hostile to business and capitalism, his campaign has done the same. Eschewing PACs and high-dollar fundraisers on Wall Street, Sanders has managed to raise a stunning $95 million, from a virtual army of 3 million small donors.

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!
Theodore Roosevelt

Then there’s money coming in from this Toxic Waste Dumping Scheme from the 90s.  It’s still coming in and  it’s for something really not in keeping with progressive goals and values.

In the late 1990s, when now-U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was a member of the House, he supported a compact between Maine, Vermont and Texas thatoriginally proposed dumping low-levelradioactive waste in a small minority community in far-West Texas, putting him at odds with other progressive congressmen.

Though the waste never made it to Sierra Blanca, a low-income, largely Hispanic town in Hudspeth County, Sanders’ efforts have attracted renewed attention online in the lead-up to Tuesday’s Texas primary. Critics suggest that the candidate’s role in promoting the compact — which ultimately brought the waste to a different site in West Texas — undermines his otherwise progressive record.

“It reflects very poorly on him,” said longtime environmental justice activist Dr. Robert Bullard, dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University and the author of Dumping in Dixie. “Shoving this down people’s throats is not progressive politics. It was business as usual. It’s a classic case of rich people from a white state shifting something they don’t want to a poor minority community somewhere else.”

And yes, the lone Sanders 2014 tax statement that we’ve seen shows they’re still making money off that hypocrisy.

Bernie Sanders released his 2014 tax returns this weekend, and in addition to having claiming massive mortgage interest and property tax deductions vastly outstripping the average American – and certainly the average Vermonter – the tax returns seem to confirm a dark open secret in the Sanders family: Jane Sanders personally financially benefits from shipping Vermont’s toxic nuclear waste to be dumped elsewhere.

For a quick refresher, refer back to our coverage of Bernie Sanders’ eager support for Congressional legislation to expedite movement of Vermont’s nuclear waste to Texas as well as his cavalier disregard for Texans and Vermonters who opposed the dump. We reported then that though Congress did not designate a specific site, the Congressional record was abundantly clear on where the likely site of the dump would be, near the low-income Latino community of Sierra Blanca. The protests of many progressives, including Paul Welstone’s, fell on Bernie Sanders’ deaf ears. The community, however, stood up and fought back. And, they won.

Besides from being eager to make his state’s nuclear waste someone else’s problem in a hurry, TPV writer Kris Jirapinyo noted that Jane O. Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ wife, conveniently sat on the Board of Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority, or TLLRWDA, the entity which technically held the power to designate the dump site.

That much we already knew. Now, in light of Bernie Sanders’ release of his 2014 taxes, we know that that Bernie and Jane Sanders financially benefit from her position on a Board that participates in willful poisoning of communities despite ample warning. According to their own tax return, Jane Sanders “materially participated” in the board, and received compensation.

So, character meet speech meet actions. So this is the gang that wants to contest the Democratic Convention because they can best represent the folks that really need representin’ or so they say.   There were so many things standing in his way–establishment things like closed primaries–that they have to contest the primary at the 2016 Democratic Convention.

There’s no reason to deem this demand self-serving; at 74 years of age, Sanders will not be running for president again and he apparently wants to create a process in which candidates who follow in his footsteps will have a better shot.

Although he has every right to pursue that goal, he’s wasting his time, and squandering his leverage, by focusing on closed primaries. Yes, he was swept in the closed states. But he also lost the open primaries by a 2-to-1 margin.

There have been 40 state contests so far, 27 primaries and 13 caucuses. Nineteen of those primaries  were accessible to independent voters. Yet Sanders only won six of them, and two were his home state of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire.

He’s got a load of excuses for not winning things.  Too many Southerners vote first.  Too much establishment politics.  Ya da ya da ya da.  The deal is he’s lost.  He needs to go quietly into the night.  Also, he may create chaos which may be his goal but he may not necessarily win a contested convention.  Remember, this is the Democratic Party. He’s not been a cooperative, useful and productive member in any sense of the word.  He’s even indicated that he’s used the affiliation for media access so I wouldn’t expect Party hardliners and loyalists to flee to him under any circumstances but a massive win in pledged delegates which is impossible at this point.

The Democrats are a different story. Despite the fact that Bernie Sanders’s path to the nomination has been all but closed off, he is now insisting there will be a “contested convention” for the party’s superdelegates. Sanders told reporters in Washington, D.C., yesterday that those superdelegates should be in play if Clinton cannot win the nomination with an outright majority of normal pledged delegates.

Is Sanders serious? There are hundreds of superdelegates, which means it is actually quite difficult to get to the magic number of 2,383 without them. Sanders himself seemed to suggest that his campaign’s goal is merely to win a majority of pledged delegates, which is what Clinton is in the process of doing (and quite handily). She is also beating him in the popular vote by some three million votes.

Paul Krugman says the Sanders campaign has devolved into “an epic descent into whining.” But perhaps of greater cause for concern is that Sanders is setting up Clinton’s nomination as illegitimate, which is not only false, but potentially dangerous when you consider the system-is-rigged beliefs of his most ardent supporters. Even Ted Cruz is prepared to admit that Trump is beating him fair and square.

Phillip Bump writing for WAPO argues Sanders can’t win.

One of the things that Sanders has been very good at, though, is conveying a convincing depiction of a guy who’s going to come from behind and win this thing, even as he has continued to trail badly or dropped further behind. During a news conference in Washington on Sunday marking the first anniversary of his campaign launch, Sanders insisted that the math above means that the Democrats were headed to a “contested convention,” leveraging the now-common language of the ferocious (and unsettled) Republican contest to paint his own contest as similarly unsettled.

“It is virtually impossible for Secretary Clinton to reach the majority of convention delegates by June 14 with pledged delegates alone,” he said. “She will need superdelegates to take her over the top at the convention in Philadelphia. In other words, the convention will be a contested contest.”

That’s true — mostly because, unlike in 2008, Sanders will contest it. Eight years ago, Clinton conceded the race before the convention, recognizing that trying to fight her way to victory on the convention floor was likely to fail, despite her having a slight lead in the popular vote. But Clinton realized the damage that could be done to the party — and perhaps herself — so she didn’t.

Sanders doesn’t share the former sentiment, as he has made clear. He was an independent until he decided to run for president, and his goal during his campaign has been to upend the system, into which a convention floor fight fits neatly.

But that doesn’t mean he has any real shot at winning.

Bump has made a pretty long list of why superdelegates are unlikely to support the Sanders Sore Loser Campaign at the Convention.  His conclusion is that Sanders can raise a stink and list all of his reasons but it won’t change the outcome.

“The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.”
–John W. Holt, Jr

I have to admit to finding the entire Sanders’ campaign and arguments vile and basically racist.  We continue to see him mention his crowd of young white minions over the concerns of every one else.  We continue to see his excuses for losing. What we don’t see are his taxes and press coverage of his many hypocritical actions.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America! 

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?