Andy Caffrey- Wednesday after Super Tuesday results show Bernie on the way to winning Democratic nomination!
Other than Massachusetts, which she only won by a razor slim margin of 50.3% to Bernie’s 48.5%, Hillary Clinton could only win Super Tuesday victories in conservative southern states with large numbers of minorities. There are not many more states yet to vote with huge numbers of minorities.
Bernie Sanders won all four of the other five states outside of the south, including Oklahoma, which has the most conservative Democrats out of all the Super Tuesday states.
The pundits are clueless and missing all of this. They just look at the large advantage in delegates that Hillary has today and her Super Delegate advantage, but that is no indicator of things to come. This is:
Despite Hillary’s victories today, if you add up the votes of all the Super Tuesday states, Bernie won white men 54-44%. That’s in all the states! Mostly southern states! The socialist did that!
But Hillary won white women, blacks, and hispanics:
White Women: only a 50% advantage to Bernie’s 48%. So it’s already almost a 50:50 split with white women! Hillary has almost lost her advantage with women! Blacks 83% to Bernie’s 15% Hispanics 67% to Bernie’s 33% So this bodes well for Bernie! He’s not going to drop below 48% among white women, and he can only go up among blacks and hispanics, and he’s creaming Hillary with white men.
Even before Super Tuesday the writing was on the wall:
Hillary’s only big win was also in a heavily black southern state, South Carolina 73.5% to 26%.
Other than that, she won Iowa by a coin toss 49.9% to 49.6% and the Nevada caucus by a slim 52.6% to 47.3%.
Bernie crushed her in New Hampshire 86.2% to 13.6%.
The nation has known Hillary for 25 years. They’ve only known Bernie for less than one.
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Hillary Trump Clinton reveals disconnection from reality in Super Tuesday speech
Hillary Clinton last night: “America never stopped being great!” Wow! Could she be any more out of touch with reality?
I guess she thinks that when the Supreme Court Republicans overthrew the Al Gore presidency that it was GREAT!
She makes my case that she is an unrepentant mass murderer with her support for George Bush’s Iraq war. I guess she really thinks that war was GREAT! But I thought she said it was “a mistake.” Afghanistan and Libya destroyed by America, that was GREAT!
When she empowered Dictator Bush in the world’s greatest terrorist assault since the Vietnam War, that destroyed the nation of Iraq, murdered a million people there, wiped out Christianity in Iraq, and irradiated it with depleted uranium mutating thousands of babies, well that was all GREAT to Hillary!
Oh, and the resultant creation of ISIS? How freakin’ great was that?!!
35 years of climate denialist obstruction of climate action causing the now “unstoppable” collapse of the polar ice sheets and 20-66 feet of global sea level increases, that’s GREAT to Hillary! As was her husband sending Al Gore to Kyoto in 1997 to gut the climate treaty! Wonderfully GREAT!
The crash of the economy deregulated by her husband and advocated by herself, man was that GREAT!
The nation’s entire black community losing half of its total wealth since 2007 because of that crash, and American workers’ wages frozen flat for four decades while the richest one percent went from taking in 8% of the nation’s wealth to sucking up 23%? GREAT!, that’s all GREAT!
The Republicans dismantling our democracy and shutting down Congress during the entire Obama administration is GREAT!
Hillary the psychopath really needs to drop out of the race NOW! She is mentally incompetent, morally corrupt and a tyrant, a planet killer, and destroyer of the black and Latino communities with her call to jail the “Super Predators” who live there. The devastation to the black community with mandatory minimum sentences? GREAT!
The water in Flint, Michigan? GREAT!
Come on, Hillary supporters! Your vote for her is a deadly weapon! How many people do you want to kill with it? How horrible and murderous does Hideous Hillary have to be for you to wake up and abandon her cause and join the revolution against the ruling class?
So I was informed last night that our Congressman Jared Huffman, who has accomplished absolutely nothing during four years in Congress other than get us a hiking trail and suck up $700,000 of taxpayer money is a Hillary delegate. So this Congressional ballot you have a true choice: Huffman for Hillary or Andy Caffrey the nation’s first Sanders Democrat.
Which side are you on?
Marijuana up and down
By Fatty Dawg.
New laws and an ordinance are on the books. Trimmigrants find the new version of cold and unwelcome unchanged, however.
Growers are culturally divided, money versus love. Outsiders mostly have no idea that the Humboldt worldwide reputation was built on love. Back-to-the-landers sold only the extra weed that they had grown for their own precious use.
When you grow for yourself you don’t soak it in Avid®. You carefully throw out the branches with mold. You don’t use the misleadingly labeled “fish emulsion”. Stuff you buy on the street in Berkeley has all this and more, Monsanto Morsels. Cancerbis sativa.
Big growers are the other class, the money growers. Their dope has all this junk and they won’t smoke it themselves. It’s for the street market controlled by their buds. Buds with heaters in their cars.
The new state laws have been heavily influenced by big dispensary investors who want all the market. They want to force out the small people. They will be able to grow huge amounts for themselves so have no need to buy from small producers. The legislators' care for the future is smothered by Feed-the-Greed.
More than anything, this kind of influence is why the new state laws are corrupt. You now cannot even sell a bong without a dispensary license from the state. With little to no legal outlet for their product, many small growers will be forced out, pushed along hard by big fees, onerous record-keeping, and inspections. Sacramento payoffs. CaliCartel rising.
The lies and posturing by the Governor over global warming are starkly illuminated by the brilliantly wasteful marijuana grow lights that he approved - four acres worth for a dispensary.
Local attorneys are saying don’t register with the government. I won’t go quite all the way there; if you are on the verge of having a clean operation, sign up because some of the benefits are in very short supply and I wouldn’t want you to lose. But know exactly why you are signing up, because they are into divide-and-conquer which hurts everyone, and most of us are going to have to resist in order to have a reasonable chance. Sacramento needs to clean up its act and the County could do better also. Honor your black market contacts! But if you are into resisting, work at cleaning up your scene, make it environmentally compliant! You will need to do this eventually, the more you do this the less likely you will be targeted for enforcement, and good environmental respect helps all of us. We want a healthy future, please.
High quality growing has to be small because it is care intensive. Small growers therefore usually do little or no hiring of helpers such as trimmers. Big operators are growing money so their way of managing is very different. These folks will be more than willing to sell out to the corporadoes. Their interest is to parasitize the Humboldt reputation, make money off the ethical work done by others. Up until now their labor practices have been sometimes brutal, sometimes good.
Now will we finally see migrant worker camps for trimmers? Probably not a chance anytime soon. Hatred of lower classes still rules most of the petty merchants, and their buds are in the Supervisor chambers. Different strain of chamber pot. Resist!
Pfizer Buys Allergan VIAGRA MEETS BOTOX FOR IRISH TAX SCAM November 23, 2015 The pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer will acquire pharmaceutical corporation Allergan in a deal valued at $160 billion, a volatile union of Viagra (Pfizer) and Botox (Allergan). More to the point, this deal is structured as an “inversion” designed to dodge U.S. taxes. Allergan (itself the product of a similar inversion) is headquartered in New Jersey but for tax reasons is incorporated in Ireland – a tax haven. After the acquisition, Pfizer will keep its headquarters in New York but change its corporate address to Ireland. In other words, the resulting merged company will make and sell products in the same places it makes and sells them now. The same executives will occupy the same buildings. It will receive the same taxpayer-funded U.S. services, infrastructure, courts and military protection that it receives now. But the company will now claim it is “based” in tax-haven Ireland and thereby dodge U.S. taxation. It’s A Tax Dodge. It is highly likely that this inversion will enable Pfizer to dodge ever having to pay the taxes it owes on the approximately $148 billion of taxable profits it has kept out of the country. At the U.S. tax rate of 35 percent, this represents a tax-revenue loss of up to $51.8 billion that other taxpayers will have to make up for. It also provides Pfizer a substantial advantage over other companies that focus on innovation and serving customers instead of engaging in schemes to dodge taxes. Congress could stop Pfizer from deserting America tomorrow. Legislation now waiting for a vote would apply to any direct or indirect inversion. (The Pfizer-Allergan merger is indirect.) ● The legislation would prevent the tax benefits of an inversion if a company has its headquarters in the United States. Pfizer is not moving to Ireland – its CEO, staff and facilities will remain here. ● The legislation requires that if the majority of a company’s shareholders are American, the company should be considered American. Pfizer’s original U.S. shareholders will own 56 percent of the merged company. ● Companies should not be able to desert America by changing their corporate address to a tax haven. Congress should pass this legislation before this deal is consummated by shareholders in coming months to ensure Pfizer pays its fair share of U.S. taxes. Pfizer got $5.3 billion in federal contracts between 2010 and 2014. And Pfizer makes $1 billion a year from selling drugs to Medicare, Medicaid and other U.S. government programs. About 5 percent of Pfizer’s $20 billion annual U.S. revenue comes from the federal government and taxpayer dollars. Pfizer reported that it lost an average of $3 billion in the U.S. but made $15 billion each year each year offshore over the last five years. But Pfizer had 40 percent of its sales and 50 percent of its assets in the U.S. in 2014. It looks a lot like Pfizer is engaged in schemes that make it appear as if its profits are really earned in tax havens rather than in the U.S. As a result of this kind of shifting, Pfizer currently has approximately $148 billion in untaxed profits stashed offshore on which it has paid ZERO U.S. income taxes. A lot of people see corporations as these anonymous entities with no actual human face. But as Mitt Romney reminded us in the 2012 presidential campaign, “Corporations are people, my friend.” As of 2010, the top 1 percent (all bona fide people) owned 35 percent of corporate shares and the next 9 percent (also made up of people) owned another 46 percent. When you hear that “corporations” are benefiting from a tax break, subsidy, trade deal, rigged contract, whatever, you are really hearing about a few people benefiting. But not the rest of us. Thanks to Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future
11/13-Paris commentaries Doing justice to the human misery of this moment means both attending to the particular experiences and desperate needs of those affected right now in Paris, *and* relating what has happened to the rest of the world, and to the history that has brought us to this desperate point. Still a rare occurrence in the West, such blinding terror attacks have become an apocalyptic commonplace in the places that Western states have helped to ravage. While it is totally unacceptable that places such as Paris are made to look like battlefields, it is equally crucial that we seize upon this moment to reflect on those other places, with histories and culture just as rich as Paris, that have been torn apart by recent wars and sectarian violence, often as a direct–and sometimes an indirect–response to Western imperialism, and often under US leadership. Places whose suffering seldom makes it onto our TV screens, and even then, when it does, is generally shorn of the historical context that makes it comprehensible.
Were we to take seriously Obama’s boilerplate affirmation of “humanity and the universal values we share” in the wake of these mass killings, we would have to stand opposed absolutely not only to the killing of civilians in Paris, but in all the many other cities and towns across the world, including especially those places where Western bombs rain down, snuffing out innocent lives of every day people, even as I write this line. After all, while we have very limited influence over the actions of others–infantile imperial fantasies of “full spectrum dominance” to one side–we ought to have much more say over our own actions, right?
Those who emphasize only the immediate and particular suffering of those killed and injured and traumatized in Paris, without acknowledging the broader context and history out of which this horrific violence has exploded–though they may sound like the true humanitarians–neither do justice to the situation, nor do they help us to achieve a framework for response, in thinking or in action, that can in fact reduce, rather than escalate and increase, the dangers that these terrible events represent, and that they portend.
Those politicians and pundits who loudly mourn and claim to honor the victims of the Paris attacks, emphasizing the exceptional, unique, and inexplicable nature of “the terrorists,” and before long calling us to rush and to strike out at a “terror” and an “evil” that is understood incorrectly as located simply *elsewhere,” are moral imposters. They all but guarantee that such horrors will recur again soon, “elsewhere” and “here” both.
Relishing the latest killer drone strikes and promising us a generation-long war against “militant islam”–just moments before the bombs went off in Paris– the new US Joint Chiefs of Staff head Marine General “Fighting Joe” Dunford only assures us that he will create more “Jihadi Johns.” Every bomb is a toxic seed, that both brings terror to the people below, and planting the basis for future terrorism.
Conversely, those who emphasize only the “big picture” and do not dwell on the human devastation and horror of what is happening to the actual people whose lives have been torn apart in Paris do an opposite injustice, focusing on the general situation to the point of growing blind to the particular. We must not trivialize the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Paris. We must not see our anti-imperialism as negating or making light of what these people are facing. We must rather see the struggle against imperialist response as a deep and sincere way to honor the lives of those who have been made to pay the price for reckless policies and murderous rulers who ravage in their name.
We have reached a point where it is possible–and perhaps necessary–to conceive of the struggle to end imperialism and to dismantle its ideological and institutional apparatus as a way to protect innocent people from terrorism of both the sectarian and the state-sponsored variety, both “here” and “abroad.” We must make the argument against war and empire both in ethical terms and in terms of our own self-interest. If we want to live in a world without terror and terrorism, we must stop it from raining down on others as well.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that we live on one and the same world, and that this world is in peril, indeed, in despair. Let us shame and shed the leadership of those who would kill innocent people for their cynical ends, whatever flag they hoist or dogma they spout.
Let us not allow Paris blood be traded for blood elsewhere, whether among the immigrant and refugee communities of Europe, or among peoples living in the war-torn Middle East.
Let us unite with the suffering in the streets everywhere, as human beings, not as captive crusaders blinded by pain and by the false moral imposters that tell us again and again that our particular suffering is unique. It is horrifying, it is intolerable, yes. But it is far from unique. Just as the terror is not unique. When we feel this pain and sorrow and terror, sadly, we are being forced to join with so much of the rest of the world. Let us mourn the victims in Paris, not as separate from, but as part of that world.
As part of that world, let us break the vicious cycle of imperialism–sectarian terrorism—imperialism.
Until and unless we do, I weep for our future, which surely will burn…
Joseph G. Ramsey is an activist and writer living in Boston. He is a contributing editor at Red Wedge, a co-editor at Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of Marxist theory and practice, and a contributing board member at Socialism and Democracy.
We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gaddafi by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.
Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations, there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.
Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.
The open history of the last half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to its domination agenda.
Why bring up this “ancient history” when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberations of Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention. Which will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet more atrocities and upheaval as we are seeing in Paris tonight.
I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.
And one further cause of despair: that although this historical record is there in the open, readily available from the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue to be completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public. The latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again — creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.
Chris Floyd is a columnist for CounterPunch Magazine. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.
