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Who Should Bernie Voters Support Now? Robert Reich vs. Chris Hedges on Tackling the Neoliberal Order
The day after Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at the Democratic National Convention and urged his supporters to work to ensure his former rival wins the presidential race, we host a debate between Clinton supporter Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton, and Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who backs Sanders.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Our special, "Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As we continue to talk about the Democratic National Convention, we’re joined now by two guests. Joining us from Berkeley, California, is Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary under President Clinton and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. And here in Philadelphia is Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His most recent book is Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.
And I’d like to begin with Robert Reich. You’re a—you were a Bernie Sanders supporter. You’re now backing Hillary Clinton. You’re not at the convention, but your perspective on what you saw last night and the possibility of the Democratic Party uniting behind Hillary Clinton, or a group of the Sanders supporters going with Jill Stein?
ROBERT REICH: Well, it’s very hard to tell what the delegates are going to do. And it’s very hard to tell—even harder to tell what the electorate is going to do. You know, this is a very agonizing time for many Bernie Sanders supporters. I, with a great deal of reluctance initially, because I’ve known Hillary Clinton for 50 years—50 years—endorsed Bernie Sanders and worked my heart out for him, as many, many people did. And so, at this particular juncture, you know, there’s a great deal of sadness and a great deal of feeling of regret. But having worked so long and so many years for basically the progressive ideals that Bernie Sanders stands for, I can tell you that the movement is going to continue. In fact, it’s going to grow.
And right now, at this particular point in time, I just don’t see any alternative but to support Hillary. I know Hillary, I know her faults, I know her strengths. I think she will make a great president. I supported Bernie Sanders because I thought he would make a better president for the system we need. But nonetheless, Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. I support her. And I support her not only because she will be a good president, if not a great president, but also, frankly, because I am tremendously worried about the alternative. And the alternative, really, as a practical matter, is somebody who is a megalomaniac and a bigot, somebody who will set back the progressive movement decades, if not more.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, reducing the election to personalities is kind of infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. It’s a system where corporate power has seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon. We’ve lost our privacy. We’ve seen, under Obama, an assault against civil liberties that has outstripped what George W. Bush carried out. We’ve seen the executive branch misinterpret the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as giving itself the right to assassinate American citizens, including children. I speak of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son. We have bailed out the banks, pushed through programs of austerity. This has been a bipartisan effort, because they’ve both been captured by corporate power. We have undergone what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a corporate coup d’état in slow motion, and it’s over.
I just came back from Poland, which is a kind of case study of how neoliberal poison destroys a society and creates figures like Trump. Poland has gone, I think we can argue, into a neofascism. First, it dislocated the working class, deindustrialized the country. Then, in the name of austerity, it destroyed public institutions, education, public broadcasting. And then it poisoned the political system. And we are now watching, in Poland, them create a 30,000 to 40,000 armed militia. You know, they have an army. The Parliament, nothing works. And I think that this political system in the United States has seized up in exactly the same form.
So, is Trump a repugnant personality? Yes. Although I would argue that in terms of megalomania and narcissism, Hillary Clinton is not far behind. But the point is, we’ve got to break away from—which is exactly the narrative they want us to focus on. We’ve got to break away from political personalities and understand and examine and critique the structures of power. And, in fact, the Democratic Party, especially beginning under Bill Clinton, has carried water for corporate entities as assiduously as the Republican Party. This is something that Ralph Nader understood long before the rest of us, and stepped out very courageously in 2000. And I think we will look back on that period and find Ralph to be an amazingly prophetic figure. Nobody understands corporate power better than Ralph. And I think now people have caught up with Ralph.
And this is, of course, why I support Dr. Stein and the Green Party. We have to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza, which controls the Greek government, was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling now—about 4 percent. We’ve got to break out of this idea that we can create systematic change within a particular election cycle. We’ve got to be willing to step out into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade. But on the issues of climate change, on the issue of the destruction of civil liberties, including our right to privacy—and I speak as a former investigative journalist, which doesn’t exist anymore because of wholesale government surveillance—we have no ability, except for hackers.
I mean, this whole debate over the WikiLeaks is insane. Did Russia? I’ve printed classified material that was given to me by the Mossad. But I never exposed that Mossad gave it to me. Is what was published true or untrue? And the fact is, you know, in those long emails—you should read them. They’re appalling, including calling Dr. Cornel West "trash." It is—the whole—it exposes the way the system was rigged, within—I’m talking about the Democratic Party—the denial of independents, the superdelegates, the stealing of the caucus in Nevada, the huge amounts of corporate money and super PACs that flowed into the Clinton campaign.
The fact is, Clinton has a track record, and it’s one that has abandoned children. I mean, she and her husband destroyed welfare as we know it, and 70 percent of the original recipients were children. This debate over—I don’t like Trump, but Trump is not the phenomenon. Trump is responding to a phenomenon created by neoliberalism. And we may get rid of Trump, but we will get something even more vile, maybe Ted Cruz.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, I remember you, on Democracy Now!, talking about your time as labor secretary when President Clinton signed off on welfare reform, and you described walking the streets of Washington, D.C., wondering where the protests were, that you had vigorously objected. And it was also an issue, a bill that Hillary Clinton had supported. So, can you respond to Chris Hedges on these three points, including, so, you take a walk in the political wilderness for a little while?
ROBERT REICH: Well, Amy, it’s not just taking a walk in the political wilderness. If Donald Trump becomes president, if that’s what you’re referring to, I think it is—there are irrevocable negative changes that will happen in the United States, including appointments to the Supreme Court, that will not be just political wilderness, that will actually change and worsen the structure of this country. I couldn’t agree with Chris Hedges more about his critique, overall, of neoliberalism and a lot of the structural problems that we face in our political economy today. I’ve written about them. But I’ve done more than write about them. I’ve actually been in the center of power, and I have been doing everything I possibly can, as an individual and also as a mobilizer and organizer of others, to try to change what we now have.
I think that voting for Donald Trump or equating Hillary Clinton with Donald Trump is insane. Donald Trump is certainly a product of a kind of system and a systematic undermining that has occurred in the United States for years with regard to inequality of income and wealth and political power. But we don’t fight that by simply saying, "All right, let’s just have Donald Trump and hope that the system improves itself and hope that things are so bad that actually people rise up in armed resistance." That’s insane. That’s crazy.
What we have to do is be—we’ve got to be very, very strategic as progressives. We’ve got to look at the long term. We’ve got to understand that Bernie Sanders brought us much further along than we were before the Sanders campaign. We owe a lot to Bernie Sanders, his courage, his integrity, his power, the fact that most people under 30 voted for Bernie Sanders. In fact, if you look at the people who voted for Bernie Sanders under 30, that was more people than voted for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton together under the age of 30. We are building a progressive movement in this country. But over the next four years, I don’t want Donald Trump to irretrievably make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to move forward with that progressive movement.
Now, I understand Hillary Clinton is not perfect. I’ve known her , as I said before, for 50 years. I met her when she was 19 years old. I know her strengths, and I know, pretty well, her weaknesses. She is not perfect. And as Chris says, you know, she is also very much a product of many of the problems structurally in this country right now. We fight those structural problems, yes. Hand in hand, Chris, with you, shoulder to shoulder—I’m very short, maybe it’s my shoulder, and it’s your rib cage—but it doesn’t matter, we continue to fight. I will continue to fight. Many people who are watching and listening will continue to fight. We must continue to mobilize. I hope Bernie Sanders does what he implied he would do last night—that is, carry the movement forward, lend his name, his energy, his email list. This is not the end of anything. But we have got to be, at the same time, very practical about what we’re doing and very strategic about what we’re doing. This is not just a matter of making statements. It’s a matter of actually working with and through, and changing the structure of power in this country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chris, I’d like to ask you—you’ve written that liberals are tolerated by the capitalist elites because they do not question the virtues of corporate capitalism, only its excesses, and call for tepid and ineffectual reforms. Could that have also have been said of FDR in the 1930s? Because you were one of the folks who did not back Bernie Sanders from the beginning.
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, you’ve—
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I didn’t back Bernie Sanders because—and Kshama Sawant and I had had a discussion with him before—because he said that he would work within the Democratic structures and support the nominee. And I think we have now watched Bernie Sanders walk away from his political moment. You know, he—I think he will come to deeply regret what he has done. He has betrayed these people who believed in this political revolution. We heard this same kind of rhetoric, by the way, in 2008 around Obama.
A political campaign raises consciousness, but it’s not a movement. And what we are seeing now is furious spin—I listened to Ben Jealous just do it—from the self-identified liberal class. And they are tolerated within a capitalist system, because, in a moment like this, they are used to speak to people to get them to betray their own interests in the name of fear. And I admire Robert and have read much of his stuff and like his stuff, but if you listen to what he’s been saying, the message is the same message of the Trump campaign, and that his fear. And that is all the Democrats have to offer now and all the Republicans have to offer now.
And the fact is, from climate change alone, we have no time left. I have four children. The future of my children, by the day, is being destroyed because of the fact that the fossil fuel industry, along with the animal agriculture industry, which is also as important in terms of climate change, are destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life. And neither party has any intention to do anything about it.
AMY GOODMAN: What should Bernie Sanders have done?
CHRIS HEDGES: Bernie Sanders should have walked out and run as an independent.
AMY GOODMAN: Take—
CHRIS HEDGES: And defied the Democratic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Take up the invitation of Dr. Jill Stein—
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —and run on a ticket with—
CHRIS HEDGES: She offered to let him run on the top of the ticket. That’s what he should have done. And the fact is, you know, let’s not forget that Bernie has a very checkered past. He campaigned for Clinton in '92. He campaigned for Clinton again in ’96, after NAFTA—the greatest betrayal of the working class in this country since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948—after the destruction of welfare, after the omnibus crime bill that exploded the prison population, and, you know, we now have—I mean, it's just a monstrosity what we’ve done; 350,000 to 400,000 people locked in cages in this country are severely mentally ill. Half of them never committed a violent crime. That’s all Bill Clinton. And yet he went out and campaigned. In 2004, he called on Nader not to run, to step down, so he could support a war candidate like John Kerry. And I’m listening to Jealous before talk about the Iraq War. Sixty percent of the Democratic senators voted for the war, including Hillary Clinton. The idea that somehow Democrats don’t push us into war defies American history.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Well, all I can say is that at this particular point in time—I mean, again, many of the things that Chris Hedges is saying, I completely agree with. The real question here is: What do we do right now? And what do we do to mobilize and organize a lot of people out there who right now are not mobilized and organized? And how do we keep the energy building? I disagree with Chris with regard to Bernie Sanders. I think Bernie Sanders has been a great and is a great leader right now of the progressive cause.
What I think we ought to do is develop a third party outside the Democratic and Republican parties, maybe the Green Party, so that in the year 2020, four years from now, we have another candidate—it may be Bernie Sanders, I think he’s probably going to be too old by then—but we have a candidate that holds the Democrats accountable, that provides a vehicle for a lot of the energy of the Bernie Sanders movement to continue to develop, that fields new candidates at the Senate, in Congress, at the state level, that actually holds Democrats’ feet to the fire and Republicans’ feet to the fire, that develops an agenda of getting big money out of politics and severing the link between extraordinarily concentrated wealth and political power in this country. That’s what we ought to be doing.
Now, we can—but in order to do that, we cannot have—and, you know, I think that Hillary will be a good president, if not a great president. This is not just trucking in fear, Chris. But I do fear Donald Trump. I fear the polls that I saw yesterday. Now, polls, again, this early in a campaign still—we’re still months away from the election, but they are indicative. They show Donald Trump doing exceedingly well, beating Hillary Clinton. And right now, given our two-party system, given our winner-take-all system with regard to the Electoral College, it’s just too much of a risk to go and to say, "Well, I’m going to vote—I’m not going to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’m going to vote exactly what I want to do." Well, anybody can do that, obviously. This is a free country. You vote what you—you vote your conscience. You have to do that. I’m just saying that your conscience needs to be aware that if you do not support Hillary Clinton, you are increasing the odds of a true, clear and present danger to the United States, a menace to the United States. And you’re increasing the possibility that there will not be a progressive movement, there will not be anything we believe in in the future, because the United States will really be changed for the worse.
That’s not a—that’s not a risk I’m prepared to take at this point in time. I’m going to move—I’m going to do exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 40 years: I’m going to continue to beat my head against the wall, to build and contribute to building a progressive movement. The day after Election Day, I am going to try to work with Bernie Sanders and anybody else who wants to work in strengthening a third party—and again, maybe it’s the Green Party—for the year 2020, and do everything else I was just talking about. But right now, as we lead up to Election Day 2016, I must urge everyone who is listening or who is watching to do whatever they can to make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president, and not Donald Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to break and then come back to this debate on both sides of the United States, as well as of this issue. Chris Hedges is with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author and activist. Latest book, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt. And who you were just listening to is Robert Reich, who is the former labor secretary under President Clinton and professor at University of California, Berkeley, his latest book called Saving Capitalism. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter and now says he will vote for Hillary Clinton. When we come back, we’ll hear some of the words of Donald Trump and get response. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Opening Ceremony" by Laura Ortman. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Our special for this two weeks, "Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in a moment, we’ll return to our debate between Robert Reich and Chris Hedges, but first let’s turn to Donald Trump’s nomination speech at the RNC in Cleveland last Thursday. Trump said Sanders’ supporters would vote for him in the fall.
DONALD TRUMP: I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a chance, never had a chance. But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest single issue—trade deals that strip our country of its jobs and strip us of our wealth as a country. Millions of Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so it works fairly and justly for each and every American.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Trump talking at the convention in Cleveland. Robert Reich, interestingly, Donald Trump and Chris Hedges agree on one thing, that free trade deals that the—that both the Republicans and Democrats have negotiated over the past few years, especially NAFTA, have been disastrous for the American people. You were part of the Clinton administration when NAFTA was passed. Talk about this, the impact that Trump is utilizing among white workers in America over the issue of free trade.
ROBERT REICH: Well, Donald Trump is clearly using trade and also immigration as vehicles for making the people who have really been hurt by trade, by globalization, feel that he is going to somehow be on their side. He’s not going to be on their side.
Trump is right in a very, very narrow respect, that trade has hurt very vulnerable people, working-class people. The burdens of trade have been disproportionately fallen on those people who used to have good unionized jobs in America. And the failure of NAFTA and also the WTO, the World Trade Organization, Chinese ascension into the WTO, all of those Clinton-era programs—the failure was, number one, not to have nearly strong enough and enforceable enough labor and environmental side agreements; number two, not to have adjustment mechanisms here in the United States for people who lost their jobs to help them get good jobs, that were new jobs, for the jobs they lost. The winners in trade could have compensated the losers and still come out ahead, but they did not. And that is a structural, political problem in this country that we have to address.
It is also a problem with regard to technological displacement. It’s not just trade. Technology is displacing and will continue to displace and will displace even more good jobs in the future, but we have absolutely no strategy for dealing with that. And right now, the burdens of technological displacement are falling, once again, on the working middle class, lower-income people, who have very, very few alternatives, driving a greater and greater wedge between those who are lucky enough to be—to have rich parents or be well educated or be well connected, and everybody else.
We cannot go on like this. This is unsustainable. And Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are symptomatic, their rise, are both symptomatic of this great wave of antiestablishment anger that is flooding American politics, although on the one side you have authoritarian populism, and on the Bernie Sanders side you have a political revolution. I prefer the political revolution myself. I’m going to continue to work for that political revolution.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I think we have to acknowledge two facts. We do not live in a functioning democracy, and we have to stop pretending that we do. You can’t talk about—when you eviscerate privacy, you can’t use the word "liberty." That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The fact is, this is capitalism run amok. This whole discussion should be about capitalism. Capitalism does what it’s designed to do, when it’s unfettered or unregulated—as it is—and that is to increase profit and reduce the cost of labor. And it has done that by deindustrializing the country, and the Clinton administration, you know, massively enabled this.
And, you know, we’re sitting here in Philadelphia. The last convention was in Cleveland. These are Potemkin villages, where the downtowns are Disneyfied, and three and four blocks away people are living in appalling poverty. We have responded to surplus labor, as Karl Marx says, in our deindustrialized internal colonies, to quote Malcolm X, by putting poor people of color in cages all across the country. Why? It’s because surplus labor—corporate entities cannot make money off of surplus or redundant labor. But when you lock them in a cage, they make $40,000 or $50,000 a year. This is the system we live in.
We live in a system where, under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, the executive branch can put the soldiers in the streets, in clear violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, to see—carry out extraordinary rendition of American citizens who are deemed to be, quote-unquote, "terrorists," strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities, including in our black sites. We are a country that engages in torture.
We talk—Robert talks about, you know, building movements. You can’t build movements in a political system where money has replaced the vote. It’s impossible. And the Democrats, you know, their bedside manner is different from the Republicans. You know, Trump is this kind of grotesque figure. He’s like the used car salesman who rolls back the speedometer. But Hillary Clinton is like, you know, the managers of Goldman Sachs. They both engage in criminal activities that have—and Clinton’s record, like Trump, exposes this—that have preyed upon the most vulnerable within this country and are now destroying the middle class. And to somehow speak as if we are in a functioning democracy, or speak as if there are any restraints on capitalism, or speak as if the Democratic Party has not pushed forward this agenda—I mean, Obama has done this. You know, he has been as obsequious to Wall Street as the Bush administration. There’s no difference.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Chris, you know, I—again, I find this a frustrating conversation, because I agree with so much of what you have said, but the question is: What do we do about it? I mean, we are in a better position today, in the sense that Bernie Sanders has helped mobilize, organize and energize a lot of Americans, and educated a lot of Americans about the very issues that you have talked and written about and I have talked and written about. But it is—the question is: What is the action? What is the actual political strategy right now?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, let me—let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: And I think the political—
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me answer that.
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me just—let me just put in my two cents. I think political strategy is not to elect Donald Trump, to elect Hillary Clinton, and, for four years, to develop an alternative, another Bernie Sanders-type candidate with an independent party, outside the Democratic Party, that will take on Hillary Clinton, assuming that she is elected and that she runs for re-election, and that also develops the infrastructure of a third party that is a true, new progressive party.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that’s precisely what we’re trying to do. There is a point where you have to—do I want to keep quoting Ralph?—but where you have to draw a line in the sand. And that’s part of the problem with the left, is we haven’t.
I covered the war in Yugoslavia, and I find many parallels between what’s happening in the United States and what happened with the breakdown of Yugoslavia. What is it that caused this country to disintegrate? It wasn’t ancient ethnic hatreds. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia and a bankrupt liberal establishment that, after the death of Tito, until 1989 or 1990, spoke in the language of democracy, but proved ineffectual in terms of dealing with the plight of working men and women who were cast out of state factories, huge unemployment and, finally, hyperinflation.
And the fact is that these neoliberal policies, which the Democratic Party is one of the engines for, have created this right-wing fascialism. You can go back—this proto-fascism. You can go back and look at the Weimar, and it—Republic—was very much the same. So it’s completely counterintuitive. Of course I find Trump a vile and disturbing and disgusting figure, but I don’t believe that voting for the Democratic establishment—and remember that this—the two insurgencies, both within the Republican Party and the—were against figures like Hillary Clinton, who spoke in that traditional feel-your-pain language of liberalism, while assiduously serving corporate power and selling out working men and women. And they see through the con, they see through the game.
I don’t actually think Bernie Sanders educated the public. In fact, Bernie Sanders spoke for the first time as a political candidate about the reality the public was experiencing, because even Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, was talking about economic recovery, and everything was wonderful, and people know that it’s not. And when you dispossess—
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me—let me—
CHRIS HEDGES: Let me just finish. Let me finish. When you dispossess that segment, as large as we have—half the country now lives in virtual poverty—and you continue to essentially run a government that’s been seized by a cabal, in this case, corporate, which uses all of the machinery of government for their own enrichment and their own further empowerment at the expense of the rest of the citizenry, people finally react. And that is how you get fascism. That is what history has told us. And to sit by—every time, Robert, you speak, you do exactly what Trump does, which is fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. And the fact that we are going to build some kind of—
ROBERT REICH: Well, let me—let me try to—
CHRIS HEDGES: —amorphous movement after Hillary Clinton—it’s just not they way it works.
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject—let me—let me try to inject—
AMY GOODMAN: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich?
ROBERT REICH: Let me try to inject some hope in here, in this discussion, rather than fear. I’ve been traveling around the country for the last two years, trying to talk to tea partiers and conservatives and many people who are probably going to vote for Donald Trump, to try to understand what it is that they are doing and how they view America and why they’re acting in ways that are so obviously against their self-interest, both economic self-interest and other self-interest. And here’s the interesting thing I found.
This great antiestablishment wave that is occurring both on the left and the right has a great overlap, if you will, and that overlap is a deep contempt for what many people on the right are calling crony capitalism—in fact, many people on the left have called crony capitalism. And those people on the right, many, many working people, they’re not all white. Many of them are. Many of them are working-class. Many of them have suffered from trade and technological displacement and a government that is really turning its back on them, they feel—and to some extent, they’re right. Many of them feel as angry about the current system and about corporate welfare and about big money in politics as many of us on the progressive side do.
Now, if it is possible to have a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of the bottom 90 percent that is ready to fight to get big money out of politics, for more equality, for a system that is not rigged against average working people, where there are not going to be all of these redistributions upward from those of us who have paychecks—and we don’t even realize that larger and larger portions of those paychecks are going to big industries, conglomerates, concentrated industries that have great market power, because it’s all hidden from view—well, the more coalition building we can do, from right to left, multiethnic, multiracial, left and right, to build a movement to take back our economy and to take back our democracy, that is—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Robert Reich—Robert Reich, I’d just like to interrupt you for a second, because we only have a minute left, and I just wanted to ask Chris one last question. In less than a minute, if you can, regardless of—you’re voting for Jill Stein, other folks are going to vote for Clinton and Trump. Where do you feel this massive movement that has developed over the last few years, this people movement, would have a better opportunity to grow, under a Trump presidency or under a Clinton presidency, assuming that one of those two will eventually be elected?
CHRIS HEDGES: I don’t think it makes any difference. The TPP is going to go through, whether it’s Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Endless war is going to be continued, whether it’s Trump or Clinton. We’re not going to get our privacy back, whether it’s under Clinton or Trump. The idea that, at this point, the figure in the executive branch exercises that much power, given the power of the war industry and Wall Street, is a myth. The fact is—
ROBERT REICH: Equating—I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Even on immigration?
CHRIS HEDGES: What? On immigration? I mean, let’s look at Obama’s record on immigration. Who’s worse?
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, you know, you can’t get worse than Obama.
ROBERT REICH: And can I just say something?
CHRIS HEDGES: I mean, the idea is, the Democrats speak, and the—
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Reich, 10 seconds.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah.
ROBERT REICH: I just want to say, equating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is absolute nonsense. I just—anybody who equates the two of them is not paying attention. And it’s dangerous kind of talk.
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s not what I—that’s not what I did.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but this is a discussion that will continue. Chris Hedges, I want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt. And former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, professor now at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Saving Capitalism.
That does it for the broadcast. I’ll be in Provincetown, Massachusetts and Martha’s Vineyard this weekend, doing a talk back from the conventions.
Special thanks to Laura Deutch, Gretjen Clausing, Ryan Saunders and the whole team here at PhillyCAM. ... Read More →
Jill Stein vs. Ben Jealous: Should Progressives Reject Hillary Clinton & Vote Green?
After a tension-filled opening day of the Democratic National Convention that saw Senator Bernie Sanders endorse his former rival Hillary Clinton, we host a debate between Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Ben Jealous, former NAACP president and CEO and a Bernie Sanders surrogate.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We are "Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn back to the opening night of the Democratic National Convention.
BEN JEALOUS: Today is our day to begin to unify so we can defeat Donald Trump. And I am looking forward to joining him, along with all of us, to take back the Senate, elect great local and state change makers, defeat Trump and make Hillary Clinton president of these United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Ben Jealous, former president of the NAACP, addressing the DNC last night. Ben Jealous is a Bernie Sanders surrogate who spoke at the convention on Monday night. We’re also joined by Dr. Jill Stein, who is running for president on the Green Party ticket. She was the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.
AMY GOODMAN: That was quite a night last night. Ben Jealous, you gave one of the major addresses. People are used to hearing you explain why Hillary Clinton should not be the nominee—
BEN JEALOUS: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: —why it should be Bernie Sanders.
BEN JEALOUS: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: But you had a very different message last night.
BEN JEALOUS: Well, you know, we came through a primary, and now we have 105 days to keep a madman out of the White House. And we went—you know, we know what happened in 2000. And the reality is that we cannot afford to end up with having an Iraq War because we narrowly lose the White House to somebody who should not be in there, as we did with Bush. So, the reality is, you go through a primary, you come into a convention, and you come out one campaign, in this case to hold onto the White House and keep a neofascist from becoming president.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But what do you say to those Sanders supporters who feel that, in many respects, Hillary Clinton is more hawkish when it comes to issues of foreign policy and war even than Donald Trump, in some respects?
BEN JEALOUS: If you look at the utter racism that Trump has directed towards people in this country, there is no reason to think that he will not do the same thing when he actually, you know, has his finger on the button. He clearly seems to, you know, have some sort of love affair going on with Putin. I don’t know who that gives comfort to. And he has all the personality characteristics of some of the worst dictators and tyrants we’ve seen around the world. But the reality is here that he will also destroy voting rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights. He will put in a Supreme Court that will take us back very quickly. We used to think that the Voting Rights Act pretty much was sacrosanct in this country. It’s been—you know, great damage has been done to it. This is the first presidential—and quite frankly, you know, my roots, as you know, my family, so much of it is in West Baltimore, and communities like that suffer greatly when we sort of pretend like who’s in president—who is the president does not matter. And we cannot afford to go through, you know, George W. Bush on steroids.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, what’s your response to that, that we cannot afford to see a repetition of Bush or, as Ben Jealous called Donald Trump, a madman?
DR. JILL STEIN: I agree. Donald Trump is a very dangerous person. He says extremely despicable, reprehensible things. But at the same time, Hillary Clinton has a track record for doing absolutely horrific things, for expanding wars, in the likes of Libya, for example. There could hardly be an example of a more catastrophic war, which has been more problematic for increasing the terrorist threats. Finger on the nuclear button? I worry very much about the air war that Hillary Clinton would like to start over Syria with this no-fly zone against a nuclear-armed power in the form of Russia.
And in terms of racism, the immigrant deportations that Hillary has approved of and has supported are equally horrific. Whether it’s against black people or Muslim people or Latinos, it’s not acceptable for anyone. And, in fact, Hillary played a major role in creating the refugees, the waves of refugees, particularly coming out of Honduras, into this country, where she’s supported the deportation of women and children, and, in fact, the night raids that are going on, and, under the Obama White House, the greatest number of immigrants who have actually been deported.
Further, let me say, I think it’s so important for us to have unity to stop Donald Trump. And it’s important to point out that the most powerful way to stop Donald Trump was, in fact, sabotaged by the Democratic Party and by Hillary Clinton by way of stopping Bernie Sanders’ campaign, as he himself and many others have pointed out. It’s so true historically—we know this from Nazi Germany—that it’s really important to have a unified front and a strong progressive coalition in order to stop neofascism. It’s not just Donald Trump. We are seeing this in Europe, as well, as well as in other countries, and particularly throughout the U.S. The problem is not Donald Trump alone. The problem is the policies of neoliberalism, of austerity, of the Wall Street deregulation and the NAFTA, which Hillary Clinton herself represents, has promoted. Putting another Clinton in the White House, unfortunately, is not the answer. It will only fan the flames of the right-wing extremism that Donald Trump represents. If we want to defeat Donald Trump, it’s very important that we really rally and unify, in my view, around a truly progressive campaign. Hillary Clinton represents the opposite of that. My campaign represents the continuing agenda of the Bernie Sanders campaign.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Jill Stein, I wanted to ask you, when we had you on the show last, you were offering—this was after it was clear that Hillary Clinton had prevailed. You were offering the possibility for Bernie Sanders to move over to the Green Party. Did any—were there any kinds of discussion that occurred between that time and now? And also, what do you make of—there are some Sanders supporters—we had Norman Solomon on the program yesterday, who said he’s not going to vote for Hillary Clinton in California. In the safe Democratic states, they’re going to vote for you, but in the battleground states, he understands the necessity to vote for Hillary Clinton. What’s your response to that kind of a tactic or approach from some Sanders supporters?
DR. JILL STEIN: So, let me say, I think there’s more reason than ever for Bernie Sanders to move over. After the email revelations and the media—the corporate media’s characterizing this as, "Oh, they said bad things about Bernie"—they didn’t just say bad things about Bernie, they sabotaged his campaign. They created public relations smear campaigns, in addition to all the other evidence we have of stripping voter rolls, not counting votes, the superdelegates and the Super Tuesdays. But it’s clear there’s collusion that was going on between the big media and between the DNC and between Hillary’s campaign. So, these were knives stuck in the back. These were absolutely outrageous and underhanded techniques that were used against Bernie’s campaign. I think he has more reason than ever. We’re encouraging him to actually repudiate, to rescind his endorsement of Hillary Clinton and consider coming over and exploring with the Green Party how we can build this strong, unstoppable, unified movement.
In terms of the safe state strategy, in my view, no state is safe in an age where the climate is in meltdown. We’ve heard from the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, recently. They just got an "oh, my god" report from the—from the Antarctic, which they will be rolling out written reports about soon, but this was a verbal report saying that we can expect as much as nine feet of sea level rise by 2050, unless we have a dramatic turnaround. And under the Democrats, we saw a massive increase in fossil fuel extraction and a massive increase in the rate at which carbon dioxide and methane are actually going up. Hillary Clinton was the major—one of the major proponents to increase fracking around the world. We should not rest easy with Donald Trump. We should not rest easy with Hillary Clinton. And we should not rest easy with a voting system that tells us we only have two lethal choices. We could, in fact, enact ranked choice voting right now in any legislature across the state, that would take the fear out of voting. But the Democrats won’t pass it, because they rely on fear to intimidate your vote, which tells you they are not your friend. They do not deserve your vote on that basis alone.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Jill Stein, you remind me of someone. You remind me of Ben Jealous before yesterday. He wasn’t saying that’s the problem with the Democrats; he was saying that’s the problem with Hillary Clinton. And that’s why you supported Bernie Sanders.
BEN JEALOUS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the pivot you’re making now. Is it just about Donald Trump? And how hard is it, just honestly, as you start to—
BEN JEALOUS: Well, I mean, let’s be honest.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I just want to say, last night, there was a period in the convention, on the convention floor, where every time one of the speakers said "Hillary Clinton," people chanted "Bernie Sanders! Bernie Sanders!"
BEN JEALOUS: Sure, sure, sure.
AMY GOODMAN: But what about that?
BEN JEALOUS: Yeah, look, what you saw yesterday was the beginning of a convention. People come in, having fought each other; they go out fighting together. And you look at the beginning, and people, you know, show up as they show up. But, you know, let’s be honest. You know, if Jill was running for mayor or Congress or Senate, I might be supporting her. There’s a lot of issues that we absolutely agree on. And if you’re going to build a party, build it from the bottom up—win some seats in Congress, win some seats in the Senate. You start at the presidency. Why? Because you can get more money for your party. If you can get 5 percent, then you can get some more money for your party. And what was the cost of that in 2000? The Iraq War. And how much did that cost us, and how much did that cost our children and the future?
The reality is that we have a responsibility, when our Earth is in such peril, to not be kind of flying kites and investing in fantasies, but to actually do the hard work of organizing. And the real hard work, we all know, is actually in the streets once you get somebody in office. We don’t elect presidents to make change happen for us. We elect politicians to make it easier for our movements to make change happen. But you’ve got to be willing to build a movement.
Frankly, I only hear about the Green Party when somebody’s running for president, in most places. I never hear about it winning in Congress. I never hear about winning in the Senate. I wish—I wish I did. But the reality is that the Green Party in Europe oftentimes joins with people who are center-leftists or even, you know, folks that we don’t typically agree with, because they have a different system, and, quite frankly, they’re much more strategic and much more effective at actually pulling their country to the left. That’s what Bernie Sanders and our progressive movement inside of the Democratic Party is doing. I agree, we can have a much better system. But you know what? We have the system that we have.
And it’s different, I think, when the community that you are most connected to can afford for, you know, this to be lost or that to be lost, but I’m rooted in a black community that’s been devastated by attacks on its rights, that’s been devastated by mass incarceration, and my responsibility is to deliver real results for real people that transforms real families’ lives. I don’t have time to kind of play games with fantasies.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jill Stein, you were shaking your head as Ben was speaking.
DR. JILL STEIN: Yeah, can I respond to that?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But I wanted to add my question on this, which is, the Green Party has been around for decades now, and—
BEN JEALOUS: And how many senators do we have? And how many congresspeople do we have?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —yes, it has—it has won some local elections—
DR. JILL STEIN: Well—
BEN JEALOUS: How many governors do we have?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —some local elections and some—
BEN JEALOUS: How many major cities—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, let me finish the question.
BEN JEALOUS: Come on.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: They’ve been able to win some local elections, but at the national level, the percentage support for the party has barely grown at all. And I’m just wondering, as you’re putting forth your perspective, why you feel that has not caught the kind of support here in this country that Greens have in Europe?
DR. JILL STEIN: Well, you know, there is no doubt we have a voting system, as well as a system of press and debates and so on, which essentially removes any knowledge that there—and, you know, the reason people don’t hear about what the Green Party is doing is because there’s a complete corporate media blackout on what we’re doing. You can look at Mayor Gayle McLaughlin in Richmond, California, who did incredibly innovative things as an eight-year mayor, using—turning eminent domain on its head and actually using it against the banks in order to seize underwater mortgages and preserve the homes of families who were threatened with eviction and foreclosure; or with suing the—Chevron, which was extremely dangerous, blew up, sent 5,000 people to the hospital; massively reduced police violence and deaths at the hands of police—an exemplary mayor. You don’t hear about that. You didn’t hear about Mayor Jason West in New Paltz, New York, who actually went to jail as the first official, as a mayor, to actually officiate over gay marriages, went to jail in order to perform those marriages. So, we see Greens actually breaking through. We have hundreds of people in office. We run hundreds of candidates. And, in fact, ballot access rules require us to run a presidential candidate in order to get on the ballot for lesser offices, as well.
But I would think back to the campaign of Eugene V. Debs. He never won. But what did he do? Because he was in a high-visibility position, he helped raise up the fight at the community level, got hundreds of people. And he ran over and over and over again, and built a movement, because he had—
AMY GOODMAN: He ran for president from jail.
DR. JILL STEIN: As well, that’s right, and many times before he went to jail, too, and helped initiate a movement from the grassroots up, that took office—excuse me—at many levels of government, including eventually at the top. But we live in a uniquely oppressive time politically right now. The Green Party—
BEN JEALOUS: Uniquely?
DR. JILL STEIN: —is the only—well, in—
BEN JEALOUS: Like segregation wasn’t worse?
DR. JILL STEIN: No, what I mean—well, and, in fact, who was called a spoiler during segregation? It was the parties of—actually, during the time of slavery, it was that parties of abolition—
BEN JEALOUS: But how is this—how is this time uniquely oppressive?
DR. JILL STEIN: Let me just finish my thought, if I could. It’s the parties of abolition that were called spoilers for standing up to challenge, and they came out of nowhere over the course of a few years. All other independent parties in this country have been wiped off the political map. You could look at the Labor Party, you could look at Peace and Freedom, you could look at socialist parties. None of them have been able to survive even as a national party. And that’s why we are all collaborating underneath the umbrella of the Green Party, because we are the one opposition party that has managed to survive the smear campaigns and the fear campaigns that have taken place as politics has become more oppressive and more regressive.
And for those who would say "silence political opposition," that actually is tyranny. The U.S. goes to war. We bomb countries that eliminate political opposition. Instead of trying to silence the voice of political opposition, on which real democracy depends, we should be embracing ranked choice voting. It would take our—
BEN JEALOUS: I’m all for ranked choice voting.
DR. JILL STEIN: Well, then, pressure your legislature to pass it right now. It would take them 36 hours, in fact, to do it.
BEN JEALOUS: So let’s have that national campaign.
DR. JILL STEIN: Let’s avoid any splitting of the vote. We don’t have to—and the other point here is that the American public is leading the charge. They are the ones who are rejecting these candidates and these political parties, saying that the two candidates we have now are the most untrustworthy, the most disliked. And who are the pundits to tell them, to tell the American people, who are being thrown under the bus, "Be good little boys and girls. Just support these candidates of the political establishment to do more of their damage"? Remember, you do not defeat neofascism through neoliberalism. Neoliberalism will create more neofascism. We have the potential not to split the vote, but to flip the vote, because there are 42 million young people who have no way forward, who are trapped in predatory student loan debt, about which Democrats happen to have nothing to offer, any more than Republicans. By simply getting the word out that they can come out—that is a plurality of the vote—they can come out and actually win this election, and not only win it, to cancel student debt, like we did for the friggin’ bankers, the crooks on Wall Street. We can cancel that debt, make higher education free, end police violence. These are all eminently solvable problems.
The Democrats, even when they had two Democratic houses of Congress, what did they do? They bailed out Wall Street. You know, they enacted all of the above, which has been basically "drill, baby, drill" on steroids. Hillary Clinton’s finger on the button is as dangerous as—certainly as dangerous as Donald Trump. And it’s Barack Obama himself who initiated the new nuclear arms race, spending a trillion dollars. We should not rest easy with either candidate.
This is a time for us to stand up. In the words of Alice Walker, biggest way people give up power is by not knowing we have it to start with. My campaign has been supported, actively supported, by many of the leaders in the African-American community, like Marc Lamont Hill and like Cornel West, who say that their community cannot afford to sit back and let themselves be thrown under the bus. We must establish our own power. If you have to lose an election in order to establish your power, you have to do that. But simply by allowing Hillary Clinton and the Democrats—
BEN JEALOUS: May I speak?
DR. JILL STEIN: —to pretend to be saving us is absolutely the wrong thing to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Ben Jealous?
BEN JEALOUS: Look, you know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool us twice, shame on you. And the reality is—
DR. JILL STEIN: I would say exactly the same.
BEN JEALOUS: Excuse me—oh, yeah, look, there’s a lot of things we agree on. What we—but what is not—we can talk about sort of fantasies, visions for the future, but we can’t deny the facts of the past. George W. Bush got into the White House because Al Gore lost by about 900 votes in Florida. Ralph Nader got 90,000. The reports, the studies that went back and looked at those voters said 60 percent of them would have gone for Gore if Nader wasn’t on the ballot there. I’m all for a viable third party—
AMY GOODMAN: Ben, could you make the argument in that case that with Al Gore’s choice of Joe Lieberman as his running mate—
BEN JEALOUS: Oh, there’s all sort of things. There’s all sorts of things, absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: —that he lost the election?
BEN JEALOUS: This is the part that kills me—right?—is that we’ll acknowledge that, you know, Joe Lieberman was not a great choice for vice president, and we’ll acknowledge that there were Democrats who voted for Republicans, but then, when it gets to this factor, we pretend like it had no effect. And it did.
And the reality is that, yes, we need third parties. And you know what? I would defend the rights—I mean, I’ve gone to jail, frankly, in multiple states defending people’s rights to participate. I believe there should be third parties. I’ve fought for ranked choice voting. I would love to see you guys get somebody to be mayor of Oakland, and not just Richmond. But the reality is that what you do is you start with the presidency, and you don’t think about the consequences. For you to sit here and suggest that people should vote for you in swing states is irresponsible.
And the reality is that if a Trump is in the White House, yes, we will blame a lot of things, and we will talk about all the dumb mistakes, and, yes, we should have had Bernie Sanders, who absolutely was polling much higher and is strong—we can go through all of that. We will do all that Monday morning quarterbacking. We will also talk about the role of the Green Party. If you guys are going to actually go in there and—you know, people have a choice between, yes, a neoliberal, a neofascist and the Green Party; let’s be honest, voting for the Green Party in a swing state helps the neofascist.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, wait—
BEN JEALOUS: There’s no other way to put it.
AMY GOODMAN: —let’s look at the poll for one minute. You have the polls indicating right now—NBC poll—Clinton 39 percent, Trump 40 percent, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson 10 percent and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein at 5 percent. CNN saying—you’ve got this latest poll—Trump at 44, Clinton at 39, Gary Johnson at 9 percent and Jill Stein at 3 percent.
BEN JEALOUS: Fine. And so we will look, and we will go through the votes. I’m an organizer. I deal with specific numbers by precinct, by state. And quite frankly, when I come somebody and say, "You know, we can abolish the death penalty in your state," we go out there with a strategy, and we usually get it done. When I was head of the NAACP, we did it in six states in six years. Tough issue. But the reality is, you don’t—
AMY GOODMAN: Now it’s in the Democratic platform.
BEN JEALOUS: Absolutely. And you don’t—you don’t come to the people with a pipe dream. You come to the people with a plan. It’s great to have big, bold dreams. I push them all the time. But I’m not going to waste your time unless I know that we have a good chance of winning. I mean, you know, let’s play sides on the Green Party having the next president of these United States. It’s not going to happen. So then, let’s talk about, for our families, how we actually get things better. I would love to get—you know, to make progress yard by yard, but inches add up to yards. And the reality is that winning in the Congress, winning in the Senate, we could talk about—I would love to strategize about how to actually get Greens into federal office. But starting with the presidency? Again, in a swing state, a vote for the Green Party is going to help the neofascist right now. And we have 105 days, and we can’t mess with this.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask both of you to maybe talk about the narrative that has developed in terms of the Sanders movement, that the willingness of African Americans and Latinos in such large numbers to vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary was a reflection of backwardness, of a lack of understanding of the—of so many African-American and Latino voters about their actual interests, and your sense of how Bernie Sanders tried to explain in his speech last night the unities that he has with Hillary Clinton, as opposed—at the same time recognizing that he has stark policy differences with her, but urging his supporters to back her. Jill?
DR. JILL STEIN: So, let me just say, first, you know, briefly, Ben mentioned, you know, it’s important to think of the past, we can’t disappear the past. Hillary Clinton cannot disappear her record of the past. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Hillary Clinton has a very clear, lifelong—practically lifelong track record for locking up African Americans, for deporting immigrants, for serving the interests of Wall Street, being funded by Wall Street and the war profiteers. So, let’s not pretend for a minute that Hillary Clinton’s track record offers us any hope. And—
BEN JEALOUS: So let’s put progressive people in Congress, in the Senate.
DR. JILL STEIN: Well, can I finish? It’s my turn now. Well, yes, absolutely, but look at where opposition parties are. We are in a political context that has been extremely hostile to opposition parties. The Libertarian Party has some advantages, because they are a corporate-sponsored party. But I regard the Green Party as a true opposition party, because we do not take money from corporations, from lobbyists and from super PACs. That’s what we had in common with Bernie Sanders. So we have the unique ability to uphold that agenda. Whatever label you put on us, I don’t think that matters to the American people. The American people don’t like the label of Democrats and Republicans. They’ve become minority parties. So I wouldn’t inflict a framework of the past. The Greens are the only ones that have survived. The Labor Party was established with far more infrastructure and funding, support from labor and so on, and has been wiped off the political map. The Greens are it for opposition politics right now. And should we give them a pass at the national level? Absolutely not. The answer to the threat of Trump and neofascism around the world is not another neoliberal in the White House.
I think this pertains very much to your question, which is: Are we going to have a real debate? I think it’s not just people of color, it’s not just Latinos. It’s the American people who deserve a real discussion, not only a right to vote, but a right to know who they can vote for. My campaign has come up in the polls virtually without any corporate media coverage. We tripled our numbers, from 2 percent about two months ago to as high as 5, 6 and even 7 percent in the most recent CNN poll. So we’ve tripled without any help from the corporate media. Can we double that again in order to get into the debates? I think there’s a very good chance that we can. And I would urge people to support our campaign, if only for the purpose of opening up the debates. If you would wipe out third parties, then you also wipe out Gary Johnson, and you then massively boost—
BEN JEALOUS: No one wants to wipe out third parties.
DR. JILL STEIN: Well, if you tell us to basically go away, because we are an inconvenient truth—
BEN JEALOUS: No, I’m telling you to win at the local level, win in Congress—
DR. JILL STEIN: —then you are enhancing the vote of Donald Trump.
BEN JEALOUS: —win in Senate, win a governorship.
DR. JILL STEIN: And this is how you do it, is by actually breaking into the political dialogue; otherwise, we are essentially wiped out, we are eliminated from that political dialogue—
BEN JEALOUS: No.
DR. JILL STEIN: —even while we are leading the charge. And it’s not only electorally. Greens are intensively involved in the social movements, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion, a very interesting one, and I think it’s one that’s happening all over, certainly one that was happening on the floor of the Democratic convention. Interestingly, I spoke to a number of delegates who said they were weighing what to do. They were weighing whether to support Hillary Clinton or to support a third-party candidate. But the delegates would not say that to me on camera, supporting Jill Stein, for example, saying that they feared, if they did express support for a third-party candidate, that they would have their credentials stripped as a delegate.
BEN JEALOUS: That would never happen. That would never happen.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s interesting.
BEN JEALOUS: No doubt. And I would go to jail to stop that. That would never happen.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re going to continue this discussion after break. Ben Jealous, former NAACP president, he is a Bernie Sanders surrogate, was, and now is saying support Hillary Clinton in the major presidential election. Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "I Read You" by THEESatisfaction. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, and our special two-week coverage, "Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. In our second hour of our expanded two hours of daily coverage during the Republican convention last week in Cleveland and this week the Democrats in Philadelphia, we’re going to have a debate between the former labor secretary, Robert Reich, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. But right now, we are spending this hour with former NAACP President Ben Jealous, who was a Bernie Sanders surrogate, but spoke on the convention Monday night saying at this point he would throw his support to Hillary Clinton, with, well, Bernie Sanders saying the same. Dr. Jill Stein is also with us, running for president on the Green Party ticket. She was the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ben, I had asked a question earlier; I was hoping, at least a part of it, you might be able to respond to, the—when Bernie Sanders spoke last night, he—it was a long presentation, but he went into the details of why he felt that there had been enough—that his movement has been able to achieve significant changes in the Democratic Party platform, what he felt were the unities now between him and Hillary Clinton, versus what Trump represented. And I’m wondering your response to that speech.
BEN JEALOUS: Look, absolutely, and I stand right where Bernie does. Let me be really clear: I’m still Bernie Sanders’ surrogate. I’m still very much building this revolution we’re building together. We are progressives who understand how to build power. Bernie is an organizer, I’m an organizer. And the reality is, part of being an organizer and being a leader is making tough strategic decisions, so you can actually deliver the best results for the families of this country.
What you saw Bernie do last night was to really get people to take stock of how we’ve transformed this party. So, our folks who are in the room realize that that tent, they have made bigger; that tent, they have transformed. The platform of the party, we saw what the first draft was. It was milquetoast. Now it’s one of the most progressive in history. And it’s one of the most progressive in history because of the influence and the fight, quite frankly, that we brought to that process. Now, a week ago, we thought superdelegates may have the same unwavering influence for decades as they’ve had with decades. I sat with Reverend Jackson on Sunday; we were in church together. He was clear: The progress we’ve made against superdelegates will add up to more change than what he was able to do when he had them abolished for a minute, and then reimposed by the DNC.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain what happened. Explain on the superdelegates.
BEN JEALOUS: So what we’ve actually have is an agreement that, you know, we’ll go through our process, but it literally says "shall," so, you know, it’s a process with an obligated outcome, which is to reduce the number of superdelegates by about two-thirds. Those two-thirds—
AMY GOODMAN: From 750 to 200, something like that?
BEN JEALOUS: Yeah, yeah, to 200-and-something. It will just be the, you know, governors, congresspeople.
AMY GOODMAN: Is this a promise, or it’s changed?
BEN JEALOUS: Yeah, yeah, no, this is a promise, because when you’re in the minority, you actually sometimes have to negotiate the outcome in advance; otherwise, all you have is a process. And then the other ones will be—will essentially turn into pledged delegates. They’ll still have an office, but they will have to vote the way of their states and will have to be apportioned as their states were apportioned. It’s a big deal.
You know, it’s the same thing we went through, quite frankly, in the movement to abolish the death penalty. We had one victory in '72. It got turned around on us in ’76. I come onto the national staff in ’96. We hadn't won anything in 20 years. We go to the board. I just want to talk about how progressives, sometimes we struggle with each other, because this is a family conversation. That’s why I didn’t dodge it this morning. Right? Because we’re all family, because we—some of us fight inside, some of us fight outside, but there’s a reason why we agree on so much, which is that we’ve been in the trenches for a long time together. And we came to the board of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and we said, "We are going to go to a state-by-state strategy." And they said, "That’s incrementalist. It has to be all or nothing. It’s immoral if it’s not all or nothing." But what have we done now? We have abolished the death penalty in about 20 states in this country—it’s 18, 19. We’ve abolished it entirely for juveniles, entirely for mentally—that’s how you get change to add up.
And that’s what Bernie Sanders and I are doing in the party, which is why he says, "Yes, Hillary Clinton and I actually agree on some things. We agree on making this country better for children. We agree on increasing the inclusion of women into our society." She’s a fierce advocate for women and for children. You know, we now agree on the TPP, granted she didn’t start out there. But you know what? Go back and look at the history of RFK. There’s a lot of things, when he was hanging out with J. Edgar Hoover, that we didn’t agree with him on. But the movement pushed him. And the reality is that we’re pushing her, too. But we’ll also hold her accountable. There isn’t anybody in that room that feels like Bernie Sanders, if four years from now there was—you know, we had been betrayed, wouldn’t be a very different force to be reckoned with. But the reality is that we, as progressives, don’t just have a responsibility to our ideals, we have a responsibility to people, who need real change. And Bernie Sanders understands that the way to get real change in this moment is to simply push for the best of the two viable choices that we have and then hold them accountable. And that’s what we’ll do, while electing progressives at the local level.
AMY GOODMAN: I couldn’t count the number, the hundreds, of no—of "Ban TPP" signs on the floor last night.
BEN JEALOUS: And both candidates have said, "Ban TPP."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jill Stein?
DR. JILL STEIN: Well, the candidates may have said it, and Hillary Clinton, you know, easily moves from one camp to the other. But, you know, to have made progress in a nonbinding, voluntary platform, you know, to my mind, buyer beware here. I live in a state where we’ve had a great Democratic Party platform for a long time. With an extremely neoliberal Democratic Party, actions and legislation and so on, I would not look to the platform, you know, to be the marker of having made progress.
BEN JEALOUS: That’s all the Greens have.
DR. JILL STEIN: And it’s very clear—you know, and what’s not in the platform? You know, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The fact that the platform committee, in which Hillary Clinton’s delegates dominated, the fact that they refused to ban fracking, to go against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, when Hillary has adopted positions that are somewhat in favor of that—
AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.
DR. JILL STEIN: —yet the platform committee would not adopt it. You know, to my mind, it really—
BEN JEALOUS: I was there. I can tell you what happened.
DR. JILL STEIN: —it really casts grave doubt, as there should be, on Hillary’s positions. In terms of women, look at Aid to Families [with] Dependent Children. Welfare, as we know it, was destroyed by the Clintons. Look at the—
AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.
DR. JILL STEIN: —what Hillary did to living wages in Haiti. She pushed them down from a miserable 60 cents an hour to an extremely miserable 40 cents an hour. Hillary Clinton is a friend to corporations before she is a friend to women and children.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but it’s clearly a discussion that continues. Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate. Ben Jealous, former NAACP president and Bernie Sanders surrogate, is now—gave the convention speech last night saying, as Bernie Sanders did, support Hillary Clinton.
That does it for our broadcast. I’ll be speaking this weekend in Provincetown on Friday night, in Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday night. Check our website at democracynow.org. ... Read More →
Chaos on Convention Floor: Protests, Boos and Chants of "Bernie" Mark Opening of DNC
The tumultuous opening of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia began one day after Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned following the release of nearly 20,000 emails revealing how the Democratic Party favored Hillary Clinton and worked behind the scenes to discredit and defeat Bernie Sanders. On Monday morning, protesters booed and heckled Wasserman Schultz at a Florida delegation breakfast. Hours later, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke about the DNC email scandal in a meeting with his delegates. Later in the meeting with his delegates, the room erupted into boos when the Vermont senator repeated his support for Hillary Clinton. Supporters of Sanders chanted "Run! Run! Run!" and "Bernie or Bust!" The tension continued on to the floor of the DNC hours later. Democracy Now! was on the floor at the opening gavel of the convention and spoke with several delegates.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: It has been a tumultuous 24 hours here at the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The convention proceedings officially began one day after Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned following the release of nearly 20,000 emails revealing how the Democratic Party favored Hillary Clinton and worked behind the scenes to discredit and defeat Bernie Sanders. On Monday morning, protesters booed and heckled Wasserman Schultz at a Florida delegation breakfast.
FLORIDA DELEGATE: Debbie Wasserman Schultz!
PROTESTERS: Boo!
REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Thank you so much!
AMY GOODMAN: Hours later, Senator Bernie Sanders spoke about the DNC email scandal in a meeting with his delegates.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: As I think all of you know, Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned yesterday as chair of the DNC. Her resignation opens up the possibility of new leadership at the top of the Democratic Party that will stand with working people.
AMY GOODMAN: Later in the meeting, with his close to 2,000 delegates, the room erupted into boos when the Vermont senator repeated his support for Hillary Clinton.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We have got to defeat Donald Trump. And we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.
SANDERS SUPPORTERS: Boo!
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Brothers and sisters—
AMY GOODMAN: Supporters of Sanders chanted "Run! Run! Run!" and "Bernie or Bust!" The tension continued on to the floor of the Democratic National Convention when it was gaveled open hours later. Democracy Now! was there at the opening gavel of the convention.
MAYOR STEPHANIE RAWLINGS-BLAKE: I hereby call the 47th quadrennial Democratic National Convention to order.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the Baltimore mayor, not Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the DNC, now resigned, has gaveled the Democratic National Convention into order on this first day.
DONNA EDWARDS: I’m Donna Edwards. I actually live in Baltimore City. I was so proud to see Stephanie Rawlings-Blake give the gavel down for this exciting convention. I think it just shows that we’re moving forward. We’re moving forward with unity and strength, just like we do in Baltimore.
AMY GOODMAN: Could you talk about the controversy around Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the emails that came out, 20,000 of them, and how it suggested that the DNC was clearly on the side of Hillary Clinton? No matter who you support, they clearly supported her.
DONNA EDWARDS: I would say that what’s interesting is that in that debate or in that discussion, no one is talking about the fact that Bernie never identified himself as a Democrat until he decided to run for president. So, that’s all I have to say on it. It’s over. Let’s move forward.
SANDERS SUPPORTERS: Bernie! Bernie! Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!
AMY GOODMAN: Marcia Fudge, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, is trying to speak. People are booing. People are chanting "Hillary!" There’s chaos in the California delegation.
MARK MALOUF: My name is Mark Malouf. I am a delegate for Bernie Sanders in Congressional District 5 from California, Sonoma, Napa County, Vallejo. And the reason why we were booing Tim Kaine is because we’d much prefer a much more progressive candidate that’s able to unify the party against Donald Trump and stop the rise of fascism.
AMY GOODMAN: It sounds like your delegation is very divided. People were chanting "Hillary!" and other people were saying no, other people were saying "Bernie!" And many people are holding up "Ban TPP" signs.
MARK MALOUF: Although it is very divided, I am not one of the so-called Bernie or Bust, so I will planning—I am planning on voting for the eventual Democratic nominee. However, I do not know if that is the case for many of the people in this audience.
PROTESTERS: No TPP! No TPP! No TPP! No TPP!
ALYSSA DERONNE: I’m Alyssa DeRonne from Asheville, North Carolina. The time is now to stop the TPP. We cannot have the TPP come up in a lame-duck session of Congress.
CLINTON SUPPORTER: You’re having a hissy fit because you lost. And you don’t—you disrespect a man who fought for your civil rights and fought for the civil—
ALYSSA DERONNE: I’m here to fight for the people, because I live in a democracy.
CLINTON SUPPORTER: Oh, you don’t know the people. You just became involved, and you lost. We would work with you, but you’re not respecting our people, and you’re not respecting others, and you want to have the floor the whole time, and that is just wrong. People would be with you, but you are disrespectful, and you are being bratty and acting out. And that’s not what America is about.
ALYSSA DERONNE: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear her. I’m trying to stay positive, and I live in a democracy. And I know that unfair trade deals ruin our country. They put millions and millions of people out of jobs. They trash our environment. They’re going to invade our internet security. And we don’t even know the entire thing, because it’s shrouded in secrecy.
KATY ROEMER: My name’s Katy Roemer. I’m a registered nurse, and I’m a member of National Nurses United. And I’m a nurse from California, from Congressional District 13 as a delegate. And I think this is what democracy looks like. I’m incredibly proud to be here. We have, you know, been with Senator Sanders. We were the first union to endorse him. And, you know, I’m glad that finally in American politics we’re actually airing the fact that there is not necessarily agreement on issues.
CLINTON SUPPORTER: Hillary! Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!
AMY GOODMAN: And your thoughts on Tim Kaine?
KATY ROEMER: Tim Kaine—look, Tim Kaine has a few good things about him, but the reality is, Tim Kaine has not been a friend to labor. Right? And I am a working woman, and I work within labor. I’m a union member. And Tim Kaine has not been a friend to the labor movement. Right?
AMY GOODMAN: Explain.
KATY ROEMER: Well, I mean, he’s basically not been—he’s not been friendly to us. He’s voted against—you know, certainly, if you support fast track for TPP, you’ve got a problem. Right? Because that is an absolute attack on organized labor in this country.
NANCY KIM: Hi. My name is Nancy Kim. I’m a PLEO delegate from Los Angeles, California. I’m a millennial. And the sign I’m holding here today is "No to TPP," because this is NAFTA on steroids. America does not know about it. The magnitude of the problem of the TPP, nobody knows about it. Corporate media is not talking about it. This is going to affect our planet. This is going to affect our families, our people. It’s basically, in a nutshell—I mean, it’s over 5,000 pages, 30 chapters. Only six chapters of it is actually about trade, and the rest of it is all about corporate domination. And it’s basically the end of democracy and end of humanity, basically. And we want to bring attention to it. It’s our job. Our constituents chose us to come out here and represent them. And it’s not about a cult of personality or just a person that’s running for office, like Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton or whoever. It’s about the issues. And I’m a community organizer in Los Angeles, and these issues are not just words on a paper. It’s real. So we’re here to make—it’s day one. It’s not even midday, and I lost my voice, because I’m here to do whatever it takes to really bring justice and let everyone know the truth. People, once they know the truth, even Hillary Clinton people, they will love Bernie Sanders.
AMY GOODMAN: That report from the convention floor, with special thanks to John Hamilton. When we come back, we’ll speak with Dr. Jill Stein, who’s running for president of the Green Party—who’s running for president on the Green Party ticket. She was the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nominee. Ben Jealous will also be with us, former NAACP president, Bernie Sanders surrogate, who spoke at the convention last night in favor of Hillary Clinton. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us. ... Read More →
"It's a Sad Day for Many of Us": Bernie Delegates Boo Sanders After Endorsing Clinton
Before the Democratic National Convention officially began on Monday, Democracy Now! was there when Senator Bernie Sanders addressed his 1,900 delegates and threw his support behind his former rival, Hillary Clinton. We play highlights from the night’s speeches and speak with several Sanders delegates, who say "it pains me," but that they now plan to vote for Clinton. Others say they remain undecided and are at the DNC to ensure Sanders’s values are represented.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: It’s been a tumultuous 24 hours here at the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The convention began on Monday, one day after Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as head of the party following the release of nearly 20,000 emails that revealed how the Democratic Party favored Hillary Clinton and worked behind the scenes to discredit and defeat Bernie Sanders. Before the convention officially began, Sanders addressed his 1,900 delegates. Democracy Now! was there.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We have got to defeat Donald Trump. And we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine.
SANDERS SUPPORTERS: Boo!
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters, this is—this is the real world that we live in. Trump is a bully and a demagogue. Trump—Trump has made bigotry and hatred the cornerstone of his campaign. Throughout this campaign, he has insulted Mexicans and Latinos, he has insulted Muslims, he has insulted women and African Americans.
SANDERS SUPPORTERS: We want Bernie! We want Bernie! We want Bernie! We want Bernie! We want Bernie! We want Bernie! We want Bernie! We want Bernie!
SANDERS SUPPORTER 1: We’re going to fight. The WikiLeaks showed that this election was rigged. We’re going to fight for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is the only one with integrity. We’re going to fight. You saw today, he said Hillary, everybody said "boo." That’s what’s going to be in the convention. We’re going to fight this week. We’re going to fight for the TPP. We’re going to—
SANDERS SUPPORTER 2: Never Hillary! Never Hillary. I love Bernie, but I am not voting for Hillary.
FAWAZ ANWAR: Fawaz S. Anwar, national delegate for Bernie from the great state of Texas. I’d just like add, as a dedicated Democrat, Democrat before Bernie, Democrat after Bernie, I love Bernie, everything he stands for. But the problem is, you’ve—we’ve all seen what happened this morning. Clinton is slipping behind Trump. I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared for my civil liberties. I carry the Constitution around with me, to this day. I’m scared that Trump’s going to win now. And now that Clinton is sagging behind Trump, the most misogynistic, sexist, sexist, racist person that the Republicans have ever nominated, Clinton is slipping up. I just—I don’t know how else to say it. But our democracy is in danger if Trump becomes president. I’m in agreement with Bernie. I’m going to vote for Clinton if she’s the nominee. But the fact is, Bernie beats Trump. Bernie beats Trump. Everyone knows this. I do not understand why this has to be like this.
JIM KEADY: My name is Jim Keady. I’m a Bernie delegate from New Jersey. I’m proud to be here to represent the agenda that Bernie’s been pushing for the past year. The thing that really struck me the most was when Bernie had said, you know, "We have set the agenda for the future here in America." We think about the young people that have supported Bernie’s campaign. You know, we need to have a vision that goes well beyond this presidential election. That’s looking for the next four years, through the next 40 years, and taking care of our country for the next 40,000 years. And that’s what excites me the most. It pains me when Bernie, you know, asked us to support Hillary Clinton. I’m sure it broke his heart, as well, because, you know, look, Hillary is—you know, as Robert Reich had said, she’s the perfect candidate for the democracy that we have, and Bernie is the perfect candidate for the democracy that we want.
DEBORAH PARKER: My name is Deborah Parker. I am from the Tulalip Tribes in the state of Washington, and I’m a Bernie delegate. I was also on the Platform Drafting Committee and the Platform Committee that voted in Orlando.
AMY GOODMAN: Will you be voting for Hillary Clinton?
DEBORAH PARKER: You know, right now, I came as a delegate, and I earned a lot of votes to represent Bernie’s values. And so, I’m really here to represent those values, not only on the platform and also from the state of Washington and my district, where I was voted. We were 80—I believe 84 percent Bernie Sanders. So, they asked me to come represent their voice, so that’s what I’m doing. As far as voting, I haven’t made those decisions right now. It’s—again, it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking for—this is not just about politics, in the sense—yes, it’s political, but there’s a feeling, there’s a movement, there’s inspiration that has been created. And how do you just all of a sudden change that and go for the person that you don’t think would make the best president? And yeah, we hear the lesser of two evils. And, you know, so I’m—it’s a sad day for many of us.
AMY GOODMAN: Once the Democratic convention began, supporters of Senator Sanders repeatedly broke into chants of "Bernie!" every time Hillary Clinton was named. During his speech to the convention, Senator Sanders again urged his supporters to back Hillary Clinton in November.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her, as you do, as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play, as she helped lead the fight for universal healthcare. I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children, for women and for the disabled. Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president, and I am proud to stand with her tonight. Thank you all very much.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren also spoke on the opening night of the DNC as a keynote speaker. She accused Republican nominee Donald Trump of fanning the flames of fear and hatred.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Now, we are here tonight because America faces a choice, the choice of a new president. On one side is a man who inherited a fortune from his father and kept it going by cheating people, by skipping out on debts, a man who has never sacrificed anything for anyone, a man who cares only for himself every minute of every day. On the other side is one of the smartest, toughest, most tenacious people on this planet, a woman who fights for children, for women, for healthcare, for human rights, a woman who fights for all of us and who is strong enough to win those fights. We’re here today because our choice is Hillary Clinton. I’m with Hillary. I’m with Hillary.
AMY GOODMAN: First lady Michelle Obama also spoke and gave one of the most impassioned addresses of the evening.
MICHELLE OBAMA: I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States. So, look—so, don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again, because this right now is the greatest country on Earth. And as my daughters prepare to set out into the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth, a leader who is worthy of my girls’ promise and all our kids’ promise, a leader who will be guided every day by the love and hope and impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children.
AMY GOODMAN: First lady Michelle Obama. In a minute, we’ll be joined by two guests. From Berkeley, California, Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Clinton, professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Bernie Sanders supporter. Here in Philadelphia, Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His most recent book, Wages of Rebellion. He supports Dr. Jill Stein. A debate, coming up. ... Read More →
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Philadelphia: Fractious DNC Opens Amid Party Turmoil
The Democratic National Convention opened in the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia Monday amid an ongoing scandal over the released DNC emails and public divisions between Clinton and Sanders supporters. On Monday morning, protesters booed and heckled DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz at a Florida delegation breakfast, yelling "Shame! Shame! Shame!" and carrying signs reading "emails." Wasserman Schultz has resigned in the wake of WikiLeaks’ release of 20,000 emails, which show the DNC worked to discredit and defeat Bernie Sanders. The FBI has launched an investigation into whether Russian spy services were behind the hack. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake took over Wasserman Schultz’s role of gaveling in the opening of the convention Monday afternoon.
TOPICS:
DNC 2016
2016 Election
Bernie Sanders
Hillary Clinton
Bernie Supporters Boo Sanders for Endorsing Clinton
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’s delegates booed Sanders himself at a delegate meeting Monday afternoon when he called for supporting Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: "We have got to defeat Donald Trump. And we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine."
Among those to try to quell the "Bernie or Bust" movement Monday was comedian Sarah Silverman, who appeared on stage at the DNC convention center alongside comedian and now Senator Al Franken. As the crowd shouted "Bernie! Bernie!" Silverman tried to shift the chant to "unity." She then chastised Sanders supporters.
Sarah Silverman: "Unity, unity, unity."
Sen. Al Franken: "Hillary, Hillary, Hillary."
Sarah Silverman: "The Bernie—can I just say, to the Bernie or Bust people, you’re being ridiculous."
Finally, following prime-time convention speeches by first lady Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Sanders took to the stage, again endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: "Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president, and I am proud to stand with her tonight. Thank you all very much."
But on the convention floor, disunity was on full display. Sanders supporters sported shirts reading "Hill No." Others taped their mouths shut, with the word "silenced" written in marker on the duct tape. This is Oregon delegate Sandra Jafarzadeh.
Sandra Jafarzadeh: "I covered my mouth with a 'silenced' sign on it. And the reason why I said that is because superdelegates didn’t represent the voice of the people. They were supposed to represent the voice of the middle class, the voice of the 99 percent. And they failed. They didn’t do that."
We’ll host two debates on the choice for Sanders supporters later in the broadcast: first between Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and former NAACPPresident Ben Jealous, then between Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
TOPICS:
Bernie Sanders
DNC 2016
2016 Election
Hillary Clinton
TeleSUR Journalist Arrested at Protests Outside DNC
Outside the convention center, protests continued for a second day. At least 50 people were briefly taken into custody by police during a mass sit-in outside the convention center Monday. The demonstration dubbed "Democracy Spring" was protesting against the big influence of corporate money in politics. At least one journalist was arrested attempting to cover the protest. Police arrested TeleSUR journalist Abby Martin as she tried to access the blocked-off area. She says she was following the police’s instructions when an officer grabbed her, tore her dress and handcuffed her. She was released hours later.
TOPICS:
DNC 2016
2016 Election
DNC: Hundreds March to Demand Moratorium on Deportations
Meanwhile, hundreds marched to demand a moratorium on deportations and the closure of the Berks Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania. This is one of the protesters.
Fernando Lopez: "What it means to be undocumented is the same crisis that people are facing here in the U.S.: citizens that have felonies. Basically, you don’t have any rights. You don’t have any voice. You don’t have a political voice. You don’t have the right to vote. The reality is that people that are coming to this country, it’s not because they want to live the American dream. It’s because, in many instances, people are fleeing poverty, people are fleeing violence, and then coming here and face more violence and face more trauma. It’s insane. It’s a cycle that never ends. So, like, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s immoral. And I think the right thing to do, because this is going to go down in history, is for them to dismantle this organization that is ICE and to stop all deportations and to end this crisis already."
TOPICS:
DNC 2016
2016 Election
Immigrant Rights
Immigration
Japan: Man Kills 19 at Home for People with Mental Disabilities
In Japan, a knife-wielding man killed 19 people and wounded at least a dozen near Tokyo on Tuesday. Japanese police say the attack took place in the city of Sagamihara at a facility for people with mental disabilities. The man appeared to have been a former employee of the facility, and the victims were all patients there. The suspected attacker turned himself in at a local police station and was charged with murder. Police have not yet offered a possible motive for the attack.
German Police: Syrian Bomber Pledged Allegiance to ISIS
In Germany, officials say a Syrian man who blew himself up outside a concert Sunday night had declared allegiance to ISIS. The 27-year-old man was killed and about a dozen people were wounded in the blast. Police say they found bomb-making materials in the man’s apartment, along with a video of the man pledging support to the group. Police described the alleged bomber as having legal and psychiatric troubles. They said he had arrived in Germany two years ago, but had been denied asylum.
TOPICS:
Islamic State
Florida Rep. Alan Grayson's Ex-Wife Alleges Domestic Abuse
Politico is reporting Florida Congressmember Alan Grayson’s ex-wife repeatedly went to police with accusations of domestic abuse over a two-decade period. The revelations come as Grayson enters the final weeks of his Democratic primary campaign for Senate. Politico reports Lolita Grayson called police at least two times in Virginia and two more times in Florida, and that she sought medical attention on at least two occasions. She says that Grayson threatened to kill her on at least one instance. Alan Grayson denies he engaged in any abuse during the couple’s 25-year marriage, which ended last year in a bitter annulment that she is now appealing.
Kashmir Curfew Lifted; General Strike Continues
In Kashmir, Indian authorities announced the end of a 17-day curfew in the city of Srinagar today. The city has been under lockdown since Indian security forces killed an independence leader earlier this month, setting off massive demonstrations. Many of the city’s shops remained closed amid a general strike protesting Indian rule. More than 42 people have been killed since the protests began. At least three of the deaths occurred when Indian troops opened fire on protesters.
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Kashmir
Philippines: Duterte Declares Ceasefire with Communist Rebels
In the Philippines, newly elected President Rodrigo Duterte has declared a unilateral ceasefire with communist rebels who have fought the government since 1968. The insurgency began then and has claimed more than 40,000 lives.
President Rodrigo Duterte: "While we extol the bravery and heroism of our soldiers, you, the rebels, do the same for your members and fighters. What I see instead are the widows and the orphans, and I feel their pain and grief."
The group that will represent the rebels in the negotiations says it welcomes the ceasefire. Meanwhile, Former Filipino President Gloria Arroyo has returned to the country’s Congress after nearly five years in prison on corruption charges. The Supreme Court has now cleared her of the charges.
TOPICS:
Philippines
10,000 Sign Petition to Hold Tony Blair Accountable for Iraq War
In Britain, more than 10,000 people have signed a petition demanding the British Parliament "hold Tony Blair to account" for the country’s participation in the 2003 Iraq War. British law requires the government issue a formal reply to the request. There have been renewed calls for Blair to face trial after the release of the Chilcot report earlier this month, which presented evidence Blair had misled the country in making the case for war.
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Iraq
South Koreans Demonstrate for 12th Day Against New U.S. Missile Base
In South Korea, protests against the deployment of a U.S. missile system continued for a 12th straight day. Residents of Seongju, southeast of Seoul, have held daily demonstrations since their city was announced as the location for the missile base two weeks ago. The South Korean government says it needs the THAAD missile system to counter threats from North Korea. U.S. troops would be deployed along with the missiles. These are two of the protesters.
Protester: "To deploy THAAD in South Korea will not only further worsen the relations between the Republic of Korea and the DPRK, but also negatively affect the situation in Northeast Asia and push South Korea to the brink of war. Therefore, we must oppose it."
Protester: "If THAAD is deployed in Seongju, there will be U.S. forces. I have heard about the scandals involving U.S. troops in other countries, so as a mother with daughters, I am deeply worried and strongly oppose THAAD."
Russia has warned of "irreparable consequences" if the missiles are deployed. China has also said the missiles would threaten stability on the Korean Peninsula.
TOPICS:
Military Industrial Complex
North Korea
South Korea
Tunisia: Hundreds Protest Amnesty Law for Officials Accused of Corruption
And in Tunisia, hundreds of people protested against a proposed amnesty law for public officials and state employees charged with corruption. Parliamentary debate on the bill is expected to begin today. Many Tunisians fear laws like the one proposed would mean a return to the same kind of widespread corruption that helped spark the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Protesters successfully blocked the bill last year, the first time it was introduced.
TOPICS:
Tunisia
Arab Spring
Human Rights
Mississippi: Transgender Woman Dee Whigham Murdered
In Mississippi, a U.S. Navy sailor has been charged in the murder of 25-year-old transgender woman Dee Whigham, who was found stabbed to death in a hotel room Saturday. The alleged killer is 20-year-old Dwanya Hickerson, who was in training at Mississippi’s Keesler Air Force Base. Police say they are investigating the murder as a possible hate crime. Dee Whigham had recently begun her medical career as a nurse at a medical center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. At least 15 transgender people been murdered this year, following a record of more than 20 killings in 2015.
TOPICS:
LGBT
Chris DeLay, Who Posted Alton Sterling Video, Still Prevented from Returning to Work
And Chris LeDay, the man who posted a Facebook video showing the police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, says he still hasn’t been allowed to return to work. Three weeks ago, the day after posting the video, LeDay was arrested, shackled, jailed and ultimately charged for outstanding traffic fines. Now officials on the Dobbins Air Force Base, where LeDay has worked as a technician, are saying his arrest had led to issues with his security clearance that are preventing him from returning to work. This is Chris LeDay speaking on Democracy Now! after his arrest.
Amy Goodman: "So, are you sorry you posted the video of the police killing of Alton Sterling?"
Chris LeDay: "Not at all, because the main thing—the main thing I wanted to do was try to help the Sterling family get justice, and use my platform to put these cops on display. I think it was an atrocity, and they handled it wrong. It was a clear-cut case of murder, in my opinion, even though I’m not an expert. But I saw his kid crying, you know, his son crying on television, and that really broke my heart, because, you know, I have three children."
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Police
Police Brutality
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Philadelphia: Fractious DNC Opens Amid Party Turmoil
The Democratic National Convention opened in the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia Monday amid an ongoing scandal over the released DNC emails and public divisions between Clinton and Sanders supporters. On Monday morning, protesters booed and heckled DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz at a Florida delegation breakfast, yelling "Shame! Shame! Shame!" and carrying signs reading "emails." Wasserman Schultz has resigned in the wake of WikiLeaks’ release of 20,000 emails, which show the DNC worked to discredit and defeat Bernie Sanders. The FBI has launched an investigation into whether Russian spy services were behind the hack. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake took over Wasserman Schultz’s role of gaveling in the opening of the convention Monday afternoon.
TOPICS:
DNC 2016
2016 Election
Bernie Sanders
Hillary Clinton
Bernie Supporters Boo Sanders for Endorsing Clinton
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’s delegates booed Sanders himself at a delegate meeting Monday afternoon when he called for supporting Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: "We have got to defeat Donald Trump. And we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine."
Among those to try to quell the "Bernie or Bust" movement Monday was comedian Sarah Silverman, who appeared on stage at the DNC convention center alongside comedian and now Senator Al Franken. As the crowd shouted "Bernie! Bernie!" Silverman tried to shift the chant to "unity." She then chastised Sanders supporters.
Sarah Silverman: "Unity, unity, unity."
Sen. Al Franken: "Hillary, Hillary, Hillary."
Sarah Silverman: "The Bernie—can I just say, to the Bernie or Bust people, you’re being ridiculous."
Finally, following prime-time convention speeches by first lady Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Sanders took to the stage, again endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: "Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president, and I am proud to stand with her tonight. Thank you all very much."
But on the convention floor, disunity was on full display. Sanders supporters sported shirts reading "Hill No." Others taped their mouths shut, with the word "silenced" written in marker on the duct tape. This is Oregon delegate Sandra Jafarzadeh.
Sandra Jafarzadeh: "I covered my mouth with a 'silenced' sign on it. And the reason why I said that is because superdelegates didn’t represent the voice of the people. They were supposed to represent the voice of the middle class, the voice of the 99 percent. And they failed. They didn’t do that."
We’ll host two debates on the choice for Sanders supporters later in the broadcast: first between Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and former NAACPPresident Ben Jealous, then between Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
TOPICS:
Bernie Sanders
DNC 2016
2016 Election
Hillary Clinton
TeleSUR Journalist Arrested at Protests Outside DNC
Outside the convention center, protests continued for a second day. At least 50 people were briefly taken into custody by police during a mass sit-in outside the convention center Monday. The demonstration dubbed "Democracy Spring" was protesting against the big influence of corporate money in politics. At least one journalist was arrested attempting to cover the protest. Police arrested TeleSUR journalist Abby Martin as she tried to access the blocked-off area. She says she was following the police’s instructions when an officer grabbed her, tore her dress and handcuffed her. She was released hours later.
TOPICS:
DNC 2016
2016 Election
DNC: Hundreds March to Demand Moratorium on Deportations
Meanwhile, hundreds marched to demand a moratorium on deportations and the closure of the Berks Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania. This is one of the protesters.
Fernando Lopez: "What it means to be undocumented is the same crisis that people are facing here in the U.S.: citizens that have felonies. Basically, you don’t have any rights. You don’t have any voice. You don’t have a political voice. You don’t have the right to vote. The reality is that people that are coming to this country, it’s not because they want to live the American dream. It’s because, in many instances, people are fleeing poverty, people are fleeing violence, and then coming here and face more violence and face more trauma. It’s insane. It’s a cycle that never ends. So, like, it just doesn’t make sense. It’s immoral. And I think the right thing to do, because this is going to go down in history, is for them to dismantle this organization that is ICE and to stop all deportations and to end this crisis already."
TOPICS:
DNC 2016
2016 Election
Immigrant Rights
Immigration
Japan: Man Kills 19 at Home for People with Mental Disabilities
In Japan, a knife-wielding man killed 19 people and wounded at least a dozen near Tokyo on Tuesday. Japanese police say the attack took place in the city of Sagamihara at a facility for people with mental disabilities. The man appeared to have been a former employee of the facility, and the victims were all patients there. The suspected attacker turned himself in at a local police station and was charged with murder. Police have not yet offered a possible motive for the attack.
German Police: Syrian Bomber Pledged Allegiance to ISIS
In Germany, officials say a Syrian man who blew himself up outside a concert Sunday night had declared allegiance to ISIS. The 27-year-old man was killed and about a dozen people were wounded in the blast. Police say they found bomb-making materials in the man’s apartment, along with a video of the man pledging support to the group. Police described the alleged bomber as having legal and psychiatric troubles. They said he had arrived in Germany two years ago, but had been denied asylum.
TOPICS:
Islamic State
Florida Rep. Alan Grayson's Ex-Wife Alleges Domestic Abuse
Politico is reporting Florida Congressmember Alan Grayson’s ex-wife repeatedly went to police with accusations of domestic abuse over a two-decade period. The revelations come as Grayson enters the final weeks of his Democratic primary campaign for Senate. Politico reports Lolita Grayson called police at least two times in Virginia and two more times in Florida, and that she sought medical attention on at least two occasions. She says that Grayson threatened to kill her on at least one instance. Alan Grayson denies he engaged in any abuse during the couple’s 25-year marriage, which ended last year in a bitter annulment that she is now appealing.
Kashmir Curfew Lifted; General Strike Continues
In Kashmir, Indian authorities announced the end of a 17-day curfew in the city of Srinagar today. The city has been under lockdown since Indian security forces killed an independence leader earlier this month, setting off massive demonstrations. Many of the city’s shops remained closed amid a general strike protesting Indian rule. More than 42 people have been killed since the protests began. At least three of the deaths occurred when Indian troops opened fire on protesters.
TOPICS:
Kashmir
Philippines: Duterte Declares Ceasefire with Communist Rebels
In the Philippines, newly elected President Rodrigo Duterte has declared a unilateral ceasefire with communist rebels who have fought the government since 1968. The insurgency began then and has claimed more than 40,000 lives.
President Rodrigo Duterte: "While we extol the bravery and heroism of our soldiers, you, the rebels, do the same for your members and fighters. What I see instead are the widows and the orphans, and I feel their pain and grief."
The group that will represent the rebels in the negotiations says it welcomes the ceasefire. Meanwhile, Former Filipino President Gloria Arroyo has returned to the country’s Congress after nearly five years in prison on corruption charges. The Supreme Court has now cleared her of the charges.
TOPICS:
Philippines
10,000 Sign Petition to Hold Tony Blair Accountable for Iraq War
In Britain, more than 10,000 people have signed a petition demanding the British Parliament "hold Tony Blair to account" for the country’s participation in the 2003 Iraq War. British law requires the government issue a formal reply to the request. There have been renewed calls for Blair to face trial after the release of the Chilcot report earlier this month, which presented evidence Blair had misled the country in making the case for war.
TOPICS:
Iraq
South Koreans Demonstrate for 12th Day Against New U.S. Missile Base
In South Korea, protests against the deployment of a U.S. missile system continued for a 12th straight day. Residents of Seongju, southeast of Seoul, have held daily demonstrations since their city was announced as the location for the missile base two weeks ago. The South Korean government says it needs the THAAD missile system to counter threats from North Korea. U.S. troops would be deployed along with the missiles. These are two of the protesters.
Protester: "To deploy THAAD in South Korea will not only further worsen the relations between the Republic of Korea and the DPRK, but also negatively affect the situation in Northeast Asia and push South Korea to the brink of war. Therefore, we must oppose it."
Protester: "If THAAD is deployed in Seongju, there will be U.S. forces. I have heard about the scandals involving U.S. troops in other countries, so as a mother with daughters, I am deeply worried and strongly oppose THAAD."
Russia has warned of "irreparable consequences" if the missiles are deployed. China has also said the missiles would threaten stability on the Korean Peninsula.
TOPICS:
Military Industrial Complex
North Korea
South Korea
Tunisia: Hundreds Protest Amnesty Law for Officials Accused of Corruption
And in Tunisia, hundreds of people protested against a proposed amnesty law for public officials and state employees charged with corruption. Parliamentary debate on the bill is expected to begin today. Many Tunisians fear laws like the one proposed would mean a return to the same kind of widespread corruption that helped spark the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Protesters successfully blocked the bill last year, the first time it was introduced.
TOPICS:
Tunisia
Arab Spring
Human Rights
Mississippi: Transgender Woman Dee Whigham Murdered
In Mississippi, a U.S. Navy sailor has been charged in the murder of 25-year-old transgender woman Dee Whigham, who was found stabbed to death in a hotel room Saturday. The alleged killer is 20-year-old Dwanya Hickerson, who was in training at Mississippi’s Keesler Air Force Base. Police say they are investigating the murder as a possible hate crime. Dee Whigham had recently begun her medical career as a nurse at a medical center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. At least 15 transgender people been murdered this year, following a record of more than 20 killings in 2015.
TOPICS:
LGBT
Chris DeLay, Who Posted Alton Sterling Video, Still Prevented from Returning to Work
And Chris LeDay, the man who posted a Facebook video showing the police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, says he still hasn’t been allowed to return to work. Three weeks ago, the day after posting the video, LeDay was arrested, shackled, jailed and ultimately charged for outstanding traffic fines. Now officials on the Dobbins Air Force Base, where LeDay has worked as a technician, are saying his arrest had led to issues with his security clearance that are preventing him from returning to work. This is Chris LeDay speaking on Democracy Now! after his arrest.
Amy Goodman: "So, are you sorry you posted the video of the police killing of Alton Sterling?"
Chris LeDay: "Not at all, because the main thing—the main thing I wanted to do was try to help the Sterling family get justice, and use my platform to put these cops on display. I think it was an atrocity, and they handled it wrong. It was a clear-cut case of murder, in my opinion, even though I’m not an expert. But I saw his kid crying, you know, his son crying on television, and that really broke my heart, because, you know, I have three children."
TOPICS:
Police
Police Brutality
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