Robert Mercer's daughter is a member of the transition team. The two are credited with bringing in Bannon and Fiorina's caricature, Kellyanne Con-way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mer...activities

Didn't expect it, isn't prepared, has no idea what being President entails. Will probably pull a Sarah Palin and quit in six months.

Wall St Journal:
During their private White House meeting on Thursday, Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope, said people familiar with the meeting. Trump aides were described by those people as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama's term.
After meeting with Mr. Trump, the only person to be elected president without having held a government or military position, Mr. Obama realized the Republican needs more guidance. He plans to spend more time with his successor than presidents typically do, people familiar with the matter said.

CNN:
"Trump told Christie in 2015 that he didn't expect to make it past Octoberat which point he would endorse Christie, according to a Christie adviser who asked not to be named in order to speak about behind-the-scenes maneuvers," according to the book, written by CNN's Thomas Lake with reporting from Jodi Enda, Susan Baer and CNN's political team.
"I think they always had an understanding that the first one out would probably endorse the other," the adviser said.
During the throes of the Republican primary, Trump and Christie had a common enemy: Marco Rubio. After Christie's endorsement, Trump would praise Christie for his takedown of Rubio during the Republican debate right before the New Hampshire primary. Christie mercilessly mocked Rubio when he repeated a talking point again and again to criticize President Barack Obama.

Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches

It happened.


Yes, I was surprised. Since I spend a lot of time in western Pennsylvania, I knew there was more support for Trump than the media let on, but he just seemed too incompetent, incoherent, and disorganized a candidate to defeat the Clinton machine. I enjoyed torturing my friend who has been very close to Hillary for decades with scary stories about Trump surging. But in our early election day texting, I confessed that I thought it would be called for Hillary by 11PM at the latest. I was as wrong as everyone else.


I did not vote for either Hillary or Trump, and was resigned to taking my chances with either horrible outcome, but I was implicitly anticipating the dangers of a Clinton administration. I also thought, however, that there might be one positive effect of Hillary's presidency. Contrary to what might be considered the usual leftist line that electing the explicitly ultra-reactionary Trump would foment the revolution, or at least radical discontent, I thought that, in the American context, Hillary being president would help the left the most.


If Trump wins, I argued, and his policies fail miserably and obviously, Democrats and liberals would spend the next four years saying: "See, you should have voted for Hillary," and channeling oppositional energy into a familiar anti-Trump, anti-Republican, "Let's make sure we elect a Democrat in 2020" politicsas we saw after Bush's election in 2000. The Democrats would once again present themselves as the system's way out.


On the other hand, I thought that, if Hillary were to win and wreak her expected havoc on America and the world, Democrats and liberals would not be able to blame the Republicans. It would be the left that could say "See what you voted for?" The system would have failed in its Democratic guise. Because this might finally persuade more progressive-minded people to break with the Democratic Party once and for all. It was Hillary's presidency, not Trump's, that would open new paths for the left.



Now we have Donald Trump as president. His election is a disgrace, and we know what a disaster his administration will be for the country and the world. Mr. Anti-establishment, "drain the swamp," tribune of the forgotten, is already filling up his clown car cabinet with the same-old tired Republican reactionaries and incompetents (Sarah Palin, Giluliani, Christie, Bolton), not to mention turning to industry and Wall Street lobbyists (and here) and, of course, Goldman Sachs (Steven Mnuchin) to run the Treasury. As business news site Quartz so aptly headlines: Trump criticized Clinton for her Wall Street ties, but he's the best thing to happen to big banks.


Just as with Hillary, there's the (fake) public position, and then there's the (real) private position, and Trump's betrayal of whichever working-class voters thought he would be their savior has already begun. Let's hope they don't cling to their illusions about him as long as foolish liberals have clung to theirs about Obama.


So the task for the left is to organize and fightagainst every piece of crap policy Trump and his crew try to foist on us, and for a different political world. No doubt. But here's where my fears about President Donald as opposed to President Hillary are already making me shudder. If our idea of organizing is to spend the next four years in a hashtag "opposition" movement (#FightTrump), managed and funded by the Democrats and their favored oligarchs, in order to mobilize support for the 2020 candidacy of an Elizabeth Warren, a Cory Booker, or a Lin-Manuel Miranda (Who can't see that coming?)the next capitalist-imperialist identity-politics candidatethen we will have learned nothing.


As I write, the pressing question for many is whom to name as the next DNC Chair: Howard Dean or Keith Ellison. Who the hell cares? If our idea of organizing is to reform the Democratic Partyget the right guy or gal in chargewe will have learned nothing. The Democratic Party is a counter-revolutionary center-right capitalist party, and the DNC Chair is an employee of the donors. The problems we are facing, and the solutions we need to fight for, are way more radical than anything the Democratic Party will ever consider. If we haven't learned this, we've learned nothing.


Even just considering electoral politics in the most basic democratic terms, we need to fight for the elimination of the electoral college, a transparent and trustworthy voting system, some form of Instant Runoff Voting, an end to voter caging and suppression, public financing, and access of third parties to debates, the media, and ballots in all states. Is the Democratic Party going to fight for any of that?


Did nobody notice that Trump, for whom only 27% of the eligible electorate voted, actually lost the popular vote by more than 500,000, and maybe more than two million, votes? By the only salient democratic measure of the people's will, Hillary Clinton won the election. So how is the country all racist and/or sexist? If the Electoral College didn't exist, would any of Hillary's supporters be excoriating the 2016 voting electorate for its racism and misogyny, or would they be congratulating that electoratethe very same electorate with the very same resultfor its embrace of diversity? White Supremacy didn't defeat Hillary; the Electoral College did.


Wouldn't it make more sense for Hillary supporters, instead of complaining about the imputed racist and/or misogynist attitudes of those who didn't vote for her, to champion the cause of the majority who did, and focus on agitating for the reforms that are needed to make our electoral system actually democratic?


This is not revolutionary, but simple democratic, politics, but it implies the need for a difficult fight for serious changes. Does anyone think the Democratic Party, which so worships the system that it respectfully accepted having a couple of presidential elections stolen from it, is up for even that?


And that's not counting the hard problems, the socio-economic problems.


Yes, there's plenty of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia all across the United States, including among those low-income rural white voters in Pennsylvania who voted for Obama in 2008 and flipped to Trump this year. Trump personally has a history of trafficking in such vile attitudes, and his campaign certainly did. Everyone must fight them whenever and wherever they appear, and they will be a central targetalong with his militarism, imperialism and authoritarianismof left opposition to the Trump administration.


But those attitudes existed in western Pennsylvania and the rest of the country in 2008 and 2012, too. Why were there five million fewer votes for Clinton this year than Obama in 2012? Why did over 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012, and one third who voted for him in both elections, vote for Trump this year? Six states flipped from Obama to Trump. Is the only salient fact about this Obama-Trump voting bloc that it's racist?


Trump got a whole 1% more of the white vote than Romney. Why did Hillary get a lower share of African-American (-7%) and Latino (-6%) votes than Obama did in 2012, while Trump got a higher share of both (+2%) than did Romney? Most importantly, why did 45% of the electorate stay home?


If we don't seriously confront the fact that many of those millions of voters who switched from Obama to Trump, or to their couches, did so because of the failures of eight years of a Democratic administration, we will learn nothing.
This wasn't a sudden switch, and it wasn't personal. As Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara point out, over the eight years of the Obama administration, "Democrats have lost almost a thousand state-legislature seats, a dozen gubernatorial races, 69 House seats and 13 in the Senate." This year, they lost the presidency and the Senate.


That's an extended slide into disaffection. It would be foolish to think it was because voters took a few years to notice the color of Barack's skin. It would be supremely foolish not to consider that white working-class voters in Rust Belt states switched to Republicanand black and Latino working-class voters stayed homebecause eight years of the Obama administration did nothing to stop the ongoing destruction of their lives and communities. It would be foolish not to recognize that Obama did not deliver the change he was promised, the change those voters of all races voted forin 2008 and in declining numbers in 2012. It would be foolish to refuse to consider that this year's rejection of Hillary was because they knew she was going to continue ignoring them in the same way.


Do we notice what's happened to Detroit and Flint, and to the hundreds of exurban communities surrounding cities like that? Or do we just notice how mellifluously and rhetorically correctly it was done? Do we really think five million people who voted for Obama, some twice, did not vote for Hillary because they all want to go around grabbing pussy, rather than because of what's been happening to them for the last eight years?


Sure, there are plenty of pissed-off white people. Should there not be? Should working-class whitesand every other working-class constituency, and all of their progressive alliesnot be furious that their lives have been destroyed over the past thirty years by what Paul Street calls "a relentless top-down class war on their livelihoods, unions, and standard of living," and over the past eight years by the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the country to the top ten-thousandth of the population? Should they not bridle at the infinite increase in military spending and the endless series of wars to which their children are sent, which have no discernible interest for them? Should they not be livid at the utterly corrupt private health insurance system, now called Obamacare, that is flaying them to death with increasing premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, for fewer coverage options?


Should middle-aged white Americans not object when they have been struck by one of the starkest indicators of a group that's been relegated to the social wastebin: "Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling." As two Dartmouth economists remark: "It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude.…Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this."


This is the kind of scourge that happens when a population has been discarded and has lost hope, as have "Millions of once productively employed' white working class people … [who have] become surplus Americans' in a time when Silicon Valley geniuses soberly design the near total elimination of manual labor and intellectuals debate the coming of a world without work.'"


Liberals delight in perplexing about how working-class Republican voters can be too ignorant to realize how they're being conned by oligarchs in populist drag. It's the process Christopher Hitchens, in his better days, called "the essence of American politics…the manipulation of populism by elitism," and Paul Street restates as: "the cloaking of plutocratic agendas, of service to the rich and powerful, in the false rebels' clothing of popular rebellion." We've seen this repeatedly, and Trump is the latest example.


But perhaps those liberals should perplex in the mirror. As Steve Hendricks points out:
Conservative Kansans fall for a plutocratic, imperialist agenda cloaked in patriotism, religion, and nostalgia for the good old Ed Sullivan days; liberal New Yorkers fall for the same plutocratic, imperialist agenda dressed up in multiculturalism, identity politics, and celebration of the good new Caitlin Jenner days. Who's the bigger fool? How's that working out for everybody? For the millions of victims of that top-down, plutocratic class war in the ghettos of the cities and the hollows of Appalachia? For the Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans, whose countries have been destroyed? Ad infinitum.


Yes, the voters who switched from Barack to Donald are fools for thinking that Trump is going to help them in any way, but they are not fools for thinking that Hillary Clinton would not have.


And how smart or foolish is it to think the thing to do now is to try and persuade them on the next version of Hillary, Clinton 3.0 (Obama was 2.0)which is all the Democratic Party is going to offer them. This bouncing back and forth between phony, mendacious saviorsfrom "hope and change" to "make America great again"while ignoring, or posing false solutions to, the fundamental socio-economic forces ripping the country apart, is the characteristic of American liberal-conservative, Democratic-Republican, politics. It suffers a lot of fools.


The problems that America faces, that cause so much frustration and rage, are now deep and persistent, and will require solutions that will be very radical in the American context. But they'll have to be, as the man said, as radical as reality. American workers are not suffering just because of trade agreements and offshoring. By some measures, 88% of jobs were lost to robots and other labor-saving devices. Tax incentive might bring some factories come back, but neither the Donald nor the Democrats can bring back jobs from China that don't exist. China now has "zero labor" factories that run 24/7 with the lights off. When thousands of truck drivers lose their jobs, those self-driving Uber vehicles will still be zipping around American interstates, and the profits will be driven into pockets in Silicon Valley, without a pit stop in Beijing. As Barry Lando points out, we are in the midst of a "perfect storm of technology" that "will lead to a net loss of over 5 million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies by 2020."


So it's the entire architecture of capitalism that has to be questionedthe whole issue of who produces wealth and who appropriates it, and what kind of social order would do that justice. All the issues raised by that pesky guy who keeps returning, "yesterday and today." There is no avoiding it. This is a moment requiring very radical thinking and action. No more half-assed tinkering.


The radicalism will come, either from the right or from the left, but it will come. Correction: It is coming from the right; the left better make another kind of radicalism real. And this is going to requirenot, pace Barack, an "intramural scrimmage," but a knock-down fight on behalf of everybody in the bottom 90% of the country, a fight in which we must force the ruling class to lose wealth and power.


That's also going to require the American left, such as it is, to make a serious examination of the relationship between identity politics and class politicsa relationship that, for the last thirty years, has been a function of most of the American left's management by, and submission to, the Democratic Party as a party of capital. The effective hegemony of the Democratic Party over left-liberal discourse and strategizing has created and enforced, as Adolph Reed, Jr. puts it, a "moral economy" that implicitly accepts as just: "a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources…, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people." This is equal-opportunity capitalist identity politics, and it's been pursuedtime to be honestat the expense of class politics. Or, as Reed puts it more sharply: "it is [itself] a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism."


To fight Trump and all he represents, we need to join the well-honed commitment to racial and gender equality with an invigorated, inclusive, and pointedly anti-capitalist class politics, which will hurt ruling class interests, prerogatives, and power, and which the Democratic Party will therefore do everything in its power to steer us away from.


The intensification of inequalitywhich even a mainstream Keynesian economist like Piketty understands is an intrinsic tendency of capitalismwill only get exponentially worse, given the dynamic of automated productivity discussed above. In this context, we're facing questions that might seem utopian, but they are urgent necessities for any kind of just society. Why should the wealth deriving from the fantastic new sources of productivity not be appropriated and distributed socially, allowing for less work and greater social security for everyone?


There will, in fact, be no way to substantially and permanently improve the lives of the discarded and enragedof all colors and genderswithout changing our social economy from one in which the first priority is that individuals are entitled to accumulate as much wealth as possible, to one in which the first priority is that everyone has economic security and social dignity. And that's a radical change that will demand a fight.


We have to start by fighting for things like: universal single-payer healthcare, steep, frankly redistributive progressive taxation (as we had in the 50s, bordering on a "maximum income" policy), a complete overhaul of the electoral process, expansion of Social Security, free public higher education and a cancelling of student debt, and an end to ceaseless wars for the defense industries and for Israel (and, yes, you have to say that last bit, or go back to scrimmaging). Then we have to go on to demand guaranteed jobs and income for all.


These demands have to, and can, be made in a way that's direct and easily understood. Single-payer is simpler to explain than Obamacare because single-payer isn't hiding conflicting popular and profit interests. Sure, there will be fights over how to pay for them, and those fights will be opportunities to learn about and dispel economic myths (including the myth that taxes pay for government programs, but that's another story). These measures do not add up to socialism, but they will move toward a socialist reorganization of society, and should be promoted frankly as such.


Yes, it is time for affirmative action for the entire working class, and that is socialism.


Tell me how impossible all this is, how the entire ruling class and establishment media will mobilize against it. You mean like how impossible it was for Donald Trump to become President?


Here's the first lesson everyone on the left should learn from Donald Trump: All these formidable establishment powers are not as omnipotent as they have fooled us into thinking they are. If you have a movement and a leadership which actually, forthrightly, fights for the things that will improve the lives of everyone except the top 10%, and mobilizes the bottom 90%, things suddenly become possible.


That kind of leadership will never come from the committed-to-capitalism Democratic Party (yes, including Elizabeth Warren).


Of course, we will not get all of these things at once, but getting even one would be a major reversal of fortunea step, finally, in the right direction. Let's take the one example of single-payer healthcare. You couldn't ask for a better issue. Obamacare is collapsing on its own deceptive contradictions, and Trump and the Republicans are promising to "replace" it. But the only thing you can replace it with that won't be worse is a single-payer system. This is not that hard to explain. Medicare, an enormously popular program, is right there as an example. Indeed, the fight for single-payer is going will be the way to prevent the privatization of Medicare.


There can be no left progressive movement of any worth in the Untied States that doesn't start fighting right now for a single-payer, universal coverage health insurance program, And no movement that's managed by Hillary and the "Never, ever" Democrats will do that. That's why progressives and leftists should spend zero minutes fretting over who will become Soros and Saban's next towel boy or girl at the DNC. Ignore them, and just wage the damn fight.


The second lesson that Trump has shoved our face into is more sobering: The left has failed. As Reed puts it, again: "The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one." For the reasons cited above and many others, the left in America is a political non-entity. When the Libertarians, led by Mr. "Who's Aleppo?" win three times the vote of Jill Stein and the Greens, it's telling us something about the extensive hold of capitalist ideology. It's that thing I hear when my working-class Latino Facebook friend and my renowned female doctor in one of the nation's premier medical research facilities, both tell me they voted for Trump because: "He's a businessman, and he knows how to create the jobs. He tells it like it is." That's the pop-culture, Apprentice-Shark Tank flavor of capitalist ideology that helped to elect Trump, and that we are a long way from overcoming.


Of course, this is not a fixed position. The success of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the increasing attractiveness of the socialist idea to millennials, demonstrate that there are real possibilities. But Bernie's capitulation, and his refusal to run on the Green ticket, betrayed what I think was a very real possibility to spread left-oppositional ideas across the political map. It's very possible that Bernie could have beaten Trump. And even if Bernie had lost on a third-party line, he would likely have gotten enough of the vote to change the political conversation going forward in important ways.


That opportunity for the American left was lost to Bernie's TINA conviction: There Is No Alternativeto the Democratic Party. His choice was a trailing shadow of the opportunity that Syriza lost in Greece last year, because, as I pointed out in previous essays, the Syriza leadership could not imagine their way out of the European version of TINA (explicitly: No Alternative to capitalism).


In Europe and America, the capitulation of an incipient populist left paves the way for a populist right. Political actors like Bernie and Syriza are so convinced that if they fight for the left they'll lose to the right, that they revert to fighting for a center that no longer existsand the right wins anyway. It doesn't make one terribly hopeful. We've already lost a couple of precious opportunities. Let's not lose any others.


Ironically, it is Donald Trump who has demonstratedalbeit in a Bizarro, demented waythe political truth of the old May '68 slogan: Demand the impossible.


If we don't want to do that? Well, America is now a ship of fools, with Donald at the helm. Enjoy the ride.



http://www.thepolemicist.net/2016/11/shi...aches.html

Calling V. Putin! Calling V. Putin! Your moving bus wheels are calling!


Donald Trump Leaning Toward Extreme Militant John Bolton As Secretary Of State

Donald Trump ran on a platform of non-intervention, but is leaning toward picking an extraordinarily hawkish secretary of state.


11/14/2016 05:07 pm ET | Updated 1 hour ago
Jessica Schulberg Foreign Affairs Reporter, The Huffington Post
Ryan Grim Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post




Former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is a leading pick to serve as secretary of state in a Trump administration.

WASHINGTON ― President-elect Donald Trump is leaning toward naming as secretary of state John Bolton, a bellicose enemy of Russia and Iran who is among the most hawkish members of the Republican foreign policy community, according to two sources familiar with Trump's thinking.
Bolton is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but served less than two years, as Democrats banded together to block his long-term appointment. His time was marked by a rapid uptick in anti-American sentiment among the global diplomatic community. Bolton remains one of the most disliked foreign policy operators on the world stage.

One source said that Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker still had an outside chance of winning the position, if he made a play for it and enough Republicans rallied to his side. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Rudy Giuliani is also under consideration for the post.

Bolton would be an aggressive selection for Trump, shattering his pledge to work peacefully with other countries. Bolton, who has called for the bombing of Iran, held high-level roles in three different Republican administrations between 1998 and 2006. He is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank whose vice president has described Trump as "an idiot."

Bolton, though an assistant, declined to comment.

If confirmed as Trump's top diplomat, Bolton would be reporting to a commander-in-chief who appears to espouse a worldview that is diametrically opposed to his own. Bolton has repeatedly slammed President Barack Obama for his willingness to engage in limited cooperation with Russia in Syria and Iran.

"While Mr. Obama sleepwalks, Mr. Putin is ardently pursuing Russia's Middle East objectives," Bolton wrote in a 2013 op ed that argued against assuming the U.S. has common interests with Russia in Syria.

In 2014, speculating that Russia was responsible for the downing of a Malaysian plane over Ukraine, Bolton told Fox News, "I think we've got to begin to treat Russia like the adversary that Putin is currently demonstrating it to be."

Two years later, Bolton expressed hope that that Obama wouldn't do anything in his final year in office to legitimize Russia's military efforts in Syria, where U.S. defense officials say Russia is focused on bombing Syrian opposition fighters rather than ISIS. "Until Mr. Obama departs the White House," Bolton wrote in October 2015, "Washington must not do anything perceived as legitimizing Moscow's new Latakia air base, or the presence of Russian aircraft and cruise missiles in the skies over the region. The suggestion that we exchange deconfliction codes with Russia is what the French call a fausse bonne idee, a superficially appealing bad idea."

Bolton's potential new boss, a man who has extensive financial ties with Russia, is far more likely than Obama to legitimize Moscow's military endeavors in the Middle East. Trump broke with the Republican orthodoxy by suggesting that the U.S. abandon its efforts to fight ISIS in Syria and let Russia take over. "This has happened before. We back a certain side, and that side turns out to be a total catastrophe," Trump said in September, referring to the U.S. support for the opposition groups fighting ISIS and Syrian president Bashar Assad. "Russia likes Assad, seemingly, a lot let them worry about ISIS. Let them fight it out."

On Monday, as talk of Bolton as secretary of state swirled, Trump called Putin. The two leaders committed to working to normalize relations, a Kremlin readout of the call said. The current relationship, Trump and Putin agreed, is "extremely unsatisfactory."

Trump listed Bolton as one of his "go-to" experts on national security issues during a "Meet the Press" interview in August. "He's, you know, a tough cookie, knows what he's talking about," Trump said of Bolton.

It was a curious comment from a man who had spent the previous several months (falsely) boasting that he was opposed to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and hitting his opponent for her vote in support of the war. Bolton was in favor of invading Iraq as early as 1998. In the lead-up to the invasion, Bolton, then under secretary of state for arms control, peddled false information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program. Even after it became clear that the former Iraqi dictator did not possess such weapons, Bolton [URL="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/john-bolton-no-regrets-about-toppling-saddam/article/2564463"]maintained that the war was a good idea.
[/URL]
Trump ran as the candidate who would break the stranglehold of big money on the nation's politics, but the rise of Bolton suggests money may still win out. Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who provided the lion's share of the financial backing for Trump's candidacy, is a major supporter of Bolton. The largest donor to John Bolton's Super PAC over the years has been the Mercer family; in 2014, Trump gave $5,000 to the Super PAC.

During the presidential campaign, some antiwar critics of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Trump would be a less hawkish president than Clinton. Trump naming Bolton as secretary of state would call the quality of that analysis into question.

Maybe Putin and the rest of the world will dodge a bullet.

I'd hate see Guiliani as Attorney General but as Sec. of State he'd be waaaaayyyy better than Bolton.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tr...3A07H?il=0

The Myths Democrats Swallowed That Cost Them the Presidential Election

http://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-democ...ion-521044



By Kurt Eichenwald On 11/14/16 at 12:22 PM


On Friday, I almost assaulted a fan of my work. I was in the Philadelphia International Airport, and a man who recognized me from one of my appearances on a television news show approached. He thanked me for the investigative reporting I had done about Donald Trump before the election, expressed his outrage that the Republican nominee had won and then told me quite gruffly, "Get back to work." Something about his arrogance struck me, so I asked, "Who did you vote for?"
He replied, "Well, Stein, but" I interrupted him and said, "You're lucky it's illegal for me to punch you in the face." Then, after telling him to have sex with himselfbut with a much cruder termI turned and walked away.
A certain kind of liberal makes me sick. These people traffic in false equivalencies, always pretending that both nominees are the same, justifying their apathy and not voting or preening about their narcissistic purity as they cast their ballot for a person they know cannot win. I have no problem with anyone who voted for Trump, because they wanted a Trump presidency. I have an enormous problem with anyone who voted for Trump or Stein or Johnsonor who didn't vote at alland who now expresses horror about the outcome of this election. If you don't like the consequences of your own actions, shut the hell up.
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week
Latino protesters wave signs during a march and rally against the election of Republican Donald Trump as president of the United States in Los Angeles on November 12. Ted Soqui/Reuters
Let me explain this as clearly as I can: In reporting on Trump and his campaign, my job has never been to promote or oppose his election. I believed the media was letting him slide toward Election Day without conducting the normal examination performed on all presidential candidates, while instead wasting time on idiotic spectacles like Trump's appearance on The Dr. Oz Show. So I dug in, working full-time from July up to election eve, without weekends off, missing family events. In exchange, my family and I received multiple death threats and endured many online attacks. Yet we stayed committed to my work so that the public could have as much information as possible before they cast their ballot on who should the leader of the free world.
That was the only job for everyone else: vote. They wouldn't have to miss parents' day at their kids' schools; they wouldn't have to skip weekend events; they wouldn't have to neglect their spouses. All they had to do was recognize that governance is not a game, and that their choices matter. Again, if they supported Trump or truly didn't care who won after acquiring a real understanding of both candidates' positionsrather than spouting some self-indulgent, bumper-sticker logicI have no complaints. If they opposed Trump while refusing to do what they could to keep him out of officethat is, vote for the only other candidate who could winthen they need to go perform sex with themselves. And I mean that in much cruder terms.
The problem this election season has been that liberal Democratsjust like too many Republicanshave been consumed by provably false conspiracy theories. They have trafficked in them on Facebook and Twitter, they have read only websites that confirm what they want to believe, and they have, in the past few months, unknowingly gulped down Russian propaganda with delight. In other words, just like the conservatives they belittle, they have been inside a media bubble that blocked them from reality. So before proceeding, let's address a few fantasies about this campaign:
1. The Myth of the All-Powerful Democratic National Committee

Easily the most ridiculous argument this year was that the DNC was some sort of monolith that orchestrated the nomination of Hillary Clinton against the will of "the people." This was immensely popular with the Bernie-or-Busters, those who declared themselves unwilling to vote for Clinton under any circumstances because the Democratic primary had been rigged (and how many of these people laughed when Trump started moaning about election rigging?). The notion that the fix was in was stupid, as were the people who believed it.
Start with this: The DNC, just like the Republican National Committee, is an impotent organization with very little power. It is composed of the chair and vice chair of the Democratic parties of each state, along with over 200 members elected by Democrats. What it does is fundraise, organize the Democratic National Convention and put together the party platform. It handles some organizational activity but tries to hold down its expenditures during the primaries; it has no authority to coordinate spending with any candidate until the party's nominee is selected. This was why then-President Richard Nixon reacted with incredulity when he heard that some of his people had ordered a break-in at the DNC offices at the Watergate; he couldn't figure out what information anyone would want out of such a toothless organization.
The first big criticism this year was that the DNC had sponsored "only" six debates between Clinton and Bernie Sanders in some sort of conspiracy to impede the Vermont senator. This rage was built on ignorance: The DNC at first announced it would sponsor six debates in 2016, just as it had in 2008 and 2004. (In 2012, Barack Obama was running for re-election. Plus, while the DNC announced it would sponsor six debates in 2008, only five took place.) Debates cost money, and the more spent on debates, the less available for the nominee in the general election. Plus, there is a reasonable belief among political experts that allowing the nominees to tear each other down over and over undermines their chances in the general election, which is exactly what happened with the Republicans in 2012.
Still, in the face of rage by Sanders supporters, the number of DNC-sponsored debates went up to ninemore than have been held in almost 30 years. Plans for a 10th one, scheduled for May 24, were abandoned after it became mathematically impossible for Sanders to win the nomination.
Sanders speaks to Clinton during the Democratic presidential debate sponsored by MSNBC at the University of New Hampshire in Durham on February 4. The conspiracy theory embraced by Bernie-or-Busters that the DNC-sponsored debates were all held on nights when no one would watch is completely false, Kurt Eichenwald argues. Mike Segar/Reuters
Notice that these were only DNC-sponsored debates. There were also 13 forums, sponsored by other organizations. So that's 22 debates and forums, of which 14 were only for two candidates, Clinton and Sanders. Compare that with 2008: there were 17 debates and forums with between six and eight candidates; only six with two candidates, less than half the number in 2016. This was a big deal why?
The next conspiracy theory embraced by Bernie-or-Busters was that the DNC-sponsored debates were all held on nights no one would watch. Two took place on a Saturday, two on Sunday, three on a Thursday, one on a Tuesday and one on a Wednesday. In 2008, the DNC scheduled two on a Monday (one was canceled), and one each on a Sunday, Wednesday, Tuesday and Thursday. Not including any of the 2016 forums, there were 72 million viewers for the DNC-sponsored debates, almost the same amount75 million viewersas there were for every debate in 2008, including those sponsored by other organizations. And those Saturday debates, which Sanders fans howled no one would watch, were the third- and fifth-most watched debates (one of them was 3 percent away from being the fourth-most watched).
In other words, the argument that the DNC rigged the debates is, by any rational analysis, garbage. For those who still believe it, hats made of tin foil are available on Amazon.
Next, the infamous hack of DNC emails that "proved" the organization had its thumb on the scale for Clinton. Perhaps nothing has been more frustrating for people in the politics business to address, because the conspiracy is based on ignorance.
Almost every email that set off the "rigged" accusations was from May 2016. (One was in late April; I'll address that below.) Even in the most ridiculous of dream worlds, Sanders could not have possibly won the nomination after May 3at that point, he needed 984 more pledged delegates, but there were only 933 available in the remaining contests. And political pros could tell by the delegate math that the race was over on April 19, since a victory would require him to win almost every single delegate after that, something no rational person could believe.
Sanders voters proclaimed that superdelegates, elected officials and party regulars who controlled thousands of votes, could flip their support and instead vote for the candidate with the fewest votes. In other words, they wanted the party to overthrow the will of the majority of voters. That Sanders fans were wishing for an establishment overthrow of the electorate more common in banana republics or dictatorships is obscene. (One side note: Sanders supporters also made a big deal out of the fact that many of the superdelegates had expressed support for Clinton early in the campaign. They did the same thing in 2008, then switched to Obama when he won the most pledged delegates. Same thing would have happened with Sanders if he had persuaded more people to vote for him.)
This is important because it shows Sanders supporters were tricked into believing a false narrative. Once only one candidate can win the nomination, of course the DNC gets to work on that person's behalf. Of course emails from that time would reflect support for the person who would clearly be the nominee. And given that their jobs are to elect Democrats, of course DNC officials were annoyed that Sanders would not tell his followers he could not possibly be the nominee. Battling for the sake of battling gave his supporters a false belief that they could still winsomething that added to their increasingly embittered feelings.
According to a Western European intelligence source, Russian hackers, using a series of go-betweens, transmitted the DNC emails to WikiLeaks with the intent of having them released on the verge of the Democratic Convention in hopes of sowing chaos. And that's what happenedjust a couple of days before Democrats gathered in Philadelphia, the emails came out, and suddenly the media was loaded with stories about trauma in the party. Crews of Russian propagandistsworking through an array of Twitter accounts and websites, started spreading the story that the DNC had stolen the election from Sanders. (An analysis provided to Newsweek by independent internet and computer specialists using a series of algorithms show that this kind of propaganda, using the same words, went from Russian disinformation sources to comment sections on more than 200 sites catering to liberals, conservatives, white supremacists, nutritionists and an amazing assortment of other interest groups.) The fact that the dates of the most controversial emailsMay 3, May 4, May 5, May 9, May 16, May 17, May 18, May 21were after it was impossible for Sanders to win was almost never mentioned, and was certainly ignored by the propagandists trying to sell the "primaries were rigged" narrative. (Yes, one of them said something inappropriate about his religious beliefs. So a guy inside the DNC was a jerk; that didn't change the outcome.) Two other emailsone from April 24 and May 1were statements of fact. In the first, responding to Sanders saying he would push for a contested convention (even though he would not have the delegates to do so), a DNC official wrote, "So much for a traditional presumptive nominee." Yeah, no kidding. The second stated that Sanders didn't know what the DNC's job actually waswhich he didn't, apparently because he had not ever been a Democrat before his run.
Bottom line: The "scandalous" DNC emails were hacked by people working with the Kremlin, then misrepresented online by Russian propagandists to gullible fools who never checked the dates of the documents. And the media, which in the flurry of breathless stories about the emails would occasionally mention that they were all dated after any rational person knew the nomination was Clinton's, fed into the misinformation.
In the real world, here is what happened: Clinton got 16.9 million votes in the primaries, compared with 13.2 million for Sanders. The rules were never changed to stop him, even though Sanders supporters started calling for them to be changed as his losses piled up.
Hillary Clinton, accompanied by her husband former U.S. President Bill Clintonand running mate Senator Tim Kaine, addresses her staff and supporters about the results of the U.S. election at a hotel in New York, November 9. Carlos Barria/Reuters
2. The Myth That Sanders Would Have Won Against Trump

It is impossible to say what would have happened under a fictional scenario, but Sanders supporters often dangle polls from early summer showing he would have performed better than Clinton against Trump. They ignored the fact that Sanders had not yet faced a real campaign against him. Clinton was in the delicate position of dealing with a large portion of voters who treated Sanders more like the Messiah than just another candidate. She was playing the long gameattacking Sanders strongly enough to win, but gently enough to avoid alienating his supporters. Given her overwhelming support from communities of colorfor example, about 70 percent of African-American voters cast their ballot for herClinton had a firewall that would be difficult for Sanders to breach.
When Sanders promoted free college tuitiona primary part of his platform that attracted young peoplethat didn't mean much for almost half of all Democrats, who don't attendor even plan to attendplan to attend a secondary school. In fact, Sanders was basically telling the working poor and middle class who never planned to go beyond high school that college studentsthe people with even greater opportunities in lifewere at the top of his priority list.
So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.
Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for ita long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.
Then there's the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont's nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words "environmental racist" on Republican billboards. And if you can't, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.
Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, "Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,'' while President Daniel Ortega condemned "state terrorism" by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was "patriotic."
The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don't know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

Could Sanders still have won? Well, Trump won, so anything is possible. But Sanders supporters puffing up their chests as they arrogantly declare Trump would have definitely lost against their candidate deserve to be ignored.
Which leads back to the main point: Awash in false conspiracy theories and petulant immaturity, liberals put Trump in the White House. Trump won slightly fewer votes than Romney did in 201260.5 million compared with 60.9 million. On the other hand, almost 5 million Obama voters either stayed home or cast their votes for someone else. More than twice as many millennialsa group heavily invested in the "Sanders was cheated out of the nomination" fantasyvoted third-party. The laughably unqualified Jill Stein of the Green Party got 1.3 million votes; those voters almost certainly opposed Trump; if just the Stein voters in Michigan had cast their ballot for Clinton, she probably would have won the state. And there is no telling how many disaffected Sanders voters cast their ballot for Trump.
Of course, there will still be those voters who snarl, "She didn't earn my vote," as if somehow their narcissism should override all other considerations in the election. That, however, is not what an election is about. Voters are charged with choosing the best person to lead the country, not the one who appeals the most to their egos.
If you voted for Trump because you supported him, congratulations on your candidate's victory. But if you didn't vote for the only person who could defeat him and are now protesting a Trump presidency, may I suggest you shut up and go home. Adults now need to start fixing the damage you have done.

That article, above, from Newsweek is what one would/should expect from one of many propaganda mouthpieces of the Establishment Machine [which comprises both the Republicans and the Democrats]. It denigrates Sanders and Stein and posits that the Democrats can be the real answer to anything in the USA. I don't buy it. The Democrats are only the lesser of evils to the Republicans - but BOTH are evil and part of a pact with the 'Devil' of the Military, Intelligence, Corporate, Financial Oligarchy - which we need to get rid of before they get rid of the Planet and what LITTLE is left of our freedoms and democracy. NDAA was passed under Obama. Obama used drones to kill thousands of innocents - foreign and US Citizens. Bill Clinton and Obama both destabilized nations and waged needless wars for the Military-Industrial-Intelligence. Clinton repealed Glass-Steigall, and Obama bailed out the big banks but not the citizens they have robbed..and one can go on and on. The view that the Democrats are some life raft to the rough seas of the Republicans is at best naive, at worst the kind of dangerous thinking that has landed the USA exactly where it is now. As for Trump being elected there is no one to blame but the DNC itself for ignoring the will of their supporters to have Sanders, and not to have another big champion of things as usual and a war monger/owned-by-wallstreet - Clinton. Sanders, while far from perfect was the only mainstream person who could have defeated Trump and at the same time made some difference - he really should have run on the Green Party ticket - the Democratic machine on paper proved they didn't want his brand of Democratic Socialism. The Green party has the kind of change we need to avert disaster in the USA and the World - nothing less than that will do. It is exactly this idea that we can make change without changing from the usual choices between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum [Republican / Democrats] that American never changes [except in the smallest ways that don't 'bother' the secret ruling Mandarins], and the World is on the brink of collapse on all fronts - moral, environmental, endless wars, trickle-up economics, diminution of freedoms and liberties, et al. No more business as usual; no more lesser of evils; no more doing the same old things and expecting a new outcome (the definition of defective thinking)!

How I yearn for an end to the Wolfowitz Doctrine --- and the neoncons who sail in her.

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Can Trump succeed?

by Thierry Meyssan

While the Atlantist Press persists in projecting onto Donald Trump the artificial debates that Hillary Clinton imposed during the campaign, and while the calls to assassinate the elected President multiply, Trump is preparing to change the paradigm, and overthrow the Puritan ideology that has dominated his country for two centuries. But can he succeed?

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 15 NOVEMBER 2016 عربي ESPAÑOL FRANÇAIS DEUTSCH РУССКИЙ TÜRKÇE

Donald Trump and General Michael T. Flynn The international Press is working to persuade us that the electors of Donald Trump have expressed a revolt of the white working classes against the élites. But in fact, all they are doing is prolonging the message of Hillary Clinton, whom these electors specifically rejected. It refuses to consider that the current cleavage has no connection with the themes she treated during the campaign.And yet we have all seen a new line of fracture appear, not between, but in the heart of the two major parties. A number of Republican leaders supported Clinton, and several Democrat leaders supported Trump. Bernie Sanders even met with him to offer his services. Also, the analysis of the votes in terms of community loyalties (women, Hispanics, African Americans, Muslims , gays, etc.) no longer has any meaning. Although we were inundated with the idea that a vote for Trump was a vote for the hatred of minorities, at least a third of these minorities voted for him.A few journalists tried to base their comments on the precedent of Brexit, although they had been just as surprised by that decision, and just as incapable of explaining it. If we analyse foreign precedents, we have to at least to take into account the surprise elections of Narendra Modi in India and Rodriguo Dutertre in the Philippines (an old US colony).Despite the propaganda, the British did not vote against the Europeans, nor the Indians against the Muslims, nor the Philippinos against the Chinese. On the contrary, each of these three peoples hope only to save their own culture and live in peace. Although he was responsible for the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, in 2002, Narendra Modi offered his hand to Pakistan, persuaded that the problems between the two countries have been organised and sustained by the colonial powers. In the same way, Rodriguo Dutertre created astonishment by seeking rapprochement with the Chinese «enemy».A few weeks ago, I explained in these columns [1] that the cleavage which divides the United States is not determined either by ethnic loyalties or social class, but by the Puritan ideology. If this explanation is accurate, we should witness an existential struggle of the partisans of this ideology against the Trump administration. Everything that the new President undertakes will be systematically sabotaged. Already, the sporadic demonstrations against the result of election show that the losers have no intention of respecting the rules of democracy.Rather than thinking about how we might profit from the Trump administration, we should be asking ourselves how we can help him to succeed in liberating his country from its own imperialism, in order to put an end to a unipolar world and the «Wolfowitz doctrine» - or how we can substitute cooperation for confrontation.While the US Press speculates on the possible nomination of personalities from the Bush administration to the Trump administration, we should be anticipating the political role that the commercial executives of the Trump Organisation will have to play. They are the only ones he can trust.We should also take into account General Michael T. Flynn who, although he is a Democrat, was Trump's main advisor on foreign policy and defence during the campaign. A Commander of Military Intelligence, from the first Geneva Conference to the conquest of Iraq by Daesh, he has never stopped opposing President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Generals David Petraeus and John Allen, and Jeffrey Feltman, concerning the use of jihadists and terrorism in order to maintain US imperialism. Whether as National Security advisor, director of the CIA, or Secretary of Defense, he will be the best ally for peace in the Levant.

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Former UK Ambassador, Craig Murray, writes an excellent analysis of the heads we win, tails you lose form of neoliberal politics that he believes will continue under Trump.

One wonders if only a revolution will dislodge this bloody awful ruling ideology? And quite honestly I can see that happening sometime in the future if these greedy, crazy fuckers continue to refuse to change their ways. And the really telling thing is that no longer listen nor care about dissent. Theer arrogance will be their downfall, of course.

Quote:Neo-Liberalism Under Cover of Racism [URL="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/11/neo-liberalism-cover-racism/#tc-comment-title"]

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15 Nov, 2016 in Uncategorized by craig

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It is indeed peculiar that Trump can be elected President on 47.4% of the popular vote. But not nearly as peculiar as that the Conservatives can have untrammelled power in the UK on 36.9% of the popular vote. Both electoral systems need reform, but the UK's is absolutely indefensible.

There is a tiny blogroll down the bottom right hand margin of this blog, and most of the blogs on it have fallen by the wayside over the 12 years we have been going. But one which goes from strength to strength is Informed Comment by Juan Cole, whom I view as a towering intellectual figure. I have read reams and reams of comment on the direction of politics with the election of Trump, but Juan's take is the best I have seen and I do urge you to read it.

The fact that death rates are actually increasing among middle aged white males in the USA is truly startling. To my understanding that is not yet the case in the UK, but what is true here is that the life expectancy gap between the rich and poor is growing again after a century of falling.
I think it is pretty common ground that we are seeing a reaction against the political class by the dispossessed former industrial working and middle class. That is scarcely remarkable. Given the vast increase in wealth inequality, against which this blog has been railing since its inception, a reaction is inevitable.

There are two ways the establishment has sought to divert this anger.

The first, and highly successful method is to convince people that it is not the massive appropriation of resources by the ultra-wealthy which causes their poverty, it is rather competition for the scraps with outsiders. This approach employs pandering to racism and xenophobia, and is characteristic of UKIP and Trump.

The second approach employs the antithesis to the same end. It is to co-opt the forces marginalised by the first approach and rally them behind an "alternative" approach which is still neo-liberalism. This is identity politics which reached its apotheosis in the Clinton campaign. The Wikileaks releases of DNC and Podesta emails revealed the extreme cynicism of Clinton manipulation of ethnic group votes. Still more blatant was the promotion of the idea that Hillary being a corrupt neo-con warmonger was outweighed by the fact she was female. The notion that elevating extremely rich and privileged women already within the 1% to top positions, breaks a glass ceiling and benefits all women, is the precise feminist equivalent of trickledown theory.

That the xenophobic strand rather than the identity politics strand won will, I predict, prove to have no impact on continued neo-liberal policies.
The British Labour Party has played identity politics for generations just as blatantly, as I know from my experience campaigning in Blackburn. The resources of state institutions are directed to obtain geographically and politically cohesive ethnic block votes.

Both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn faced intellectually risible accusations of misogyny from the neo-liberal faux-feminists when they presented an alternative economic policy. This is the most conclusive proof of the appropriation of identity politics to the neo-liberal cause.

Opinion polls both before and after the US election appear to demonstrate beyond doubt that Sanders would have trounced Trump. But to a certainty, the financial and international interests who bankrolled Clinton would much prefer Trump to Sanders.

A number of people have been questioning what Hillary's banker backers will make of her defeat. The answer is they will not be too disappointed. She earned her money by seeing off Sanders.

It is fascinating to see that the attitude of the salaried establishment, both elected and administrative, of the Labour and Democratic parties to Sanders and Corbyn has been identical.

The Labour nomenklatura tried to defeat Corbyn's election by disqualifying or barring from voting well over 100,000 voters. The Democrat nomenklatura succeeded in their equivalent task by devices including a rigged count in Nevada, collusion with Clinton in sequencing of primaries to harm Sanders, and passing of debate questions in advance.

While Corbyn has retained his leadership position, he is not in control of the party machinery which daily leaks and spins against him. His leadership has been fatally undermined from day one by humiliating, vicious and continual attacks given to the media by his own party. As time goes by, it is more and more plain he is not able to get rid of the MPs and functionaries whose sole purpose is to promote right wing ideology. There is currently a controversy as to whether Dave Nellist and other old socialists should be permitted to rejoin. I cannot understand why they would wish to be in a party with John Woodcock, Simon Danczuk, Jess Phillips and lest we forget, still Blair, Mandelson and Campbell.

In short, in neither the US nor the UK is a viable radical alternative going to be put before the electorate in the near future. Those who believe either Brexit or Trump presage a break from neo-liberalism will be sore disappointed. They represent the continuance of neo-liberalism, but with popular discontent diverted into added racism.

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Progressives Eat Their Own Children

By David William Pear
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Where did all the progressives go for the last eight years? Most fair-weather progressives slept while Obama broke every campaign promise he made"ssshhh, he did the best he could! No he didn't! And neither did most progressives who were happy as long as they thought it did not require them to make any sacrifices.
Most wannabe progressives slept while the Nobel Peace Prize president made speeches about "Just Wars", bragged about being good at killing people, and he proved it when he murdered, maimed, widowed, orphaned and destroyed the lives of millions of people in every corner of the globe. With Obama, Clinton and Kerry it was not "]ust War", it was just more wars.
Obama did not do all the killing alone. The military-industrial-Cogressional-banking-media complex, who are the oligarchs that are really in charge of the USA, caused the worldwide wars of terror and chaos. Had Clinton been elected president fair-weather progressives would still be in hibernation. Now they have suddenly realized that the Bill of Rights have been turned into ashes and are not worth the paper they were written on.
The Bill of Rights had been on life support for decades. Civil liberties and progressive anti-war principles went into a hibernation when President Nixon ended military conscription on January 27th, 1973; one week after his second inauguration after defeating the anti-war liberal Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern (D-SD) by a landslide. It was McGovern's defeat that ushered in the era of the Superdelegates to abort the democratic and Democratic Party's ability to nominate a candidate that was "too liberal and too anti-war" to be "electable".
Superdelegates were imposed on the liberal base of the Democratic Party so they could not "runaway" with the party again. As we saw with the rigged defeat of Bernie Sanders by the Clinton machine, the chances of reforming the Democratic Party are dead. The hierarchy of the Democratic Party have all sold out to the Military-Industrial Complex, Wall Street and neoliberal capitalist exploiters. The Democratic Party is just another path to war, trade agreements and climate change.
Do not be fooled by the lies of "pink washing", minority and women's rights, getting money out of politics, and "Stronger Together" propaganda of the Democratic Party bosses. They do not care about progressive and anti-war causes. All they care about is getting elected and raking in the cash. Clinton lost because she lied about her progressive agenda and the so-called "most progressive platform in history". If you still believe that lie, then just read Obama's 2008 and 2012 platforms, and compare it to his record of war and oppression of civil liberties. Obama does not deserve the credit of being "moderate" or "fascist lite". He was not, except when compared to warmongers such as Clinton, Kerry and John McCain.
The Democratic Party is beyond resuscitation since September 11th of 2001. The feeble anti-war and anti-fascist movement during the George W. Bush presidency died on the election of Barack Obama on November 7th, 2008. The Democratic Party needs a decent funeral. It's stinking corpse is what produced Trump.

Many progressives are in shock and disbelief from a President Trump. They are in denial of what a President Clinton would have brought. They are in mourning for their self-centered agendas. We have a President Trump because too many progressives abandoned their core principles of anti-war and peace. The most important issues of ending wars for empire, imperialism, political and economic monopoly, the wars of terror and regime change, war crimes, torture, homeland spying, administrative detention, assassinations by drones, night raids, foreign bases, the occupation of Palestine, Gaza, and the bloated military budget, all were mostly ignored during the election.
Too many progressives jumped on the Bernie Bandwagon without holding his feet to the fire on foreign policy, wars of aggression, his unconditional support for Israel, and military spending. Instead they were dreaming of free college and other self-centered domestic policies without a clue how to pay for them and without empathy for the suffering all over the world, nor did they care about the horrible, and illegal US wars of aggression, which is the worst of war crimes because it is the cause of all other war crimes.
Bernie-ites told progressives who criticized Bernie's record on war, military spending and unconditional support for Israel to shut up. They said that if Bernie came out with an anti-war position that he would be committing "political suicide". They said not to worry that Bernie was a "secret anti-war" candidate. It was these so-called progressives who were "secretly pro-war". It was these so-called progressives who were selfishly pro their limited special domestic agendas. It was these so-called progressives who committed political suicide by abandoning their core principles.
Had Bernie had a principled anti-war policy he would not have just had a bandwagon. He would have had the whole parade. He would have defeated Clinton and Trump. Instead Bernie committed political suicide by not accepting Jill Stein's offer for him to run as the top of the Green Party. Instead Bernie committed political suicide by accepting Clinton's fraudulent nomination without protest and without even letting his loyal delegates finish their votes at the Democratic Convention. Instead Bernie committed political suicide by supporting Clinton. Trump won because of Bernie.
President Trump is not the fault of Jill Stein and her supporters, as they have been accused. Jill Stein had the most principled platform of all the candidates. Jill Stein gave voters an opportunity not to vote for the "lesser evil", but to vote for the greater good. A vote for Jill Stein was not a wasted vote; a vote for Clinton was the wasted vote. Those wasted votes on Clinton got Trump, without even sending the Democratic Party the message that the days of voting for evil, lesser or not, are over.
Progressives are now eating their own children. They are blaming everybody but themselves for Trump. They are still talking Clinton propaganda that Trump was the fault of Jill Stein, Russian hackers, Wikileaks, and "disloyal" Bernie and Stein supporters. Those that are disloyal to anti-war and progressive principles are those that backed Clinton as the lesser evil.
We can not expect anything from both the Republican and Democratic parties in the future except more evil. Progressives have been talking about the corruption and evil of the two party system for a long time. When are they going to "walk the talk"?
Good change will only happen when progressives stop doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As Einstein said, that is the definition of insanity.