The first black nation to overthrow its colonial masters still enslaves 300,000 of its children. Unlike the initial slavery which gave birth to Haiti, this slavery is not a result of kidnapping or intertribal warfare but poverty.

In an island with a population of 6 million, 300,000 children perform unpaid labor because their parents are simply too poor to care of them. Thus, they are given to families slightly better off than themselves where they work in an unregulated market for food and shelter. These vulnerable children are the face of Haitian poverty.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of millennials who do their research, it has now become well-known that Hillary Clinton, in her role as secretary of state, intervened in the internal politics of Haiti to prevent the government from raising the minimum wage $.24 per hour to $.61 per hour.

However, even that is only half of the scandal. Given the constant bleeding of American jobs to places like Haiti, how does it benefit American workers to keep wages in third world countries low?

From January 2008 to April 2015, about 86,800 jobs (or 39%) in the U.S. apparel manufacturing sector had disappeared. These jobs continue to be shipped abroad because free trade deals have made it lucrative for companies to outsource jobs to places where labor is cheap but to sell goods to places where consumer prices are high.

A State Department invested in the interest of ordinary Americans would have told the garment manufacturers if they don’t like Haiti’s new minimum wage laws, they can bring the 25,000 jobs back to the United States. Instead, Clinton took steps to maintain the very conditions that make outsourcing so attractive to corporations.

Who does our government work for? Who will Hillary Clinton work for?

(The Nation) Nation editors examined the qualifications of both Clinton and Sanders before making an endorsement in the race. We concluded that, on the most basic measures, both candidates are exceptionally well qualified: Clinton is a former senator and secretary of state with vast experience working on an array of critical issues: from children’s rights to women’s rights to healthcare reform, and the direction of American foreign policy. Sanders is a former mayor, congressman, and US senator who helped to form the Congressional Progressive Caucus, became a master of the legislative process (using amendments to shape policy even in Republican-controlled congresses), and forged a remarkable bipartisan coalition to develop and pass the most comprehensive piece of veterans legislation to be enacted in decades.

We could accept either of these candidates as president, but we endorsed Sanders with enthusiasm because we believe that he has additional qualifications rooted in judgement and vision.He did vote against authorizing the war in Iraq, and against the Patriot Act, and against trade deals that have done enormous damage to the prospects of American workers and American communities. He has steadily opposed the death penalty and argued for criminal-justice reform, and he recognizes and challenges the economic underpinnings of structural racism. He objects to regime change as a foreign-policy priority and instead argues for a focus on diplomacy and development. And he has recognized, along with Elizabeth Warren, that our rigged economy extends from a rigged political process in which special-interest groups and billionaires have far more influence that citizens. On many of these issues, Clinton has developed credible positions, but she keeps arguing for lowered expectations and more limited goals. That’s not what is needed. When Sanders speaks of the need for a political revolution, he evidences an understanding of just how serious the moment is and just how bold we must be in fighting for the future. To our view, that recognition is a qualification. Indeed, it is the qualification that makes us confident that Bernie Sanders is the candidate who is best prepared to be the Democratic nominee and the president of the United States.

(TomDispatch) And this, of course, is exactly the repetitive world of war (and failure) into which the young, especially in America’s poorest high schools, are being recruited, even if they don’t know it, via JROTC. It's a Pentagon-funded program that promises to pave the way for your future college education, give meaning to your life, and send you to exotic lands, while ensuring that the country’s all-volunteer military never lacks for new troops to dispatch to old (verging on ancient) conflicts. As Ann Jones has written, “It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty, however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is ‘youth development program.’” So let’s offer thanks for small favors when someone -- in this case, ex-Army Ranger and TomDispatch regular Rory Fanning (author of Worth Fighting For: An Army Ranger’s Journey Out of the Military and Across America) -- feels the urge to do something about that massive, militarized propaganda effort in our schools. In my book, Fanning is the equivalent of any 12 of our generals and we need more like him both in those schools and in our country. Tom

The Wars in Our Schools
An Ex-Army Ranger Finds a New Mission
By Rory Fanning

Early each New Year’s Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where the snowpack meets the shore and boot through a thick crust of lake ice, yelling and swearing as we dive into near-freezing water.

It took me a while to begin to understand why I do this every year, or for that matter why for the last decade since I left the military I’ve continued to inflict other types of pain on myself with such unnerving regularity.

“Is the military like Call of Duty?” one of the students asks, referring to a popular single-shooter video game.

“I’ve never played,” I respond. “Does it include kids who scream when their mothers and fathers are killed? Do a lot of civilians die?”

“Not really,” he says uncomfortably.

“Well, then it’s not realistic. Besides, you can turn off a video game. You can’t turn off war.”

A quiet settles over the room that even a lame joke of mine can’t break. Finally, after a silence, one of the kids suddenly says, “I’ve never heard anything like this before.”

What I feel is the other side of that response. That first experience of mine talking to America’s future cannon fodder confirms my assumption that, not surprisingly, the recruiters in our schools aren’t telling the young anything that might make them think twice about the glories of military life.

I leave that school with an incredible sense of calm, something I haven’t felt since my time began in Afghanistan. I tell myself I want to speak to classrooms at least once a week.

My thought now is full disclosure going forward. If a teenager is going to sign up to kill and die for a cause or even the promise of a better life, then the least he or she should know is the good, the bad, and the ugly about the job. I had no illusions that plenty of kids -- maybe most of them, maybe all of them -- wouldn’t sign up anyway, regardless of what I said. But I swear to myself: no moralism, no regrets, no judgments. That’s my credo now. Just the facts as I see them.

It’s finally starting to dawn on me, however. In our world, life is scary and I’m not the only one heading for Lake Michigan on cold winter mornings or gloomy nights. Teachers out there in the public schools are anxious, too. It’s dark days for them. They are under attack and busy fighting back against school privatization, closures, and political assaults on their pensions. The popular JROTC program is a cash cow for their schools and they are discouraged from further rocking a boat already in choppy waters.

You’ll bring too much “tension” to our school, one teacher tells me with regret. “Most of my kids need the military if they plan on going to college,” I hear from another who says he can’t invite me to his school anyway. But most of my requests simply go out into the void unanswered. Or promises to invite me go unfulfilled. Who, after all, wants to make waves or extracurricular trouble when teachers are already under fierce attack from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his unelected school board?

I understand and yet, in a world without a draft, JROTC’s school-to-military pipeline is a lifeline for Washington’s permanent war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Its unending conflicts are only possible because kids like those I've talked to in the few classrooms I’ve visited continue to volunteer. The politicians and the school boards, time and again, claim their school systems are broke. No money for books, teacher’s salaries and pensions, healthy lunches, etc...

And yet, in 2015, the U.S. government spent $598 billion on the military, more than half of its total discretionary budget, and nearly 10 times what it spent on education. In 2015, we also learned that the Pentagon continues to pour what, it is estimated, will in the end be $1.4 trillion into a fleet of fighter planes that may never work as advertised. Imagine the school system we would have in this country if teachers were compensated as well as weapons contractors. Confronting the attacks on education in the U.S. should also mean, in part, trying to interrupt that school-to-military pipeline in places like Chicago. It’s hard to fight endless trillion-dollar wars if kids aren’t enlisting.

Paul Krugman has been a voice in the wilderness for liberals for decades. But when he issues screeds in the Times against Bernie Sanders’ alleged lack of policy credentials and Sanders’ “petulant self-righteous” followers, he misses the boat completely.

Krugman needs a reality check: Wonkish policy details about economic reform are irrelevant. Sanders isn’t an economist. Neither is Clinton. As president, his economic initiatives will have more to do with whom he surrounds himself, not with whether or not he gets it exactly right about the role of the “big banks” in the 2007 Great Recession.

And Sanders is right enough. Big banks, with their bloated indebtedness and irresponsible lending and support for risky derivatives that even they didn’t always understand contributed greatly to the meltdown. Further, these bankers took the bailout money they received from taxpayers and gave themselves big bonuses the next year (until they were shamed into temporarily rescinding them). So, Sanders, I expect, will surround himself not with Wall Street insiders like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner (these are more likely Hilary supporters and fellow-travelers) but, instead, with progressive economists like Dean Baker, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, and Krugman, himself. The economic policy details that Krugman now demands will most likely emerge from this Sanders-led brain trust, not from a candidate interview with the N.Y. Daily News.

Furthermore, I think Krugman should quit being a martyr by repeatedly saying that Bernie supporters are out there accusing him and other anti-Sanders ideologues of being “corrupt or even criminal.” I’m not sure where he is finding this left wing McCarthyite paranoia? By which reputable Sanders supporters is he being scapegoated in such a ridiculous way? It's as if Krugman wants to wrap himself in the cloak of being a renegade victim when, in reality, his pro-Hilary bias puts him squarely in the liberal establishment mainstream.

Krugman should get his head out of his “inside-the-academic economics-blogosphere” and think about real world politics for a change. Sanders understands that even were he a policy wonk, the President can’t make radical stuff happen without the support of a social movement agitating for such change. And it is here that Sanders and Krugman parts ways, since Krugman doesn’t identify as a political activist and is hardly radical when critiquing moronic Republican orthodoxy or Paul Ryan. But Sanders at least has a cursory appreciation of the absolute necessity of building grassroots support for his radical proposals.

When John L. Lewis petitioned Roosevelt for certain planks of a workers’ rights platform, FDR reportedly said, “Go out there and make me!” The political question of our day is how to mobilize people to “make” their elected representatives legislate on behalf of the have-nots against the haves. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), the details of how to unwind a huge financial institution is irrelevant to this task. Clinton could no more lay out such a process than Sanders. Is Krugman similarly critical of her for such a failure to do so? In either case, it doesn't really matter.

Social movements are made up of people who are passionate and are fueled by a sense of meaning and purpose. This is what Sanders brings to the table and it’s where Clinton fails. It’s not about “idealism vs. realism” but about what exactly it takes to animate millions of people to demand radical social change. And that energy isn’t going to be stoked by a candidate making the distinctions Krugman parsed in the Times, such as those between the sub-prime lending practices of Countrywide Financial, “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers or unscrupulous financial behemoths like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse.

Krugman wishes, I’m sure, that our citizenry would just be more damn rational and understand these allegedly profound distinctions, but they don’t and won’t. But we know when we’re being screwed and we resonate when a candidate acknowledges that fact.

(The Intercept_) In a USA Today op-ed headlined “Big Donors Can Save Democracy From Donald Trump,” Hoffman tries to make the case that Trump has gone off the rails because he doesn’t have people like Hoffman telling him what to do.

Here’s how Hoffman puts it: “Large donors … often serve as an executive board of sorts, challenging campaigns to act worthy of their investment.”

Hoffman writes, “Trump brags that he is without big donors. That may be true. But it also means he is without restraint. … In business and politics alike, oversight is a good thing.”

If you’re not paying close attention, that makes the whole process sound public-spirited and inspiring. If you are, however, you realize Hoffman is telling us that he and his cohort see their money as buying them seats on the board of a corporation they ultimately control.

Hoffman acknowledges a possible downside of the system: “Raising seven figures for a candidate grants you access that the average voter will never see. This unfairness has been a source of major voter ire this cycle. Injustice makes people angry. And it is angry voters who have been pulling levers for Trump.”

But he dismisses it in favor of an even loftier goal. Big donors aren’t just backing a candidate, he says; they’re also investing in their ideology.



:snip:

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/07/super-pac-backer-reveals-that-big-money-entitles-donors-to-campaign-oversight/

(In These Times) By my count, from the announcement of Sanders’ campaign to today, this marks at least six distinct times that media commentators have declared the Sanders campaign dead in the water. Despite being repeatedly proved wrong, pundits have continued to confidently assert predictions as fact and what appears to at times be little more than gut instinct as gospel.

This isn’t just an issue when it comes to the Sanders campaign. Much has been written about the media’s similarly repeated dismissals of Trump, who has been declared to have no shot at the presidency at least as many times as—if not more than—Sanders, most recently due to his poor standing among women in national polls. Yet the election is still a whole seven months away, and a lot can change in that time. It seems to me that for the most part, we have very little to gain, and much to lose, from such predictive journalism.

In 1981, Duke University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars produced a joint study on presidential nominations that raised concerns about the way media coverage shapes nomination races. Its words are just as prophetic today:

Winners of early primaries quickly become “front-runners” with subsequent increases in media attention; losers, despite substantial promises of support in later primaries, are quickly relegated to the category of also-rans and have difficulty raising money and attracting volunteers…the participants in Iowa’s caucuses or New Hampshire’s primary have a much greater say in the selection of the major party presidential nominee than do voters of, for instance, New Jersey or California.

Among other things, the study suggested that media avoid labeling “every primary the make-it-or-break-it election.”