A federal judge in California has ruled that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has no duty under federal pesticide law to complete rulemaking on the disclosure of hazardous ingredients in pesticide products.

If the decision stands the EPA will therefore be allowed to keep the public in the dark on the full list of toxic ingredients in pesticides registered by the agency.

The judgment came last week in response to a lawsuit filed by the Center for Environmental Health, Beyond Pesticides, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, arguing that EPA is failing in its legal duty to protect consumers from supposedly ‘inert’ but often harmful pesticide ingredients.

US District Judge William Orrick stated in his ruling: “The EPA has no mandatory duty to require disclosure of ‘inert’ ingredients in pesticides, even if those ingredients qualify as hazardous chemicals under separate statutes.”

Instead, he ruled, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) states that EPA “may require” disclosure of inert ingredients, and so enjoys broad discretion on whether to force manufacturers to divulge the ingredients.

But Yana Garcia, attorney for the plaintiffs, insisted that the EPA’s effort to encourage voluntary disclosures has “simply not worked”, and that the toxic ingredients clearly meet the standard for ‘unreasonable risk’ – which the EPA is tasked with combating under FIFRA.

The litigants are now considering whether to appeal the judgment. “It defies logic that chemicals EPA finds to cause cancer and permanent neurological conditions would not meet this standard”, Garcia stated. “EPA has been dragging its feet for decades. We don’t want to be back here in 10 years. We hope EPA can solve this problem now.”

The 200 ‘inert’ ingredients that poison and kill

The ligants in the case have argued for decades that people and communities cannot make informed decisions on pesticide products without full disclosure of all product ingredients.

The claimed ‘proprietary interests’ of chemical manufacturers are also “bogus”, they maintain, “given the burgeoning market of pesticide products exempt from registration under the FIFRA 25(b) provision, which are required to disclose all ingredients.”

An inert ingredient is defined as any ingredient that is ‘not active’, or specifically targeted to kill a pest. According to a 2000 report produced by the New York State Attorney General, The Secret Ingredients in Pesticides: Reducing the Risk, 72% of pesticide products available to consumers contain over 95% inert ingredients and fewer than 10% of pesticide products list any inert ingredients on their labels.

The report also found that more than 200 chemicals used as inert ingredients are hazardous pollutants in federal environmental statutes governing air and water quality, and, from 1995 list of inert ingredients, 394 chemicals were listed as active ingredients in other pesticide products. For example, naphthalene is an inert ingredient in some products and listed as an active ingredient in others.

Some ‘inert’ ingredients are even more toxic than the active ingredients. One of the most hazardous ingredients in the commonly used herbicide Roundup, POEA, is a surfactant, which is classified as an inert and therefore not listed on the label. Researchers have found that POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.

A long story of delay and prevarication

A decision in this case has been long awaited, as the dispute began back in 2006 when Beyond Pesticides and other groups petitioned the EPA to require pesticide manufacturers to disclose 371 inert ingredienton their pesticide product labels.

After an extended period of time, in 2009 EPA finally responded to the petition asking it to require that inert ingredients be identified on the labels of products that include them in their formulations.

Then, on December 23, 2009, EPA took another promising step forward with an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), announcing its intention to seek public input on developing an inert ingredient disclosure rule. Putting forth two alternative proposals: the first would require listing of all ingredients already identified as hazardous; the second would simply require listing of all ingredients.

Unfortunately, EPA has taken no further action since then. As a result, some of the original petitioners filed an ‘undue delay’ complaint against EPA in 2014 for failing to complete rulemaking that would require pesticide manufacturers to disclose the inert ingredients on their pesticide product labels.

In response to that lawsuit, EPA retracted its previous ANPR and intention to move forward with rulemaking. Instead, EPA issued a letter to the original 2006 petitioners describing its intentions to seek non-rulemaking regulatory programs and voluntary disclosure standards, stating:

“In sum, we believe we have identified a more effective and timely way to achieve our common objective; but, because this approach would no longer pursue the rulemaking the EPA initiated via the ANPRM seeking to mandate the disclosure of potentially hazardous inert ingredients on pesticide labels, as requested in the 2006 petitions, this amended response constitutes a denial of the petitions.”

EPA then used its change of position and denial of the 2006 petition as a basis to have the undue delay lawsuit thrown out because it would no longer be issuing a rulemaking.

Lawsuit claims ‘unreasonable risk’

In response to this, plaintiffs filed this current lawsuit, advocating against EPA’s current policy to encourage voluntary disclosure by manufacturers, given that it has not been effective to-date in making people aware of what inert ingredients are found in pesticides.

They also continue to argue that the toxic ingredients in question clearly meet the standard for ‘unreasonable risk’ which the EPA is tasked with combating under FIFRA. The failure of EPA to require the disclosure of inert ingredients therefore poses many problems for those trying to protect human health, according to Beyond Pesticides:

“Failure to disclose the ingredients not only prevents consumers and decision makers from making informed decisions and comparing hazards. Local and state governments also run into roadblocks in their efforts to protect citizens, as they cannot readily evaluate what is in the pesticides products (formulations) that they are spraying in their communities to make independent judgments on safety, putting their citizens at risk.

“Under the prevailing laws, it is EPA’s duty to assess these risks and disclose the necessary information, through pesticide labels, as to what harmful ingredients pesticides contain.”

Beyond Pesticides has long advocated a regulatory approach that prohibits hazardous chemical use and requires alternative assessments to identify less toxic practices and products under the ‘unreasonable adverse effects’ clause of FIFRA.

Oliver Tickell is Contributing Editor at The Ecologist.

Sources: Beyond Pesticides; Courthouse News Service.

Western governments may be dithering over taking action over climate change, but their defence chiefs think differently – at least regarding changing weapons systems to suit rising world temperatures.

Major defense companies are studying the retro-fitting and upgrade of armanents, power plants and platforms to cope with rising temperatures amid predictions the world’s hot spots are getting hotter on land and on sea.

The world’s defence chiefs are particularly concerned with two zones in particular, the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. Both seas are shallow and therefore absorb more heat than the great oceans and certainly the world’s seas.

And rising temperatures are already making themselves felt. Some of a group of six British Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers, costing $1 billion each, have stopped operating in the Persian Gulf because the sea was too hot, with water temperatures rising above 90 degrees fahrenheit (32.2C).

The issue saw Royal Navy staff questioned on 2nd June by the UK’s Commons Defence Committee as to why their Type 45 destroyers keep losing power. The response was that the ships’ turbines overheated resulting in massive technical failures that can slow the ships to a crawl.

Don’t blame us – it’s the laws of physics!

Such ships were not designed to be operated in what amounts to cruising around in a sea hotter than a bath. The turbines are designed to be cooled by air pumped in from outside, but in Gulf the ship’s power plants cannot bring down the temperature of this air fast enough, causing the engines to cut out before they overheat.

Rolls-Royce’s Tomas Leahy told the Commitee that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had failed to specify that the Type 45s would have to operate in warm environments, insisting that the destroyers’ WR-21 gas turbine engines met the MoD’s specification:

“Are the conditions in the Gulf in line with that specification? No they are not, so the equipment is having to operate in far more arduous conditions than initially required by that specification.”

BAE Systems Maritime Managing Director John Hudson added: “What we have found in the Gulf is that it takes the gas turbine generator bit into an area which is sub-optimal for the generator, and also we found that with the drive units that the cooling system created condensation within the drive units which caused faults and that caused electrical failures as well.”

He then insisted that it was not just a problem of the Rolls-Royce engines: “It’s not a fault of the WR-21. Even if it was a simple-cycle gas turbine it will still suffer the same fate in those circumstances, it’s a law of physics.” Committee member Douglas Chapman MP, of the Scottish National Party, responded: “I am absolutely stunned!”

“It’s a billion-pound asset that you’re putting into perhaps a war zone and we don’t know if these people who are making up the complement on that ship will go in there and come back out alive, because there might be a problem with the power system on the ship”, committee member Douglas Chapman MP further told the parliamentary session.

Like other modern navies, the British had designed the ship, each with a 190-strong crew, for a wide range of contingencies, but engineers admit that rapid climate change is another matter.

The Royal Navy is building a new base in Bahrain to service both the Type 45 destroyers, and the future Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, with maintainance facilities to deal with temperature blow outs.

Until then experts say that all of the Type 45 Destroyers should be equipped with back-up diesel generators to deal with main engine failure in such warm water. But the solutions are not so simple. Power plants, weapons and generators can all suffer from the heat, and extra power is needed just to keep everything cool.

Will politicians finally take climate change seriously?

Scientists for years have been warning of the tropicalization of the Mediterranean Sea – another area where American, Russian, French, British and Italian ships manouvre, with operations concentrating on the turbulance in Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Tunisia.

In October of last year The Guardian reported that soaring Gulf temperatures may make tourism in the area a thing of the past, with destinations like Dubai and Doha not being fit for human habitation by the end of this century.

Meanwhile last summer a ‘heat dome’ stretching across the Middle East from Dubai to Beirut resulted in the second-highest heat index ever recorded on Earth, with air temperatures rising above 120F (48.9C) in Iran and Iraq for days on end last August. Iran was forced to declare a mandatory four-day national holiday as nearby Basrah (Iraq), experienced over a week above 120F.

Just bear in mind that US troops operations in the Iraq war in 2003 were curtailed by temperatures of just 90-100F (32-38C), with troops needing increased water allocations and working short hours, while demands on fuel stores increased due to increased power demand and lower helicopter flight efficiency in the hot air.

Coping with temperature extremes is not new for the world’s navies. In WW11, the US navy pioneered air conditioning methods as its crews, men raised in a generallly temperatate climate, sweltered inside their steel boxes deployed against Japan in the Pacific.

From fine sand getting into the engines of tanks, helicopters even guns in the first Gulf War to toughening hulls against polar ice, military planners have prided themselves for decades in coming up with innovative solutions to cope with climatic conditions. What is new, and harder to deal with, is designing for a climate that is itself changing.

Politicians need to address head on the climate change issues it seems to want to ignore, if not least for their military.

Richard Galustian is a Senior Consultant to several major international corporations involved in MENA. Based on his background and experience, he has unique access to various influential components of British, US and Middle Eastern and North African societies. One his primary endeavors involves providing political and business advice. Richard has lived and worked most of the past 40 years in the Middle East and North Africa. Noteworthy is the fact that he spent three years in Iraq, post-2003 invasion as well as then time in Afghanistan in 2006 and more recently in Libya. He is a regular columnist with Gulf News in Dubai, Times of Malta, Oman Times as well as having contributed articles to various prestige British and American publications including London’s The Spectator.

Anneka’s astounding hat towers a staggering one foot above her head and cascades well over 6ft down to the ground. Designed and hand made by celebrity milliner and Britain’s Next Top Model Judge Louis Mariette, it has been created solely to get people talking about the need to improve horse welfare standards at British racecourses.

Anneka explains that whilst people often only blame the steeplechase races for horse fatalities, Ascot too has had its fair share of deaths and actually ranks as Britain’s most dangerous Flat (turf) venue. And in 2014, four horses died. They were Case Statement who died from a broken lower leg; Inchila and Sir Graham Wade both suffered a fractured pelvis; and Tiger Cliff collapsed and died after the race. Last year, two horses died: Stravagante who was destroyed due to a fractured cannon-bone and King Edmund who fell and broke his neck.

So what can you do?

It’s time, says Anneka, to put the safety of the animals must above profit and to do just that she is proposing and campaigning for the following measures:

• An end to National Hunt Racing which involves jumping fences and ditches, often referred to as hurdles or steeplechase. The Grand National and Cheltenham festival races are two of the biggest and most dangerous steeplechases, responsible for 40 deaths in the last 10 years. Cheltenham saw seven deaths this year and there were five at Aintree.

• An end to the whip, which has been shown to be ineffective and can cause painful welts. The use of the whip urges the horse to go beyond what it is able to comfortably do, and can result in injuries and stress. Norway banned the whip in 1982 and there is no reason why the UK cannot follow that example. In 2014, there were 586 breaches of the British Horseracing Authority rules against excessive whip use. Racing Writer of the Year, Alan Lee, declared in The Times that Royal Ascot is ‘a stage on which jockeys have regularly been guilty of a win-at-all-costs attitude with the whip in the principal races’.
  

• Shorten the course to under 4.5 miles Anything over this is too long and gruelling for most horses. Many horses can suffer stress, strokes and collapse.

“I don’t think that we will ever see an end to horse racing, as it is deeply embedded in British Culture” says Anneka, “however we can certainly bring attention to improvements which so desperately need to be made. 

By wearing this hat, I am hoping to open up a calm and civilised discussion with MP’s and those working in the horse racing industry to explore how we can move forward.

Sadly the hedonism of the Royal Ascot event is an intoxicating smoke screen to the reality of the death and suffering behind the sport of horse racing and its time we sat up, opened our eyes and realised that Royal Ascot is not simply just the glamorous event we perceive it to be”

The hat’s maker, Louis, like Anneka, is a great animal lover. The son of a vet he has specialised in celebrating nature in his hat making. This hat took two weeks to make – each of the 1400 foam roses have been hand dipped in Red Stallion pain and although the finished hat is heavy and painful to wear, Anneka is undeterred. “My head pain is irrelevant, when those poor horses are being whipped to within an inch of their life out there on the tracks,” she says.

Anneka Svenska The Activist:

Conservationist Anneka has long worked to stop wildlife crime. She recently teamed up with Chris Packham, Bill Oddie and Steve Backshall to make an anti-badger cull film and last week joined forces with Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher to deliver a petition to the Chinese Embassy to request that the cruel Yulin Dog Meat Festival should be stopped.

Anneka has travelled to the depths of South Africa alongside David Attenborough’s ‘Life of Birds’ producer Nigel Marven to film the desperate decline of the rhinos. She has also rescued over 300 stray and abused dogs from Romania and Cyprus, as well as many from the cruel dog meat trade of Thailand.

Anneka’s production company GreenWorldTV supports under-funded animal charities and inspiring animal rescuers who find it hard to create film and media campaigns without backing.

Websites to visit if you would like to read more about the dangers of horse racing:

Horse Deathwatch, Animal Aid, League Against Cruel Sports, The Coalition for the Protection of Race Horses

Source for statistic on numbers of racehorse deaths since 2007 is The Horse Deathwatch website

Dear Bernie,

You ran a great race, achieving something that most of us thought would be impossible, running as an ‘avowed’ socialist in today’s United States of America, against one of the most hardened and tested political machines in the country, the Clintons, and winning 22 primaries and caucuses with a total of over 11 million votes.

And while Hillary and her minions threw everything they had at you, including voter suppression efforts, lies about your voting record in the Senate, unfair assistance from the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic officials, and manipulation of the media, you came excruciatingly close to knocking her off and winning the nomination.

Okay, you didn’t make it to the finish line.

Now the pressure is on you, from the corporate media that originally ignored you, then attacked you and finally resorted to outright corruption the night before the June 7 primary by prematurely calling the race for Clinton in hopes of depressing your turnout in the last six primaries, and now to a meeting tomorrow with President Obama, who will try and convince you to give up, and to endorse Hillary Clinton.

But while it’s true that way back at the start of your seemingly Quixotic campaign, you did promise to endorse her if you lost, that campaign has since evolved beyond even your imagination into a powerful movement for ‘political revolution’, with millions of people behind it.

The real Hillary you exposed

Also over the intervening months, you have both seen how unprincipled your opponent can be, and have also done a masterful job of highlighting just how corrupted she has become as a person and politician.

You’ve pointed out how she has been bought by the too-big-to-fail bankers, who have paid her legal bribes totaling millions of dollars, euphemistically calling them ‘speaking fees’. You’ve denounced her acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars of legal bribes in the form of campaign contributions from key industries like the drug companies, the military contractors, the oil giants and even the for-profit prison industry.

While you graciously declined early on and waited, in my view, way too long to go after Hillary for her improper and illegal use, for years, of a private email server during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, late in the primary battle you finally did point out that she was acting in an illegal way (one that now has her as the first presumptive presidential candidate in memory running while being actively investigated by the FBI).

You also intimated – correctly in my humble view as an investigative reporter – that this move of hers to avoid the Freedom of Information Act was linked to her efforts to peddle influence to US corporate executives and foreign leaders in return for cash going into the Clinton Foundation coffers – a sordid arrangement reeking of corruption and self-dealing.

You’ve been right in all of this campaign criticism, and you have successfully exposed Hillary Clinton as the bought-and-paid candidate of big money, a woman who will say whatever she thinks it takes to get herself elected but who, in the end, will be serving the interests of those who paid for her election, not of the American people.

But after all that, you’re prepared to back her?

How could you now even think about turning around and doing what you originally said you would do and endorsing her? How could you, after exposing Clinton as the candidate of big banks, big pharma, big military and rich people, ask your millions of supporters – including people who dropped their hard-earned $27 into your campaign, often multiple times, to the tune, I believe, of over $200 million – suddenly turn around and ask them to back her in the general election?

If you were to endorse Hillary Clinton at this point, you would be destroying everything you have accomplished in this amazing campaign.

Many people – especially the young people for whom your movement may have been a first-ever experience at political action – would surely become cynical about politics. Others would just write you off as just another self-serving politician accepting a deal. Most would ignore any call for unity anyhow, making it doubly pointless and destructive for you to make it.

So what would you accomplish then, except perhaps to be repaid for your submission with some offer of a plum post on an important Senate Committee (assuming that the Republicans, in a race against Clinton, don’t end up staying in control of the Senate, making such a promised plum into a prune)?

Fortunately there is another path, and I’m sure you’ve been at least thinking about it. That is to run in the general election, this time going up against both Hillary and Trump (as well as the Libertarians and the Conservatives, who will be vying with Trump for the country’s right-leaning voters).

You could run as an independent. I’m sure you’d get plenty of financial backing again from your supporters, as in the primaries, and that you’d do creditably well, too if you did. But as Ralph Nader learned, the problem is you’d be wasting a lot if not most of your time and much of your funding fighting simply to get your name on state ballots – a process which the two established parties have conspired to make extremely difficult. In fact, many states’ deadlines for getting an independent name on the ballot have already, or are about to pass.

The Green way to victory

On the other hand, I know you have been approached about, but reportedly have yet to respond to, offers from people like Dr. Jill Stein, a leader of the Green Party and its presumptive nominee for this year’s presidential race as she was in 2012, and Seattle’s socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant too, about seeking and accepting the Green Party’s nomination for president (the Green Party’s nominating convention is in early August). Stein has even said she’d let you have the top spot, running for president!

As I assume you are aware, the Green Party is already on the ballot in 21 states having a total of 310 electoral votes, which is 40 more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. The party is reportedly working hard to get on a number of other state lines too in time for November’s election and is already close to having 25 states with another 60 electoral votes.

They’re not stopping there (and would do even better with some of your campaign money to pay for lawyers and petition gatherers). If you got that nomination, you’d be well on your way to being a viable national third-party candidate, and could work to get on the ballots of other critical states. This could be done in some states by getting smaller state parties, for example Peace & Freedom or the Working People’s Party to nominate you, and where no other option exists by fighting to get listed as an independent candidate.

Could you win in such a five-way race? I believe that in this unprecedented political environment, running against two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who have the highest negative polling numbers in the history of polls, you could indeed win.

You start with the more than 10 million people who’ve already voted for you once in the primaries (who would surely vote for you again in November), and since you have already run in all 50 states, your name recognition is as high as it could possibly be. Unlike Ralph Nader in his campaigns, you are virtually guaranteed as a third-party candidate to be included in the nationally televised debates in the fall, which will only increase your chances of winning.

And you know you will be deluged with campaign funds from your backers in even greater amounts than during the primaries if you are running for the White House for real in the general election.

But even if you didn’t win an outright majority of electoral votes, there’s a good chance you’d win the presidency. All you would really have to do is out-do Hillary Clinton. That’s because given the limitations of Donald Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of even the total right-leaning candidates’ votes, it’s a pretty safe bet that between the two of you, Clinton and yourself, you will win a combined majority of the electoral votes.

Making your ‘political revolution’ real

Recall that the electors in the Electoral College are not required by law to vote for the candidate who won their state’s popular vote. Like those frustrating ‘super delegates’ of the Democratic Party, they are free to vote for whom they choose (remember the Nixon elector who famously voted for anti-war Rep. Pete McClosky, or the electors who voted in 1824 for John Quincy Adams, though Andrew Jackson had won both the electoral and the popular vote that year?).

This means if you were to win more electoral votes than Clinton, you could just sit tight and let her contemplate the choice between allowing the election to move from a deadlocked Electoral College to the Republican-led House for a decision, which would mean her turning the White House over to a Republican (possibly Donald Trump!) or alternatively instructing her electors to vote for you.

If you ended up with fewer electors than Hillary, you could do the same, and have your electors vote for her, making her the president.

In either of those cases, I suspect you could both agree to have the one handing over the electors become the vice president, perhaps with some important responsibilities assigned to the role as part of a publicly transparent deal.

What should be particularly attractive about this plan is that by your running as a Green, you would be institutionalizing that ‘political revolution’ that you launched a year ago with your primary run. A Green campaign with you as the marquis candidate would put the Green Party on the ballot in all 50 states for the 2018 off-year election, as well as the 2020 presidential election.

It would transmute the Green Party instantly from a perennial protest vote option into a major party going forward, perhaps even supplanting the increasingly corrupted and out-of-touch Democratic Party that you for so long avoided joining.

The downside? What downside?

In fact, with you topping a Green ticket this year, many people, perhaps including some with name recognition, could be expected to run for Senate and House on that party line, and in such a tumultuous election year, they might well be voted into office as Green Party candidates, further undermining the Establishment two-system in Congress, and encouraging yet more people to run as Green candidates in 2018.

Frankly, aside from the wear-and-tear of another grueling three-to-four-month campaign (though you seem to thrive on them!), I don’t see any downside to this plan. You still get a chance to win the White House, you get to continue to lead and further develop a political revolution, and you don’t have to eat crow and endorse a candidate whom you clearly know to be the embodiment of the very rigged political-economic system you’ve been decrying.

Bernie, it’s been 44 years since I’ve been this excited about a US presidential campaign. In 1972, George McGovern put his whole Senate career on the line and tackled one of the most corrupt and ruthless politicians of the day, Richard Nixon, because he passionately believed that the Vietnam War had to be ended, and that poverty in America and other issues had to be seriously addressed.

He lost, but he fought a noble battle that was epic and that is still remembered. In a way, with Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, he really won, for it was his candidacy and the movement he was part of that pushed Nixon to adopt the extreme tactics of Watergate that led to his downfall.

It’s your turn now. You’ve already accomplished one helluva lot, and it almost seems unfair for me and your supporters to ask you, like Muhammed Ali after his draft refusal and ban from boxing, to climb back into the ring for another few punishing rounds of political combat, but we need you to do it.

Please, for the sake of the political movement you’ve begun to end America’s corrupt, rigged political and economic system, don’t stop now. Talk to Stein and Sawant and the Green Party, get their nomination for president and go for broke!

The movement you began will have you back! 

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

Dear Bernie,

You ran a great race, achieving something that most of us thought would be impossible, running as an ‘avowed’ socialist in today’s United States of America, against one of the most hardened and tested political machines in the country, the Clintons, and winning 22 primaries and caucuses with a total of over 11 million votes.

And while Hillary and her minions threw everything they had at you, including voter suppression efforts, lies about your voting record in the Senate, unfair assistance from the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic officials, and manipulation of the media, you came excruciatingly close to knocking her off and winning the nomination.

Okay, you didn’t make it to the finish line.

Now the pressure is on you, from the corporate media that originally ignored you, then attacked you and finally resorted to outright corruption the night before the June 7 primary by prematurely calling the race for Clinton in hopes of depressing your turnout in the last six primaries, and now to a meeting tomorrow with President Obama, who will try and convince you to give up, and to endorse Hillary Clinton.

But while it’s true that way back at the start of your seemingly Quixotic campaign, you did promise to endorse her if you lost, that campaign has since evolved beyond even your imagination into a powerful movement for ‘political revolution’, with millions of people behind it.

The real Hillary you exposed

Also over the intervening months, you have both seen how unprincipled your opponent can be, and have also done a masterful job of highlighting just how corrupted she has become as a person and politician.

You’ve pointed out how she has been bought by the too-big-to-fail bankers, who have paid her legal bribes totaling millions of dollars, euphemistically calling them ‘speaking fees’. You’ve denounced her acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars of legal bribes in the form of campaign contributions from key industries like the drug companies, the military contractors, the oil giants and even the for-profit prison industry.

While you graciously declined early on and waited, in my view, way too long to go after Hillary for her improper and illegal use, for years, of a private email server during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, late in the primary battle you finally did point out that she was acting in an illegal way (one that now has her as the first presumptive presidential candidate in memory running while being actively investigated by the FBI).

You also intimated – correctly in my humble view as an investigative reporter – that this move of hers to avoid the Freedom of Information Act was linked to her efforts to peddle influence to US corporate executives and foreign leaders in return for cash going into the Clinton Foundation coffers – a sordid arrangement reeking of corruption and self-dealing.

You’ve been right in all of this campaign criticism, and you have successfully exposed Hillary Clinton as the bought-and-paid candidate of big money, a woman who will say whatever she thinks it takes to get herself elected but who, in the end, will be serving the interests of those who paid for her election, not of the American people.

But after all that, you’re prepared to back her?

How could you now even think about turning around and doing what you originally said you would do and endorsing her? How could you, after exposing Clinton as the candidate of big banks, big pharma, big military and rich people, ask your millions of supporters – including people who dropped their hard-earned $27 into your campaign, often multiple times, to the tune, I believe, of over $200 million – suddenly turn around and ask them to back her in the general election?

If you were to endorse Hillary Clinton at this point, you would be destroying everything you have accomplished in this amazing campaign.

Many people – especially the young people for whom your movement may have been a first-ever experience at political action – would surely become cynical about politics. Others would just write you off as just another self-serving politician accepting a deal. Most would ignore any call for unity anyhow, making it doubly pointless and destructive for you to make it.

So what would you accomplish then, except perhaps to be repaid for your submission with some offer of a plum post on an important Senate Committee (assuming that the Republicans, in a race against Clinton, don’t end up staying in control of the Senate, making such a promised plum into a prune)?

Fortunately there is another path, and I’m sure you’ve been at least thinking about it. That is to run in the general election, this time going up against both Hillary and Trump (as well as the Libertarians and the Conservatives, who will be vying with Trump for the country’s right-leaning voters).

You could run as an independent. I’m sure you’d get plenty of financial backing again from your supporters, as in the primaries, and that you’d do creditably well, too if you did. But as Ralph Nader learned, the problem is you’d be wasting a lot if not most of your time and much of your funding fighting simply to get your name on state ballots – a process which the two established parties have conspired to make extremely difficult. In fact, many states’ deadlines for getting an independent name on the ballot have already, or are about to pass.

The Green way to victory

On the other hand, I know you have been approached about, but reportedly have yet to respond to, offers from people like Dr. Jill Stein, a leader of the Green Party and its presumptive nominee for this year’s presidential race as she was in 2012, and Seattle’s socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant too, about seeking and accepting the Green Party’s nomination for president (the Green Party’s nominating convention is in early August). Stein has even said she’d let you have the top spot, running for president!

As I assume you are aware, the Green Party is already on the ballot in 21 states having a total of 310 electoral votes, which is 40 more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. The party is reportedly working hard to get on a number of other state lines too in time for November’s election and is already close to having 25 states with another 60 electoral votes.

They’re not stopping there (and would do even better with some of your campaign money to pay for lawyers and petition gatherers). If you got that nomination, you’d be well on your way to being a viable national third-party candidate, and could work to get on the ballots of other critical states. This could be done in some states by getting smaller state parties, for example Peace & Freedom or the Working People’s Party to nominate you, and where no other option exists by fighting to get listed as an independent candidate.

Could you win in such a five-way race? I believe that in this unprecedented political environment, running against two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who have the highest negative polling numbers in the history of polls, you could indeed win.

You start with the more than 10 million people who’ve already voted for you once in the primaries (who would surely vote for you again in November), and since you have already run in all 50 states, your name recognition is as high as it could possibly be. Unlike Ralph Nader in his campaigns, you are virtually guaranteed as a third-party candidate to be included in the nationally televised debates in the fall, which will only increase your chances of winning.

And you know you will be deluged with campaign funds from your backers in even greater amounts than during the primaries if you are running for the White House for real in the general election.

But even if you didn’t win an outright majority of electoral votes, there’s a good chance you’d win the presidency. All you would really have to do is out-do Hillary Clinton. That’s because given the limitations of Donald Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of even the total right-leaning candidates’ votes, it’s a pretty safe bet that between the two of you, Clinton and yourself, you will win a combined majority of the electoral votes.

Making your ‘political revolution’ real

Recall that the electors in the Electoral College are not required by law to vote for the candidate who won their state’s popular vote. Like those frustrating ‘super delegates’ of the Democratic Party, they are free to vote for whom they choose (remember the Nixon elector who famously voted for anti-war Rep. Pete McClosky, or the electors who voted in 1824 for John Quincy Adams, though Andrew Jackson had won both the electoral and the popular vote that year?).

This means if you were to win more electoral votes than Clinton, you could just sit tight and let her contemplate the choice between allowing the election to move from a deadlocked Electoral College to the Republican-led House for a decision, which would mean her turning the White House over to a Republican (possibly Donald Trump!) or alternatively instructing her electors to vote for you.

If you ended up with fewer electors than Hillary, you could do the same, and have your electors vote for her, making her the president.

In either of those cases, I suspect you could both agree to have the one handing over the electors become the vice president, perhaps with some important responsibilities assigned to the role as part of a publicly transparent deal.

What should be particularly attractive about this plan is that by your running as a Green, you would be institutionalizing that ‘political revolution’ that you launched a year ago with your primary run. A Green campaign with you as the marquis candidate would put the Green Party on the ballot in all 50 states for the 2018 off-year election, as well as the 2020 presidential election.

It would transmute the Green Party instantly from a perennial protest vote option into a major party going forward, perhaps even supplanting the increasingly corrupted and out-of-touch Democratic Party that you for so long avoided joining.

The downside? What downside?

In fact, with you topping a Green ticket this year, many people, perhaps including some with name recognition, could be expected to run for Senate and House on that party line, and in such a tumultuous election year, they might well be voted into office as Green Party candidates, further undermining the Establishment two-system in Congress, and encouraging yet more people to run as Green candidates in 2018.

Frankly, aside from the wear-and-tear of another grueling three-to-four-month campaign (though you seem to thrive on them!), I don’t see any downside to this plan. You still get a chance to win the White House, you get to continue to lead and further develop a political revolution, and you don’t have to eat crow and endorse a candidate whom you clearly know to be the embodiment of the very rigged political-economic system you’ve been decrying.

Bernie, it’s been 44 years since I’ve been this excited about a US presidential campaign. In 1972, George McGovern put his whole Senate career on the line and tackled one of the most corrupt and ruthless politicians of the day, Richard Nixon, because he passionately believed that the Vietnam War had to be ended, and that poverty in America and other issues had to be seriously addressed.

He lost, but he fought a noble battle that was epic and that is still remembered. In a way, with Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, he really won, for it was his candidacy and the movement he was part of that pushed Nixon to adopt the extreme tactics of Watergate that led to his downfall.

It’s your turn now. You’ve already accomplished one helluva lot, and it almost seems unfair for me and your supporters to ask you, like Muhammed Ali after his draft refusal and ban from boxing, to climb back into the ring for another few punishing rounds of political combat, but we need you to do it.

Please, for the sake of the political movement you’ve begun to end America’s corrupt, rigged political and economic system, don’t stop now. Talk to Stein and Sawant and the Green Party, get their nomination for president and go for broke!

The movement you began will have your back! 

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

Dear Bernie,

You ran a great race, achieving something that most of us thought would be impossible, running as an ‘avowed’ socialist in today’s United States of America, against one of the most hardened and tested political machines in the country, the Clintons, and winning 22 primaries and caucuses with a total of over 11 million votes.

And while Hillary and her minions threw everything they had at you, including voter suppression efforts, lies about your voting record in the Senate, unfair assistance from the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic officials, and manipulation of the media, you came excruciatingly close to knocking her off and winning the nomination.

Okay, you didn’t make it to the finish line.

Now the pressure is on you, from the corporate media that originally ignored you, then attacked you and finally resorted to outright corruption the night before the June 7 primary by prematurely calling the race for Clinton in hopes of depressing your turnout in the last six primaries, and now to a meeting tomorrow with President Obama, who will try and convince you to give up, and to endorse Hillary Clinton.

But while it’s true that way back at the start of your seemingly Quixotic campaign, you did promise to endorse her if you lost, that campaign has since evolved beyond even your imagination into a powerful movement for ‘political revolution’, with millions of people behind it.

The real Hillary you exposed

Also over the intervening months, you have both seen how unprincipled your opponent can be, and have also done a masterful job of highlighting just how corrupted she has become as a person and politician.

You’ve pointed out how she has been bought by the too-big-to-fail bankers, who have paid her legal bribes totaling millions of dollars, euphemistically calling them ‘speaking fees’. You’ve denounced her acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars of legal bribes in the form of campaign contributions from key industries like the drug companies, the military contractors, the oil giants and even the for-profit prison industry.

While you graciously declined early on and waited, in my view, way too long to go after Hillary for her improper and illegal use, for years, of a private email server during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, late in the primary battle you finally did point out that she was acting in an illegal way (one that now has her as the first presumptive presidential candidate in memory running while being actively investigated by the FBI).

You also intimated – correctly in my humble view as an investigative reporter – that this move of hers to avoid the Freedom of Information Act was linked to her efforts to peddle influence to US corporate executives and foreign leaders in return for cash going into the Clinton Foundation coffers – a sordid arrangement reeking of corruption and self-dealing.

You’ve been right in all of this campaign criticism, and you have successfully exposed Hillary Clinton as the bought-and-paid candidate of big money, a woman who will say whatever she thinks it takes to get herself elected but who, in the end, will be serving the interests of those who paid for her election, not of the American people.

But after all that, you’re prepared to back her?

How could you now even think about turning around and doing what you originally said you would do and endorsing her? How could you, after exposing Clinton as the candidate of big banks, big pharma, big military and rich people, ask your millions of supporters – including people who dropped their hard-earned $27 into your campaign, often multiple times, to the tune, I believe, of over $200 million – suddenly turn around and ask them to back her in the general election?

If you were to endorse Hillary Clinton at this point, you would be destroying everything you have accomplished in this amazing campaign.

Many people – especially the young people for whom your movement may have been a first-ever experience at political action – would surely become cynical about politics. Others would just write you off as just another self-serving politician accepting a deal. Most would ignore any call for unity anyhow, making it doubly pointless and destructive for you to make it.

So what would you accomplish then, except perhaps to be repaid for your submission with some offer of a plum post on an important Senate Committee (assuming that the Republicans, in a race against Clinton, don’t end up staying in control of the Senate, making such a promised plum into a prune)?

Fortunately there is another path, and I’m sure you’ve been at least thinking about it. That is to run in the general election, this time going up against both Hillary and Trump (as well as the Libertarians and the Conservatives, who will be vying with Trump for the country’s right-leaning voters).

You could run as an independent. I’m sure you’d get plenty of financial backing again from your supporters, as in the primaries, and that you’d do creditably well, too if you did. But as Ralph Nader learned, the problem is you’d be wasting a lot if not most of your time and much of your funding fighting simply to get your name on state ballots – a process which the two established parties have conspired to make extremely difficult. In fact, many states’ deadlines for getting an independent name on the ballot have already, or are about to pass.

The Green way to victory

On the other hand, I know you have been approached about, but reportedly have yet to respond to, offers from people like Dr. Jill Stein, a leader of the Green Party and its presumptive nominee for this year’s presidential race as she was in 2012, and Seattle’s socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant too, about seeking and accepting the Green Party’s nomination for president (the Green Party’s nominating convention is in early August). Stein has even said she’d let you have the top spot, running for president!

As I assume you are aware, the Green Party is already on the ballot in 21 states having a total of 310 electoral votes, which is 40 more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. The party is reportedly working hard to get on a number of other state lines too in time for November’s election and is already close to having 25 states with another 60 electoral votes.

They’re not stopping there (and would do even better with some of your campaign money to pay for lawyers and petition gatherers). If you got that nomination, you’d be well on your way to being a viable national third-party candidate, and could work to get on the ballots of other critical states. This could be done in some states by getting smaller state parties, for example Peace & Freedom or the Working People’s Party to nominate you, and where no other option exists by fighting to get listed as an independent candidate.

Could you win in such a five-way race? I believe that in this unprecedented political environment, running against two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who have the highest negative polling numbers in the history of polls, you could indeed win.

You start with the more than 10 million people who’ve already voted for you once in the primaries (who would surely vote for you again in November), and since you have already run in all 50 states, your name recognition is as high as it could possibly be. Unlike Ralph Nader in his campaigns, you are virtually guaranteed as a third-party candidate to be included in the nationally televised debates in the fall, which will only increase your chances of winning.

And you know you will be deluged with campaign funds from your backers in even greater amounts than during the primaries if you are running for the White House for real in the general election.

But even if you didn’t win an outright majority of electoral votes, there’s a good chance you’d win the presidency. All you would really have to do is out-do Hillary Clinton. That’s because given the limitations of Donald Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of even the total right-leaning candidates’ votes, it’s a pretty safe bet that between the two of you, Clinton and yourself, you will win a combined majority of the electoral votes.

Making your ‘political revolution’ real

Recall that the electors in the Electoral College are not required by law to vote for the candidate who won their state’s popular vote. Like those frustrating ‘super delegates’ of the Democratic Party, they are free to vote for whom they choose (remember the Nixon elector who famously voted for anti-war Rep. Pete McClosky, or the electors who voted in 1824 for John Quincy Adams, though Andrew Jackson had won both the electoral and the popular vote that year?).

This means if you were to win more electoral votes than Clinton, you could just sit tight and let her contemplate the choice between allowing the election to move from a deadlocked Electoral College to the Republican-led House for a decision, which would mean her turning the White House over to a Republican (possibly Donald Trump!) or alternatively instructing her electors to vote for you.

If you ended up with fewer electors than Hillary, you could do the same, and have your electors vote for her, making her the president.

In either of those cases, I suspect you could both agree to have the one handing over the electors become the vice president, perhaps with some important responsibilities assigned to the role as part of a publicly transparent deal.

What should be particularly attractive about this plan is that by your running as a Green, you would be institutionalizing that ‘political revolution’ that you launched a year ago with your primary run. A Green campaign with you as the marquis candidate would put the Green Party on the ballot in all 50 states for the 2018 off-year election, as well as the 2020 presidential election.

It would transmute the Green Party instantly from a perennial protest vote option into a major party going forward, perhaps even supplanting the increasingly corrupted and out-of-touch Democratic Party that you for so long avoided joining.

The downside? What downside?

In fact, with you topping a Green ticket this year, many people, perhaps including some with name recognition, could be expected to run for Senate and House on that party line, and in such a tumultuous election year, they might well be voted into office as Green Party candidates, further undermining the Establishment two-system in Congress, and encouraging yet more people to run as Green candidates in 2018.

Frankly, aside from the wear-and-tear of another grueling three-to-four-month campaign (though you seem to thrive on them!), I don’t see any downside to this plan. You still get a chance to win the White House, you get to continue to lead and further develop a political revolution, and you don’t have to eat crow and endorse a candidate whom you clearly know to be the embodiment of the very rigged political-economic system you’ve been decrying.

Bernie, it’s been 44 years since I’ve been this excited about a US presidential campaign. In 1972, George McGovern put his whole Senate career on the line and tackled one of the most corrupt and ruthless politicians of the day, Richard Nixon, because he passionately believed that the Vietnam War had to be ended, and that poverty in America and other issues had to be seriously addressed.

He lost, but he fought a noble battle that was epic and that is still remembered. In a way, with Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, he really won, for it was his candidacy and the movement he was part of that pushed Nixon to adopt the extreme tactics of Watergate that led to his downfall.

It’s your turn now. You’ve already accomplished one helluva lot, and it almost seems unfair for me and your supporters to ask you, like Muhammed Ali after his draft refusal and ban from boxing, to climb back into the ring for another few punishing rounds of political combat, but we need you to do it.

Please, for the sake of the political movement you’ve begun to end America’s corrupt, rigged political and economic system, don’t stop now. Talk to Stein and Sawant and the Green Party, get their nomination for president and go for broke!

The movement you began will have your back! 

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

Dear Bernie,

You ran a great race, achieving something that most of us thought would be impossible, running as an ‘avowed’ socialist in today’s United States of America, against one of the most hardened and tested political machines in the country, the Clintons, and winning 22 primaries and caucuses with a total of over 11 million votes.

And while Hillary and her minions threw everything they had at you, including voter suppression efforts, lies about your voting record in the Senate, unfair assistance from the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic officials, and manipulation of the media, you came excruciatingly close to knocking her off and winning the nomination.

Okay, you didn’t make it to the finish line.

Now the pressure is on you, from the corporate media that originally ignored you, then attacked you and finally resorted to outright corruption the night before the June 7 primary by prematurely calling the race for Clinton in hopes of depressing your turnout in the last six primaries, and now to a meeting tomorrow with President Obama, who will try and convince you to give up, and to endorse Hillary Clinton.

But while it’s true that way back at the start of your seemingly Quixotic campaign, you did promise to endorse her if you lost, that campaign has since evolved beyond even your imagination into a powerful movement for ‘political revolution’, with millions of people behind it.

The real Hillary you exposed

Also over the intervening months, you have both seen how unprincipled your opponent can be, and have also done a masterful job of highlighting just how corrupted she has become as a person and politician.

You’ve pointed out how she has been bought by the too-big-to-fail bankers, who have paid her legal bribes totaling millions of dollars, euphemistically calling them ‘speaking fees’. You’ve denounced her acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars of legal bribes in the form of campaign contributions from key industries like the drug companies, the military contractors, the oil giants and even the for-profit prison industry.

While you graciously declined early on and waited, in my view, way too long to go after Hillary for her improper and illegal use, for years, of a private email server during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, late in the primary battle you finally did point out that she was acting in an illegal way (one that now has her as the first presumptive presidential candidate in memory running while being actively investigated by the FBI).

You also intimated – correctly in my humble view as an investigative reporter – that this move of hers to avoid the Freedom of Information Act was linked to her efforts to peddle influence to US corporate executives and foreign leaders in return for cash going into the Clinton Foundation coffers – a sordid arrangement reeking of corruption and self-dealing.

You’ve been right in all of this campaign criticism, and you have successfully exposed Hillary Clinton as the bought-and-paid candidate of big money, a woman who will say whatever she thinks it takes to get herself elected but who, in the end, will be serving the interests of those who paid for her election, not of the American people.

But after all that, you’re prepared to back her?

How could you now even think about turning around and doing what you originally said you would do and endorsing her? How could you, after exposing Clinton as the candidate of big banks, big pharma, big military and rich people, ask your millions of supporters – including people who dropped their hard-earned $27 into your campaign, often multiple times, to the tune, I believe, of over $200 million – suddenly turn around and ask them to back her in the general election?

If you were to endorse Hillary Clinton at this point, you would be destroying everything you have accomplished in this amazing campaign.

Many people – especially the young people for whom your movement may have been a first-ever experience at political action – would surely become cynical about politics. Others would just write you off as just another self-serving politician accepting a deal. Most would ignore any call for unity anyhow, making it doubly pointless and destructive for you to make it.

So what would you accomplish then, except perhaps to be repaid for your submission with some offer of a plum post on an important Senate Committee (assuming that the Republicans, in a race against Clinton, don’t end up staying in control of the Senate, making such a promised plum into a prune)?

Fortunately there is another path, and I’m sure you’ve been at least thinking about it. That is to run in the general election, this time going up against both Hillary and Trump (as well as the Libertarians and the Conservatives, who will be vying with Trump for the country’s right-leaning voters).

You could run as an independent. I’m sure you’d get plenty of financial backing again from your supporters, as in the primaries, and that you’d do creditably well, too if you did. But as Ralph Nader learned, the problem is you’d be wasting a lot if not most of your time and much of your funding fighting simply to get your name on state ballots – a process which the two established parties have conspired to make extremely difficult. In fact, many states’ deadlines for getting an independent name on the ballot have already, or are about to pass.

The Green way to victory

On the other hand, I know you have been approached about, but reportedly have yet to respond to, offers from people like Dr. Jill Stein, a leader of the Green Party and its presumptive nominee for this year’s presidential race as she was in 2012, and Seattle’s socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant too, about seeking and accepting the Green Party’s nomination for president (the Green Party’s nominating convention is in early August). Stein has even said she’d let you have the top spot, running for president!

As I assume you are aware, the Green Party is already on the ballot in 21 states having a total of 310 electoral votes, which is 40 more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. The party is reportedly working hard to get on a number of other state lines too in time for November’s election and is already close to having 25 states with another 60 electoral votes.

They’re not stopping there (and would do even better with some of your campaign money to pay for lawyers and petition gatherers). If you got that nomination, you’d be well on your way to being a viable national third-party candidate, and could work to get on the ballots of other critical states. This could be done in some states by getting smaller state parties, for example Peace & Freedom or the Working People’s Party to nominate you, and where no other option exists by fighting to get listed as an independent candidate.

Could you win in such a five-way race? I believe that in this unprecedented political environment, running against two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who have the highest negative polling numbers in the history of polls, you could indeed win.

You start with the more than 10 million people who’ve already voted for you once in the primaries (who would surely vote for you again in November), and since you have already run in all 50 states, your name recognition is as high as it could possibly be. Unlike Ralph Nader in his campaigns, you are virtually guaranteed as a third-party candidate to be included in the nationally televised debates in the fall, which will only increase your chances of winning.

And you know you will be deluged with campaign funds from your backers in even greater amounts than during the primaries if you are running for the White House for real in the general election.

But even if you didn’t win an outright majority of electoral votes, there’s a good chance you’d win the presidency. All you would really have to do is out-do Hillary Clinton. That’s because given the limitations of Donald Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of even the total right-leaning candidates’ votes, it’s a pretty safe bet that between the two of you, Clinton and yourself, you will win a combined majority of the electoral votes.

Making your ‘political revolution’ real

Recall that the electors in the Electoral College are not required by law to vote for the candidate who won their state’s popular vote. Like those frustrating ‘super delegates’ of the Democratic Party, they are free to vote for whom they choose (remember the Nixon elector who famously voted for anti-war Rep. Pete McClosky, or the electors who voted in 1824 for John Quincy Adams, though Andrew Jackson had won both the electoral and the popular vote that year?).

This means if you were to win more electoral votes than Clinton, you could just sit tight and let her contemplate the choice between allowing the election to move from a deadlocked Electoral College to the Republican-led House for a decision, which would mean her turning the White House over to a Republican (possibly Donald Trump!) or alternatively instructing her electors to vote for you.

If you ended up with fewer electors than Hillary, you could do the same, and have your electors vote for her, making her the president.

In either of those cases, I suspect you could both agree to have the one handing over the electors become the vice president, perhaps with some important responsibilities assigned to the role as part of a publicly transparent deal.

What should be particularly attractive about this plan is that by your running as a Green, you would be institutionalizing that ‘political revolution’ that you launched a year ago with your primary run. A Green campaign with you as the marquis candidate would put the Green Party on the ballot in all 50 states for the 2018 off-year election, as well as the 2020 presidential election.

It would transmute the Green Party instantly from a perennial protest vote option into a major party going forward, perhaps even supplanting the increasingly corrupted and out-of-touch Democratic Party that you for so long avoided joining.

The downside? What downside?

In fact, with you topping a Green ticket this year, many people, perhaps including some with name recognition, could be expected to run for Senate and House on that party line, and in such a tumultuous election year, they might well be voted into office as Green Party candidates, further undermining the Establishment two-system in Congress, and encouraging yet more people to run as Green candidates in 2018.

Frankly, aside from the wear-and-tear of another grueling three-to-four-month campaign (though you seem to thrive on them!), I don’t see any downside to this plan. You still get a chance to win the White House, you get to continue to lead and further develop a political revolution, and you don’t have to eat crow and endorse a candidate whom you clearly know to be the embodiment of the very rigged political-economic system you’ve been decrying.

Bernie, it’s been 44 years since I’ve been this excited about a US presidential campaign. In 1972, George McGovern put his whole Senate career on the line and tackled one of the most corrupt and ruthless politicians of the day, Richard Nixon, because he passionately believed that the Vietnam War had to be ended, and that poverty in America and other issues had to be seriously addressed.

He lost, but he fought a noble battle that was epic and that is still remembered. In a way, with Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, he really won, for it was his candidacy and the movement he was part of that pushed Nixon to adopt the extreme tactics of Watergate that led to his downfall.

It’s your turn now. You’ve already accomplished one helluva lot, and it almost seems unfair for me and your supporters to ask you, like Muhammed Ali after his draft refusal and ban from boxing, to climb back into the ring for another few punishing rounds of political combat, but we need you to do it.

Please, for the sake of the political movement you’ve begun to end America’s corrupt, rigged political and economic system, don’t stop now. Talk to Stein and Sawant and the Green Party, get their nomination for president and go for broke!

The movement you began will have your back! 

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

Dear Bernie,

You ran a great race, achieving something that most of us thought would be impossible, running as an ‘avowed’ socialist in today’s United States of America, against one of the most hardened and tested political machines in the country, the Clintons, and winning 22 primaries and caucuses with a total of over 11 million votes.

And while Hillary and her minions threw everything they had at you, including voter suppression efforts, lies about your voting record in the Senate, unfair assistance from the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic officials, and manipulation of the media, you came excruciatingly close to knocking her off and winning the nomination.

Okay, you didn’t make it to the finish line.

Now the pressure is on you, from the corporate media that originally ignored you, then attacked you and finally resorted to outright corruption the night before the June 7 primary by prematurely calling the race for Clinton in hopes of depressing your turnout in the last six primaries, and now to a meeting tomorrow with President Obama, who will try and convince you to give up, and to endorse Hillary Clinton.

But while it’s true that way back at the start of your seemingly Quixotic campaign, you did promise to endorse her if you lost, that campaign has since evolved beyond even your imagination into a powerful movement for ‘political revolution’, with millions of people behind it.

The real Hillary you exposed

Also over the intervening months, you have both seen how unprincipled your opponent can be, and have also done a masterful job of highlighting just how corrupted she has become as a person and politician.

You’ve pointed out how she has been bought by the too-big-to-fail bankers, who have paid her legal bribes totaling millions of dollars, euphemistically calling them ‘speaking fees’. You’ve denounced her acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars of legal bribes in the form of campaign contributions from key industries like the drug companies, the military contractors, the oil giants and even the for-profit prison industry.

While you graciously declined early on and waited, in my view, way too long to go after Hillary for her improper and illegal use, for years, of a private email server during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, late in the primary battle you finally did point out that she was acting in an illegal way (one that now has her as the first presumptive presidential candidate in memory running while being actively investigated by the FBI).

You also intimated – correctly in my humble view as an investigative reporter – that this move of hers to avoid the Freedom of Information Act was linked to her efforts to peddle influence to US corporate executives and foreign leaders in return for cash going into the Clinton Foundation coffers – a sordid arrangement reeking of corruption and self-dealing.

You’ve been right in all of this campaign criticism, and you have successfully exposed Hillary Clinton as the bought-and-paid candidate of big money, a woman who will say whatever she thinks it takes to get herself elected but who, in the end, will be serving the interests of those who paid for her election, not of the American people.

But after all that, you’re prepared to back her?

How could you now even think about turning around and doing what you originally said you would do and endorsing her? How could you, after exposing Clinton as the candidate of big banks, big pharma, big military and rich people, ask your millions of supporters – including people who dropped their hard-earned $27 into your campaign, often multiple times, to the tune, I believe, of over $200 million – suddenly turn around and ask them to back her in the general election?

If you were to endorse Hillary Clinton at this point, you would be destroying everything you have accomplished in this amazing campaign.

Many people – especially the young people for whom your movement may have been a first-ever experience at political action – would surely become cynical about politics. Others would just write you off as just another self-serving politician accepting a deal. Most would ignore any call for unity anyhow, making it doubly pointless and destructive for you to make it.

So what would you accomplish then, except perhaps to be repaid for your submission with some offer of a plum post on an important Senate Committee (assuming that the Republicans, in a race against Clinton, don’t end up staying in control of the Senate, making such a promised plum into a prune)?

Fortunately there is another path, and I’m sure you’ve been at least thinking about it. That is to run in the general election, this time going up against both Hillary and Trump (as well as the Libertarians and the Conservatives, who will be vying with Trump for the country’s right-leaning voters).

You could run as an independent. I’m sure you’d get plenty of financial backing again from your supporters, as in the primaries, and that you’d do creditably well, too if you did. But as Ralph Nader learned, the problem is you’d be wasting a lot if not most of your time and much of your funding fighting simply to get your name on state ballots – a process which the two established parties have conspired to make extremely difficult. In fact, many states’ deadlines for getting an independent name on the ballot have already, or are about to pass.

The Green way to victory

On the other hand, I know you have been approached about, but reportedly have yet to respond to, offers from people like Dr. Jill Stein, a leader of the Green Party and its presumptive nominee for this year’s presidential race as she was in 2012, and Seattle’s socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant too, about seeking and accepting the Green Party’s nomination for president (the Green Party’s nominating convention is in early August). Stein has even said she’d let you have the top spot, running for president!

As I assume you are aware, the Green Party is already on the ballot in 21 states having a total of 310 electoral votes, which is 40 more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. The party is reportedly working hard to get on a number of other state lines too in time for November’s election and is already close to having 25 states with another 60 electoral votes.

They’re not stopping there (and would do even better with some of your campaign money to pay for lawyers and petition gatherers). If you got that nomination, you’d be well on your way to being a viable national third-party candidate, and could work to get on the ballots of other critical states. This could be done in some states by getting smaller state parties, for example Peace & Freedom or the Working People’s Party to nominate you, and where no other option exists by fighting to get listed as an independent candidate.

Could you win in such a five-way race? I believe that in this unprecedented political environment, running against two candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who have the highest negative polling numbers in the history of polls, you could indeed win.

You start with the more than 10 million people who’ve already voted for you once in the primaries (who would surely vote for you again in November), and since you have already run in all 50 states, your name recognition is as high as it could possibly be. Unlike Ralph Nader in his campaigns, you are virtually guaranteed as a third-party candidate to be included in the nationally televised debates in the fall, which will only increase your chances of winning.

And you know you will be deluged with campaign funds from your backers in even greater amounts than during the primaries if you are running for the White House for real in the general election.

But even if you didn’t win an outright majority of electoral votes, there’s a good chance you’d win the presidency. All you would really have to do is out-do Hillary Clinton. That’s because given the limitations of Donald Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of even the total right-leaning candidates’ votes, it’s a pretty safe bet that between the two of you, Clinton and yourself, you will win a combined majority of the electoral votes.

Making your ‘political revolution’ real

Recall that the electors in the Electoral College are not required by law to vote for the candidate who won their state’s popular vote. Like those frustrating ‘super delegates’ of the Democratic Party, they are free to vote for whom they choose (remember the Nixon elector who famously voted for anti-war Rep. Pete McClosky, or the electors who voted in 1824 for John Quincy Adams, though Andrew Jackson had won both the electoral and the popular vote that year?).

This means if you were to win more electoral votes than Clinton, you could just sit tight and let her contemplate the choice between allowing the election to move from a deadlocked Electoral College to the Republican-led House for a decision, which would mean her turning the White House over to a Republican (possibly Donald Trump!) or alternatively instructing her electors to vote for you.

If you ended up with fewer electors than Hillary, you could do the same, and have your electors vote for her, making her the president.

In either of those cases, I suspect you could both agree to have the one handing over the electors become the vice president, perhaps with some important responsibilities assigned to the role as part of a publicly transparent deal.

What should be particularly attractive about this plan is that by your running as a Green, you would be institutionalizing that ‘political revolution’ that you launched a year ago with your primary run. A Green campaign with you as the marquis candidate would put the Green Party on the ballot in all 50 states for the 2018 off-year election, as well as the 2020 presidential election.

It would transmute the Green Party instantly from a perennial protest vote option into a major party going forward, perhaps even supplanting the increasingly corrupted and out-of-touch Democratic Party that you for so long avoided joining.

The downside? What downside?

In fact, with you topping a Green ticket this year, many people, perhaps including some with name recognition, could be expected to run for Senate and House on that party line, and in such a tumultuous election year, they might well be voted into office as Green Party candidates, further undermining the Establishment two-system in Congress, and encouraging yet more people to run as Green candidates in 2018.

Frankly, aside from the wear-and-tear of another grueling three-to-four-month campaign (though you seem to thrive on them!), I don’t see any downside to this plan. You still get a chance to win the White House, you get to continue to lead and further develop a political revolution, and you don’t have to eat crow and endorse a candidate whom you clearly know to be the embodiment of the very rigged political-economic system you’ve been decrying.

Bernie, it’s been 44 years since I’ve been this excited about a US presidential campaign. In 1972, George McGovern put his whole Senate career on the line and tackled one of the most corrupt and ruthless politicians of the day, Richard Nixon, because he passionately believed that the Vietnam War had to be ended, and that poverty in America and other issues had to be seriously addressed.

He lost, but he fought a noble battle that was epic and that is still remembered. In a way, with Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, he really won, for it was his candidacy and the movement he was part of that pushed Nixon to adopt the extreme tactics of Watergate that led to his downfall.

It’s your turn now. You’ve already accomplished one helluva lot, and it almost seems unfair for me and your supporters to ask you, like Muhammed Ali after his draft refusal and ban from boxing, to climb back into the ring for another few punishing rounds of political combat, but we need you to do it.

Please, for the sake of the political movement you’ve begun to end America’s corrupt, rigged political and economic system, don’t stop now. Talk to Stein and Sawant and the Green Party, get their nomination for president and go for broke!

The movement you began will have your back! 

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

The purple flowers of the tiny green-winged orchid were first spotted by council staff maintaining the green roof of the Household Reuse and Recycling Centre in Holloway.
Distinguished by the green veins on the outer parts of the flower – the ‘wings’ that protect the petals – the rare, lone orchid requires highly specific conditions to germinate, and could be the first of many to appear on the site.

News of the find sent a buzz through the worlds of amateur and professional botanists and environmentalists as the orchid survives in only one or two other places in outer London – and nowhere in inner London.

Cllr Claudia Webbe, Islington Council’s executive member for environment and transport, said: “This is a very exciting find and its importance should not be underestimated. It just shows that even in inner city, urban areas you can create the kind of conditions that encourage and nurture the rarest wildlife there is.I look forward to seeing what else will show up on the green roofs of our buildings in future!”

The orchid has been verified by Mike Waller, orchid specialist and London Wildlife Trust conservation ecologist, who said he was “amazed” when he heard of the discovery.
It is thought the tiny dust-like seeds of the flower, which has seen its native hay meadow habitat decimated over the last 100 years, were blown by the wind onto the green roof, which was installed 12 years ago. They can take several years to flower after germinating.

Mr Waller, who has spent 15 years studying orchids, added: “There are only really one or two sites in London where it still flowers today. One of the most famous sites is Morden Cemetery, but it has not flowered there for about 10 years now. This is a great example of the quality and good management of this green roof.”

Cllr Webbe made a special visit to see the rare specimen with Mr Waller and Dusty Gedge, president of the European Federation of Green Roof Associations and leading authority on green roofs.

Mr Gedge said: “It’s only a little thing but it’s quite an exciting story. What’s really fascinating for me is that you do something 12 years ago through the planning process – which has benefits for the wider area like holding storm water, cooling the building, improving air quality and visual appearance – and suddenly something as special as this turns up. And who knows? In the future there might be 200 of these here. This would not have happened without good planning.”

Islington Council encourages green roofs on new developments and has approved almost 54,000sq m of them since 2006.

Green-winged orchid facts:

• The green-winged orchid was first recorded in London by Charles Darwin
• Its seeds are miniscule and can easily get blown into the upper atmosphere and be transported for many miles
• The green-winged orchid has seen a huge decline in number, primarily because 99% of its favoured hay meadow habitat has been lost in this country in the last 100 years – the majority in the last 50 years due to agricultural intensification.
• The orchid requires exacting conditions to germinate. Every orchid requires a particular fungus to be present in the soil in order to start life – adding it later will not work.
• In this case, mycorrhizal fungus was already in the green roof’s soil when the seed landed, triggering the germination process.
• It can take five years or more between germinating and putting up a flowering spike.
• The orchid’s Latin name isAnacamptis morio.

We should all cry over the conduct of Britain’s EU Referendum debate. It is a picture of the nation at its very worst: bereft of any ‘big picture’ narrative able to lift or inspire.

Instead, abuse competes with smear, and fibs compete with fear, degenerating into a beggar-my-neighbour apology for political debate.

The Conservative Party’s implosion should be the least surprising element in this. Their ‘Blue-on-Blue’ civil war makes clashes between England and Russian football fans look almost civilised. Its legacy will scar the entirety of the current parliament.

It also confirms is that, at his best, Cameron was only ever an aberration. The Tory Party remains in the grip of an ultra-Right, no less ideologically extreme than the Republican ‘Tea Party’ tendency. ‘The bastards’ who tore the John Major administration apart now happily do the same to Cameron. None of this is in the name of a more progressive, inclusive Britain.

In or out of the EU, the NHS will not get an extra £350 million a week out of this government. Both sets of Tory MPs – the ‘inners’ and the ‘outers’ – happily voted for austerity measures that underfund the NHS. The Referendum will not change this, and it is a delusion to pretend otherwise.

Remain and reform

The greater tragedy, however, lies with Labour.

Even those who (like me) are implacably opposed to joining the single currency, ought to see the starkness of choices facing Britain. Whilst the Tory record on ‘progressive’ European policies is wretched, the Brexit camp would be immeasurably worse. For the Left, the challenge is to minimise the damage, and to change the script. This, in essence, is the case for ‘Remain and reform’.

Labour’s problem is that it must put a million miles between it and both warring factions of the Tory Party. There was never any point in Labour hunkering up to either the Saddam or the Uday Tory camps – whichever you thought ‘least worst’.

Instead, Labour must reach into the ideas of other movements, like ‘Another Europe is Possible’ – setting an agenda that should inspire, enrage and excite the public.

There is much to rage about, for the Tories ‘European’ record is shameful. Under them

• Britain is trying to water down the EU commitment to halve the number of deaths from air pollution;
• Cameron personally vetoed any EU tax avoidance framework that included offshore Trusts;
• British Tories oppose a ban on bee-destroying neonicotinoid insecticides, but have had to accept it as EU-wide policy;
• Europe’s 2010 Energy Efficiency Directive requires all new public buildings to be built to ‘near zero energy’ standards by 2018, but the UK wants to build to lower standards;
• the EU set a 20% target for renewable energy by 2020, however the Tories negotiated a lower (15%) target for Britain;
• the EU set out a flood protection framework, including upland farming practices, that was to be binding. Britain reduced it to ‘advisory’, and then ignored it;
• only EU resistance to genetically modified organisms in the food chain prevents Britain’s Tories from handing this as a gift to big biotech (without any thought for either liability insurance or consumer protection rights); and
• post-Paris, the UK has ensured that Europe-wide climate and renewable energy targets are not to be binding at a Member State level – allowing Britain to do less.

Labour should not even contemplate shared platforms with Cameron and Osborne. Instead, it should embrace the very pro-planet, pro-public, Euro policies that the Tories undermine … and to do so as leaders, not laggards, in the pursuit of a better Europe.

Pro-people, pro-environment, anti-austerity Europe

Both Corbyn and McDonnell would happily sign up to a bolder, anti-austerity Europe – one committed (say) to Europe-wide Robin Hood taxation; one which refused to sign a TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) agreement that would give corporations the right to sue EU citizens; or one that pledged to remove corporate rights to pillage the economy or the planet.

The problem has been getting Labour’s Party Machine to agree to anything so radical. Instead, the Party Battle Bus rattles along with little more than a Dad’s Army diatribe about how much worse it would be if we left. Heckled by fishermen on the South coast over EU fishing quotas, Labour hadn’t even had the sense to quote Greenpeace in Europe’s defence.

Over 60% of UK fishing quotas are owned by three multi-million pound firms. Some of the quotas are ‘parked’ on tiny vessels that never go to sea. But the quotas then get rented out (at extortionate rates) to smaller fishermen.

It is a rigged racket which has little to do with fish conservation and even less to do with Europe. The problem, and the corruption, comes from us – our politicians and our officials in the fisheries department, Defra.

And this is where Labour is stuck. If the Party doesn’t pick such fights with the Tories (all of them) then it ends up lacking any clear vision about the ‘better’ European future its own supporters should come out and fight for. Worse than this, it leaves Labour open to the worst elements of UKIP-Labour – the ones arguing that the UK’s problems are all down to immigration.

So let’s be clear about a few things:

First, there is an international refugee crisis bigger than any single nation can solve. The ultimate answer will need new international institutions (in much the same way we did in the post-1945 era of reconstruction and peace building). At the moment, we just don’t have the politicians big enough to see this. But the answers, when they come, will come collaboratively, not by any one country pulling up the drawbridge.

Second, playing the immigration card in British politics runs you close to fascism. Immigrants are not responsible for zero-hours contracts. They weren’t behind the debacle collapse of BHS, nor the employment policies of Sports Direct, Amazon or a dozen other household names. Immigrants haven’t saddled graduates with a mountain of student debt, nor handed the housing market over to spivs and speculators.

A politics beyond scapegoating

When communities define immigration as the problem it is usually because politicians – in deeply divided and polarised times – prefer to look for scapegoats than to radical assaults on inequality itself. Such fear and insecurity is real enough, but only charlatans cloak themselves in it as a political momentum.

So the challenge to Jeremy Corbyn is a simple one. His initial Shadow Cabinet formation may have forced Corbyn to hand control of the EU ‘Remain’ campaign to Labour’s more orthodox wing. But the resulting campaign has been catastrophically dull, unimaginative and uninspiring. It has left Labour voters wondering: what sort of Europe Labour is campaigning for? Dad’s Army has none of the answers.

So, sod the bruised egos and the etiquette, Corbyn and McDonnell have to seize the reins. It is the vision of something better, something different, something beyond the arid landscapes of Tory divides, that will bring out a ‘Remain and Reform’ vote.

It isn’t too late. This is what leadership is all about.

Alan Simpson was Labour MP for Nottingham South from 1992 until 2010. He is an independent advisor and campaigner on energy and climate policies. Alan is a member of two community energy co-ops and lives in an Eco-house in Nottingham. He is a net exporter of electricity to the grid.