It inspired this book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Thanks for all of your efforts, joe.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRYFRvOUrvI]

of some business, and run 'the B' out.

CNN says NBC is breaking the story that PBO contacted Bernie over the weekend, to get him to bow out sometime this week. Apparently, PBO is anxious to openly campaign for her, and is getting testy.

Hope that makes Bernie supporters more determined than ever to GOTV tomorrow.

Strong arm tactics, for sure!

Here's a nice Tweet, Chris Jansing, CNN:

That's the legendary Dick van Dyke @iammrvandy introducing @BernieSanders in Santa Barbara pic.twitter.com/q5X7wy24HC

— Chris Jansing (@ChrisJansing) May 28, 2016

Hope your vacation is going well, Joe. Thank you for providing us with your beautiful photography, and excellent tunes!

Have a good evening, Everyone!

Mollie

and the great pictures. Sioux Falls is now on my list of places to visit.

Hope every one is having a good evening! May have some dups from other OTs... Been out of town and catching up with reading.

Employment Lies, CounterPunch, June 6. “The question becomes: How real is the 4.7% rate of unemployment? The answer is: Not at all.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/06/employment-lies/

Predatory Payday Lenders’ Top Democratic Ally Flip Flops On New Rules, Think Progress, June 3. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/06/03/3784695/debbie-wasserman-sch...

Rapist Brock Turner and Lenient Judge Embody the Worst of American Justice System, Daily News, June 6. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-rapist-brock-turner-judge-... (This enrages me.)

Pulling Reservation Schools Back from the Brink, The Nation, June 3. http://www.thenation.com/article/pulling-reservation-schools-back-from-t...

Can Prosecutors Convict Anyone at All in the Death of Freddie Gray? The Atlantic, June Issue. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/freddie-gray-caesar-...

Small-Town America Has a Serious Drinking-Water Problem: In Sanders, Arizona, residents drank uranium-contaminated water for years. Mother Jones, June 6. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/rural-water-contamination...

The Myth of the Spoiler: Why the Machine Elites Fear Democracy, CounterPunch, June 6. “That’s right, 12 times more Democrats votes for Bush than Nader [in Florida]. But no, no, no it was the 600 Green voters that elected Bush.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/06/the-myth-of-the-spoiler-why-the-m...

Our United States of Fear: Meet the right’s ridiculous new bogeyman: We're still No. 1 in panic. You see it in politics, the presidential race, education -- and especially the media, Salon, June 5. http://www.salon.com/2016/06/05/our_united_states_of_fear_meet_the_right...

Harry Reid Is Quietly Laying The Groundwork For Elizabeth Warren To Be Vice President, Think Progress, June 6. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/06/06/3784898/harry-reid-quietly-l...

State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election, IBTimes, June 6. http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/state-department-blocks-release...

MSNBC now says Hillary Clinton is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. Chris Hayes made the announcement a few minutes ago.

Is lit up again because Bernie was/is having an event in San Francisco at Crissy Field.

Obama shouldn't have dissed Tapper at the Correspondents Dinner.

State Dept. won't release #Clinton emails until 'November 31st' https://t.co/xCr8qqvbIp #TheLead

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 6, 2016

If you are a rich athlete at a D1 school, you can pretty much do anything you want. IF this asshole was not caught in the act he probably would have got off completely, but thanks to two Swedish students, he gets a not-so-sternly worded sentence.

6 months and on the sex offender registry, for getting caught in the act. Unfuckingbelievable!

So much to be angry about today. An oil train crash in Oregon. The corporations declaring Hillary the winner. Rapists getting off. I'm just tired. So frustrating.

Party Crashing and Political Revolution: With the DNC Just Weeks Away, What’s Next for Our Movement? - by KSHAMA SAWANT

Sounds good to me:

We Need a Party of the 99%

In debates with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders repeatedly asked why single-payer healthcare does not exist in the US, while such systems exist in virtually every other major country. A key part of the answer is that almost all these other countries had some form of independent working-class party. For example the National Health Service in Britain was brought in under a Labour government after World War II. In Canada, it was the Cooperative Commonwealth Party, a social democratic party that brought in the first single-payer universal health care system in North America. Many countries also achieved strong public pension systems, fully free higher education, and other reforms as a result of powerful workers’ movements that created parties which fought for their interests.

The Democratic Party has always been a party of the oppressing class. First, as the party of the slave-owners, then after abolition as a political party funded and dominated by big business. Beginning in the 1930s it came to be seen as the party most tied to the interests of organized labor, black people, and women. But all the way through the ‘60s it still had a “Dixiecrat” wing that fiercely defended Jim Crow segregation in the South. At every point in its history, on every essential issue whenever the class interests of the corporate elite was at stake, it has taken the side of that class against the interests of the 99%.

We need a fundamentally different kind of party. A party that like Bernie takes no corporate money and completely rejects corporate influence.

Such a “party of the 99%” will need to be genuinely democratically organized and include an active, mass membership based on ordinary working people. The major policy positions voted for by the membership would be binding. The party’s elected leaders must be able to be held fully accountable by genuine democratic structures, and must be recallable through those structures. In contrast, within the Democratic Party elected leaders and establishment insiders dominate party processes in a top-down, bureaucratic fashion that seeks to avoid debate, to rubber stamp, and to discourage any activist initiative. In many areas the party does not even have meetings, but serves only as an undemocratic electoral machine.

A party of the 99% would work alongside social movements, not against them. When I was elected after campaigning to make Seattle the first major city to pass a $15 minimum wage, my organization, Socialist Alternative, and I seized the opportunity to launch the 15 Now movement to bring the maximum possible pressure to bear on the political establishment to pass $15. We used every opportunity provided by the platform of my seat on the City Council to build this new movement. We called and organized mass rallies, we mobilized to City Hall votes, we launched “action groups” in neighborhoods all around Seattle.

15 Now filed a ballot measure (against the opposition of most of our allies in labor who wanted to maintain friendly relations with the Democratic establishment) and collected 10,000 signatures so that we would have leverage against the political establishment’s attempts to back down from $15 or undermine the planned ordinance. This “credible threat” proved absolutely crucial, as later openly admitted by angry business leaders. Even at the final vote on the $15 ordinance (you can watch footage of this important council session here) we exposed every vote on every corporate loophole, making these sell outs of workers publicly uncomfortable for the corporate politicians. Our movement fought to the final day, the final hour, even the final minute against big business’s efforts to water down $15 in Seattle. 15 Now has since taken the fight all over the nation, and presently is doing battle in Minneapolis to raise the minimum wage there through a ballot initiative.

If Bernie were elected president, he would need to do the same. As he recently said, if he were elected President he would need to become the “organizer in chief,” which would require mobilizing millions of people into organized movements which can bring enormous pressure to bear against the Republicans and Democrats in order to win real gains for the 99%.

The Democrats, as a party of big business, do the opposite – they use elected office to de-escalate, demobilize, and demoralize movements. After Obama was elected as an “anti-war” candidate in 2008, he tripled the troop presence in Afghanistan within months of taking office. If the Republican candidate, John McCain had been elected and escalated the occupation of Afghanistan in this manner, he would have faced massive protests. Instead, because of the anti-war movement’s ties to the Democratic Party and the pressures not to embarrass Obama on this and other issues (such as massive drone expansion and whistleblower crackdowns), the anti-war movement collapsed and never recovered.

If you look beneath the surface at virtually every major gain for the 99% in U.S. history, you will unearth the same story – of Democratic and Republican politicians with their backs up against a wall under enormous pressure from mass movements. Jim Crow segregation existed for more than a century after the Civil War and Lincoln abolished slavery. It was defended by both parties, and it was only the fiercely determined struggle of radical civil rights activists – who rejected an incrementalist approach and organized mass struggles that stood up against violence and police repression – that segregation laws were finally defeated.

These two parties of big business never “lead the way” on major progressive changes, they make concessions out of political calculation and fear of mass movements – that if they do not bend, they may break. FDR defended his New Deal policies explicitly to business people as necessary concessions to save the system, saying “I’m the best friend American capitalism ever had.” At root, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment’s pronouncements in favor of “incremental” change are really a call for working people to step down, back off, and shut up.

While it may seem daunting to launch a new mass party, history shows that it would be far easier than trying to reform this fundamentally broken one. To win any of our key demands – to establish Medicare for all, a national $15 minimum wage, to end mass incarceration – the left will need to sever its connections to the Democratic Party. At best, another attempt to reform it will be a detour from the fundamental conclusion that needs to be reached.

Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign will likely offer the strongest left challenge in November and deserves the broadest possible support, even as we raise the vision for building a new mass party. Every vote for Stein, whose politics have much in common with Bernie, is a vote against neoliberal politics and in favor of our independence from corporate cash and influence.

In the whole history of the United States, there has rarely been a moment with more potential to launch a party based explicitly on the interests of working people and the poor. What is missing are forces with enough weight which are ready to commit. If Bernie was to call a conference to discuss this in the coming months, the process could begin in earnest this year. If he does not, it will be left to our movement to continue what we started, by rejecting Hillary and the Democratic Party, and laying the foundations for a real political revolution.

ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA COMMIT MASSIVE ACT OF MALPRACTICE AND CLAIM CLINTON ‘CLINCHED’
Kevin Costala asks some good questions:

The Associated Press and NBC News inappropriately reported Hillary Clinton made history and “clinched” the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. It spurred other media organizations, such as CNN and the New York Times, to follow suit and splash their home pages with big headlines indicating Clinton was the nominee....
...The reports of “clinching” are entirely based on an unofficial survey of superdelegates, which the AP and NBC News has conducted throughout the 2016 election. They both determined Clinton reached the “magic number” needed to clinch, which is 2383 delegates....
But if it is true that history happened, why didn’t Clinton’s own party congratulating her? How come there was no statement from the Democratic National Committee?

WTFthat is ... read on ... I need to sleep.

No one has won the nomination---SuperDelegates don't vote until July 25th#FEELtheBERN #p2https://t.co/tXKPMIBYfK pic.twitter.com/QyO4D6cb6E

— TeaParty Of the LEFT (@AngryVoters) June 7, 2016