2) Racism. We were instructed to hammer home how Bernie supporters were all privileged white students that had no idea how the world worked. We had to tout Hillary's great record with "the blacks" (yes, that's the actual way it was phrased), and generally use racial identity politics to attack Sanders and bolster Hillary as the only unifying figure.

...

4) Dirty tactics. This is where things got really bad. We were instructed to create narratives of Clinton supporters as being victimized by Sanders supporters, even if they were entirely fabricated. There were different instructions about how to do it, but something like this (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/31/1443064/-Dis-heartened-Hillary-Supporter) is a perfect example. These kind of posts are manufactured to divide and demoralize Sanders supporters, and are entirely artificial in nature. (The same thing happened in 2008, but it wasn't as noticeable before social media and public attention focused on popular forums like Reddit).

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/3rncq9/confession_of_hillary_shill_from/

Rep. Ellison Statement on Trans Pacific Partnership Text
Nov 5, 2015
Press Release

WASHINGTON – Rep. Ellison (D-MN) released the following statement today after the full text of the Trans Pacific Partnership was released online.

“Good trade deals put the priorities of working families ahead of corporate interests. Now that the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has finally been made public, Americans can see for themselves whose interests are prioritized when a trade deal is negotiated in secret with unprecedented input from multinational corporations.

“This is not “the most progressive trade deal ever negotiated.” A progressive trade deal would not ship American jobs overseas and cut worker’s pay back home. A progressive trade deal would protect international environmental regulations, not make it easier for countries to skirt around them. A progressive trade deal would ensure that lifesaving medicine stays affordable for the people who need it, not allow pharmaceutical corporations to jack up their prices and keep low-cost generic medications off the market.

“The TPP is not progressive – it is a bad deal for working families. I will continue to work to stop the TPP and make sure that any trade deal Congress approves prioritizes the American people over corporate profits.”

https://twitter.com/keithellison/status/662424113873555456

Congressman Keith Ellison Endorses Bernie Sanders for President

MINNEAPOLIS—Congressman Keith Ellison released the following statement today, announcing his endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders for president:

“I am happy to support my friend and colleague Senator Bernie Sanders in his candidacy for president. For decades, Bernie has demonstrated a willingness to push for progressive ideas that will help American families and restore balance to our economy, which has favored the millionaires and billionaires for way too long. A founder of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, he is committed to investing in our education system and infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, addressing climate change, fixing our criminal justice system, reforming our financial markets, and pushing for peace and diplomacy abroad.

“Bernie knows that the power ultimately lies with the American people. And in a time where voter participation is at an all-time low, Bernie has shown that he has the ability to create a renaissance in civic participation by exciting those who are least likely to vote.

“Having stood with Bernie over the years on many different issues, including the Fight for $15, the effort to ban private prisons, and calling for the end of subsidies for Big Oil, I am proud to stand with him now.”

http://www.keithellison.org/news-clips/congressman-keith-ellison-endorses-bernie-sanders-president

Bad Trade Deal 'Worse Than I Thought,' Sanders Says
Thursday, November 5, 2015

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 – Sen. Bernie Sanders issued the following statement today after the text of a proposed 12-nation trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was made public.

"Now that the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has finally been released, it is even worse than I thought. It is clear to me that the proposed agreement is not, nor has it ever been, the gold standard of trade agreements.

"This trade deal would make it easier for corporations to shut down more factories in the U.S. and ship more jobs to Vietnam and Malaysia where workers are paid pennies an hour. The TPP is a continuation of our disastrous trade policies that have devastated manufacturing cities and towns all over this country from Newton, Iowa, to Cleveland, Ohio. We need to rebuild the disappearing middle class, not tear it down.

"The TPP would allow foreign corporations to sue federal, state and local governments in an international tribunal for passing an increase in the minimum wage or any other law that could hurt expected future profits.

"The agreement would threaten American laws that protect the safety of the drugs we take, the seafood we feed our families and the toys our kids play with every day.

"At a time when prescription drug prices are skyrocketing, the TPP would make a bad situation even worse by granting new monopoly rights to big pharmaceutical companies to deny access to lower cost generic drugs to millions of people.

"Outrageously, the proposed agreement includes violators of international human rights, like Brunei, where gays and single mothers can be stoned to death and Malaysia where tens of thousands of immigrant workers in the electronics industry are working as modern day slaves.

"I will do everything I can to defeat the TPP. We need trade policies in this country that work for the working families of our nation and not just the CEOs of large, multi-national corporations.”

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/bad-trade-deal-worse-than-i-thought-sanders-says

Rep. Keith Ellison @keithellison

#TPPWorseThanWeThought #TPP grants Big Phrma new monopolies to raise drug prices, rolls back even Bush trade pact access to meds reforms

https://twitter.com/keithellison/status/662270829401649152

On Thursday morning, after months of questions about the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal negotiated and championed by President Obama, his administration released the agreement in its complex entirety.

The problem, though, is that it was released as a series of posts on Medium -- and, worse, a collection of PDFs -- making it hard to search for topics across the entire document.

Allow us.

We created the tool below to allow you to search the full agreement (except annexes) and to link back to the original to read more. There's a lot in there, we'll note, and spellings are internationalized. (Labor becomes "labour," for example.) So it's still not a perfect system.

But at least you can see it and search it! Critics of the deal spent months arguing that it was a secret agreement, which it no longer is. And thanks to your friends at The Fix, it's now easier to see what's in it than the government might have intended.

....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/05/we-made-president-obamas-big-tpp-trade-deal-searchable/

Why Is the Center for American Progress Hosting Benjamin Netanyahu?
The Israeli prime minister has spent the last few years trying to sabotage the Obama administration’s foreign policy. So what’s with the invite?

By Ali Gharib
October 28, 2015

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to town next month, he’ll meet with President Obama at the White House for the first time since the right-wing Israeli led a failed campaign to block the liberal Democrat’s nuclear deal with Iran. During the course of his long, no-holds-barred fight against diplomacy with Iran, Netanyahu took a stand with congressional Republicans against the White House, attracting minimal Democratic support for his position against Obama’s signal foreign policy achievement. Three years ago, Netanyahu all but endorsed Obama’s opponent in the presidential race, Mitt Romney. And Netanyahu’s own behavior at home—most notably the modus operandi of his successful reelection bid this year, which included anti-Arab bigotry and a vow to block a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—strained relations further.

So it was altogether fitting that Netanyahu, during his swing through Washington, would be given an award by the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank close to the Republican Party that never strays too far from Netanyahu’s ideological home turf. Though Israel—and its most influential DC lobby group, AIPAC—has traditionally garnered bipartisan support, neoconservatives don’t give a whit about it; they have long thought Democrats, and especially today’s Democrats, were insufficiently hawkish to give Israel the kind of support it needed in the Middle East. And Netanyahu has more than made clear where his allegiances lay on the American political spectrum: with the Republicans, and especially the neoconservatives among them.

It was jarring, then, to see the news yesterday that Netanyahu would be invited to address the liberal Washington think tank Center for American Progress, a group that serves the purpose of fueling the Democratic Party with progressive policies and ideas. The Israeli embassy approached CAP, the Huffington Post reported (in an article in which I was quoted), and asked for an opportunity to speak. “He’s looking for that progressive validation,” a former CAP staffer told the news website, “and they’re basically validating a guy who race-baited during his election and has disavowed the two-state solution.”

...

Still, there is some sense in agreeing to host Netanyahu. For one, he is the head of state of a nominal ally, however noxious he can be and however much he spurns his country’s best ally. No one should be surprised that CAP seriously entertains an offer to speak from any head of state. What’s more, CAP is in a mode now of switching from being Obama’s think tank to being Hillary Clinton’s; the gravitational pull of an election is too great for the think tank’s ideological imperative (progressivism) to outweigh its unstated partisan mission. Clinton continues, in the 2016 race, to stake out at least moderately hawkish positions on the Middle East, either from a political calculation (to distinguish herself from Obama’s overstated reluctance to conflict), a campaign one (Haim Saban, the hawkish Israeli-American businessman is a longtime Clinton and Democratic donor, though notably cool on Obama), or an ideological one (she’s just a hawk). It makes a lot more sense for Clinton’s think tank to invite Netanyahu than it would for Obama’s.

.... It’s hard to see how giving a liberal platform to Netanyahu helps advance any progressive cause at all—indeed, considering his policies and positions, Netanyahu’s appearance looks poised to do the opposite: help the right wing. That’s what makes the invitation particularly perplexing.

...

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-the-center-for-american-progress-hosting-benjamin-netanyahu/

"...capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encouraged small-hearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity."

—Martin Luther King