The Offical Senator Bernie Sanders Thread

[thoughtone]

source: Vermont Public Radio

Bernie Sanders To Announce Presidential Run

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a luncheon at the National Press Club on Monday, March 9, 2015 in Washington. VPR has learned that Sanders will announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday.


VPR News has learned from several sources that Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday.

Sanders will release a short statement on that day and then hold a major campaign kickoff in Vermont in several weeks.

Audio from this story will be posted at approximately 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 29.

Sanders' entry into the Democratic race ensures that Hillary Clinton will face a challenge to win the support of the liberal wing of the party.

Sanders' basic message will be that the middle class in America has been decimated in the past two decades while wealthy people and corporations have flourished.

His opposition to a proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (T.P.P.) shows how he plans to frame this key issue of his campaign.

"If you want to understand why the middle class in America is disappearing and why we have more wealth and income inequality in America than we have had since the late 1920s, you have to address the issue of trade,” Sanders said in a phone interview on April 23.

As the longest-serving Independent member of Congress, Sanders has been a vocal critic of the influence that large corporations have on the political process.

"All of the major corporations want to continue with this trade policy. Wall Street wants to continue this trade policy. The drug companies want to continue this trade policy. But organizations representing American workers and the environment do not want to continue the trade policy. They want new trade policies,” he said.

And Sanders says it is imperative that all the Democratic presidential candidates address the issue of trade and income inequality.

"So, I think that Hillary Clinton and every candidate out there should in fact address whether or not they support this T.P.P.," Sanders said.

In the past few months, Sanders has been actively visiting many of the early presidential primary states. Just last weekend he traveled to South Carolina to address the state Democratic Party and news reports indicate that his economic message drew a lot of support at the state meeting.

 

[QueEx]

Just how left-wing is Bernie Sanders?


Bernie Sanders rails against billionaires,
wants to break up the six largest banks,
and thinks that Obamacare didn't go far enough.
But he's also an established dealmaker and relevant on Capitol Hill.

Washington — To some Democrats, being called “left wing” is an epithet. But to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the self-described democratic socialist now running for the “big-D” Democratic presidential nomination, it’s a badge of honor.

Senator Sanders supports a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system, sometimes called “Medicare for all.” He wants to break up America’s six largest banks. He urges deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions through strict regulation. He wants to get money out of politics.

“We can’t continue having a nation in which we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation on Earth, at the same time as we’re seeing a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires,” Sanders said in his announcement speech on Capitol Hill Thursday. “So, that’s the major issue.”

So while there’s no doubt that the rumpled, outspoken Sanders is a leftie, in many ways he’s not so out there as to be irrelevant in the American political context – and in the corridors of power. Since Sanders’s first election to Congress in 1990, as an Independent, Democrats have welcomed him as a member of their caucus. For two years, he chaired the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee until Democrats lost the majority, and is now “ranking member” – occupying the top minority seat – on the Senate Banking Committee.

Sanders has also proved to be an effective political player. According to his profile in National Journal, senators have confided to Democrat Patrick Leahy, Vermont’s senior senator, “what a pleasant surprise [Sanders] has turned out to be” in his willingness to forge legislative deals.

By more than one scoring system, Sanders is not even the most liberal member of the Senate.

The Silicon Valley tech startup Crowdpac, which analyzes political data, ranks Sanders as only the second most liberal senator, after Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) of Wisconsin.

Last year, National Journal ranked Sanders as only the 37th most liberal senator for 2013, though that result no doubt says more about the ranking system than about Sanders’s politics.

More relevant is how Sanders stacks up against former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner (by a mile) for the Democratic nomination. In the Crowdpac analysis, Sanders is more liberal than Mrs. Clinton on 14 out of 15 major issues. The two issues on which the gap is greatest are banking and defense/foreign policy.

Sanders and Clinton differ in another way: More than 60 percent of his campaign contributions come in small-dollar amounts – between $1 and $199 – compared with only 10 percent of Clinton’s, according to Crowdpac. It considered donations from 1980 to the present.

Sanders backs President Obama on some issues but not others. Both men opposed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Clinton voted to authorize; Sanders remains opposed to foreign military intervention, while Obama’s record in office is mixed. Sanders supports US sanctions against Russia over its meddling in Ukraine, and Obama’s negotiations aimed at preventing Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

Like Obama, Sanders is a liberal on social issues, such as gay marriage and abortion, and supports the president’s executive actions on immigration. Sanders opposes the Patriot Act and its reauthorization, and parts company with Obama on NSA surveillance, slamming “out-of-control intelligence agencies.”

On the economy, like Obama, Sanders favors more investment in infrastructure and a higher minimum wage. But on international trade, he and Obama are polar opposites – as the president is with most Democrats. Sanders calls Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership with Pacific Rim nations, “a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multinational corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment, and the foundations of American democracy.”

The National Journal profile of Sanders describes a classic child of the '60s. Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son a Jewish paint salesman who had immigrated from Poland. At the University of Chicago, he got involved in “radical leftist politics,” and moved to Vermont, where he worked as a carpenter. Soon he got into politics, where he ran for US Senate as a candidate of the socialist Liberty Union Party and got just 2 percent of the vote.

After several more tries at political office, Sanders finally succeeded in 1981, becoming mayor of Burlington – Vermont’s largest city (population 42,000 in 2010) – by just 10 votes. Suddenly, T-shirts proclaiming the “People’s Republic of Burlington” were all the rage.

Two years ago, Sanders wrote of the weekend he spent in Vermont with the Danish ambassador to the United States, holding town halls around the state.

“Large crowds came out to learn about a social system very different from our own which provides extraordinary security and opportunity for the people of Denmark,” Sanders wrote in a Huffington Post column headlined, “What can we learn from Denmark?”

Today, Sanders has no party affiliation, and is the longest-serving Independent in congressional history. He is running for the Democratic nomination, he says, because gaining access to the ballot in all 50 states is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. He also wants to take part in the Democratic primary debates.

His path to the Democratic presidential nomination is impossibly steep, but in his campaign announcement Thursday, he said, "We’re in this race to win."

As only the second candidate to declare for the Democratic nomination, after the more centrist Clinton, Sanders certainly has some running room.

Liberal activists welcomed Sanders into the race.

“MoveOn members have cheered on Sen. Sanders for years as he's stood up to the Wall Street banks and wealthy interests who have rigged the game in Washington and knee-capped our country’s middle-class and working families,” said Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org Civic Action, in a statement.

Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz also welcomed Sanders and the contributions he and the other candidates will make to “a healthy dialogue about the future of our party and our nation.”​

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0430/Just-how-left-wing-is-Bernie-Sanders

 

[thoughtone]

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[thoughtone]

source: Ring of Fire

Bernie Sanders on Baltimore: Police Officers MUST Be Held Accountable For Their Actions


Bernie Sanders, during an interview on CNN with Wolff Blitzer, addressed the recent events in Baltimore. Sanders noted that while there the issue is at first a local issue, the president does have the eyes and ears of the nation.

He also recognized that there is a systemic problem in Baltimore, one that extends far beyond the immediate issue with Freddie Gray. Sanders mentioned that unemployment is Gray’s neighborhood is at an alarming high, not to mention that instances of violent police interaction were far from uncommon.

Watch the interview below.

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EbxobSrrC68" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="560"></iframe>

 

[thoughtone]

Ironically, only Fox News showed a partial broadcast of this announcement. No other so called "news" network broadcasted this live. However, Ted Cruz Marco Rubio and other right wing republican presidential announcements were give full coverage by all the so called "news networks."


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[Art Vandelay]

Man and woman
by Bernard Sanders

A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

The man and woman get dressed up on Sunday — and go to Church, or maybe to their "revolutionary" political meeting.

Have you ever looked at the Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf of your local bookstore? Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like "Girl 12 raped by 14 men" sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?

Women, for their own preservation, are trying to pull themselves together. And it's necessary for all of humanity that they do so. Slavishness on one hand breeds pigness on the other hand. Pigness on one hand breeds slavishness on the other. Men and women — both are losers. Women adapt themselves to fill the needs of men, and men adapt themselves to fill the needs of women. In the beginning there were strong men who killed the animals and brought home the food — and the dependent women who cooked it. No More! Only the roles remain — waiting to be shaken off. There are no "human" oppressors. Oppressors have lost their humanity. On one hand "slavishness," on the other hand "pigness." Six of one, half dozen of the other. Who wins?

Many women seem to be walking a tightrope now. Their qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism. How do you love — without being dependent? How do you be gentle — without being subservient? How do you maintain a relationship without giving up your identity and without getting strung out? How do you reach out and give your heart to your lover, but maintain the soul which is you?

And Men. Men are in pain too. They are thinking, wondering. What is it they want from a woman? Are they at fault? Are they perpetrating this man-woman situation? Are they oppressors?

The man is bitter.

"You lied to me," he said. (She did).

"You said that you loved me, that you wanted me, that you needed me. Those are your words." (They are).

"But in reality," he said, "If you ever loved me, or wanted me, or needed me (all of which I'm not certain was ever true), you also hated me. You hated me — just as you have hated every man in your entire life, but you didn't have the guts to tell me that. You hated me before you ever saw me, even though I was not your father, or your teacher, or your sex friend when you were 13 years old, or your husband. You hated me not because of who I am, or what I was to you, but because I am a man. You did not deal with me as a person — as me. You lived a lie with me, used me and played games with me — and that's a piggy thing to do."

And she said, "You wanted me not as a woman, or a lover, or a friend, but as a submissive woman, or submissive friend, or submissive lover; and right now where my head is I balk at even the slightest suspicion of that kind of demand."

And he said, "You're full of _______."

And they never again made love together (which they had each liked to do more than anything) or never ever saw each other one more time.

Bernie Sanders Recants 1972 Article on Women’s Fantasies of Rape
May 29 2015

MUSCATINE, Iowa — Senator Bernie Sanders said a 1972 article he wrote describing women’s fantasies of rape had been misinterpreted, and its resurfacing showed how campaigns had become “soap operas.’’

“That we worry what I wrote 40 or 50 years ago, to the degree they become significant in the campaign, that’s just sad,’’ Mr. Sanders said on Friday.

His campaign spokesman, Michael Briggs, told CNN that the essay was a “dumb attempt at dark satire in an alternative publication,” and that the writing “in no way reflects his views or record on women. It was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the ‘70s.”

The information about the essay, published in an alternative publication the Vermont Freeman in 1972, appeared in a Mother Jones story on Sander’s early political career, "How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician." (See below.) In the article, Mr. Sanders imagined male and female sexual fantasies, apparently to illustrate how both sexes have internalized gender stereotypes, which he went on to write were self-defeating. The Vermont Freeman no longer exists.

“A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously,” Mr. Sanders wrote.

In another passage, he wrote: “Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like, “Girl, 12, raped by 14 men” sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?’’

At the time, Mr. Sanders was 30 and running for Vermont governor on the antiwar Liberty Union Party ticket. He lost the race. Nine years later he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., as an independent. The 43-year old essay resurfaced this week in an article in Mother Jones magazine about Mr. Sanders’s formative years in Vermont’s leftist counterculture.

It is bouncing around social media, where Mr. Sanders is a favorite with the left, and it is unclear if the article will become a serious distraction to Mr. Sanders’s recently announced campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

He has been drawing large crowds to rallies in New Hampshire and in Iowa, where he calls for progressive policies like higher taxes on the rich to pay for public works jobs.

“It was a poorly written article dealing with gender stereotypes of the period, in the sense that a lot of men have the feel to be all powerful and controlling,’’ Mr. Sanders said in an interview after a town hall event in Muscatine, Iowa.

“Women have the feeling they have to be dependent. It was very poorly written in a way I certainly would not write it now. But if you read it, what you find is that is a bad situation for both people: women shouldn’t be dependent. Men should not be oppressors. We want a society where people are equal. That was about it was about.’’

 

[Art Vandelay]

How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician
A portrait of the candidate as a young radical.
By Tim Murphy
Mother Jones
Tue May 26, 2015

Sometime in the late 1970s, after he'd had a kid, divorced his college sweetheart, lost four elections for statewide offices, and been evicted from his home on Maple Street in Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders moved in with a friend named Richard Sugarman. Sanders, a restless political activist and armchair psychologist with a penchant for arguing his theories late into the night, found a sounding board in the young scholar, who taught philosophy at the nearby University of Vermont. At the time, Sanders was struggling to square his revolutionary zeal with his overwhelming rejection at the polls— and this was reflected in a regular ritual. Many mornings, Sanders would greet his roommate with a simple statement: "We're not crazy."

"I'd say, 'Bernard, maybe the first thing you should say is 'Good morning' or something,'" Sugarman recalls. "But he'd say, 'We're. Not. Crazy.'"

Sanders eventually got a place of his own, found his way, and in 1981 was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont's largest city— the start of an improbable political career that led him to Congress, and soon, he hopes, the White House. On Tuesday, after more than three decades as a self-described independent socialist, the septuagenarian senator launched his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the Vermont city where this long, strange trip began. But it was during Sanders' first turbulent decade in Vermont that he discovered it wasn't enough to hold lofty ideas and wait for the world to fall in line; in the Green Mountains, he learned how to be a politician.

Not long after graduating from the University of Chicago, and fresh from a stint on an Israeli kibbutz, Sanders arrived in Vermont in the late 1960s on the crest of a wave. The state's population jumped 31 percent in the 1960s and '70s, due largely to an infusion of over 30,000 hippies who had come to the state seeking peace, freedom, and cheap land. Sanders and his then-wife bought 85 acres in rural Vermont for $2,500. The only building on the property was an old maple-sugar house without electricity or running water, which Sanders converted into a cabin.

Free-range hair and sandals notwithstanding, Sanders never quite fit the mold of the back-to-the-landers he joined. "I don't think Bernie was particularly into growing vegetables," one friend put it. Nor was he much into smoking them. "He described himself once in my hearing as 'the only person who did not get high in the '60s,'" recalls Greg Guma, a writer and activist who traveled in the same circles as Sanders in Burlington. "He didn't even like rock music—he likes country music." (Sanders did say in a 1972 interview that he had tried marijuana.) "He's not a hippie, never was a hippie," Sugarman says. "But he was always a little bit on the suburbs of society."

What Sanders did share with the young radicals and hippies flocking to Vermont was a smoldering idealism forged during his college years as a civil rights activist— he coordinated a sit-in against segregated housing and attended the 1963 March on Washington— but only a fuzzy sense of how to act on it. Sanders bounced back and forth between Vermont and New York City, where he worked at a psychiatric hospital. After his marriage broke up in the late 1960s, he moved to an A-frame farmhouse outside the Vermont town of Stannard, a tiny hamlet with no paved roads in the buckle of the commune belt. He dabbled in carpentry and tried to get by as a freelance journalist for alternative newspapers and regional publications, contributing interviews, political screeds, and, one time, a stream-of-consciousness essay on the nature of male-female sexual dynamics. (See OP.)

Sanders was aimless. Then he discovered Liberty Union.

The Liberty Union party was conceived in 1970 as part of an informal network of leftist state parties that would uproot the two-party system and help end the Vietnam War. In Vermont, the party's leaders hoped to find a receptive audience amid the hippie emigrants. Its cofounder, a gruff, bushy-bearded man named Peter Diamondstone, had predated Sanders at the University of Chicago by a few years; Diamondstone likes to joke that they "knew all the same Communists" on the South Side.

By the winter of 1971, Liberty Union was floundering. "We were lost as a political party," Diamondstone says. That January, Sanders showed up with a friend at the Goddard College library, for a Liberty Union meeting. (The school was a favorite lefty gathering spot, and its alumni include Mumia Abu-Jamal and the members of the band Phish.) It was a large crowd by the group's standards—maybe 30 people. The party was struggling to field a candidate for the upcoming Senate special election. Sanders, with dark hair, thick black glasses, and his two-year-old son in his arms, stood up impulsively in a room full of strangers. "He said, 'I'll do it— what do I have to do?'" Diamondstone recalls.

Sanders lost that race, the first of four losing campaigns over the next five years (twice for Senate, twice for governor). In addition to opposing the war, the party pushed for things including a guaranteed minimum wage, tougher corporate regulations, and an end to compulsory education. (Vermont's schools "crush the spirits of our children" Sanders once remarked). Sanders floated hippie-friendly proposals, such as legalizing all drugs and widening the entrance ramps of interstate highways to allow cars to more easily pull over to pick up hitchhikers.

But through these campaigns, Sanders emerged as one of the leading voices within the organization and as its spokesman to the rest of the state. Within a few years, he was named Liberty Union's chairman. "He was a mouthpiece, he was an orator— we called him 'Silvertongue,'" Diamondstone says. During his 1972 campaign for governor, Sanders crisscrossed the state with the party's choice for president— the child-rearing guru Dr. Benjamin Spock.

In those early years, Sanders, a member of the Young People's Socialist League at the University of Chicago, was a true believer in what might be called small-s socialism, and had little patience for lukewarm allies. He believed in the need for a united front of anti-capitalist activists marching in step against the corrupt establishment. Guma recalled meeting Sanders for the first time at a campaign information session and asking why the candidate for Senate should get his vote. Sanders, in effect, told Guma that if he even needed to ask, Liberty Union wasn't for him. "Do you know what the movement is? Have you read the books?" he recalled Sanders responding. "If you didn't come to work for the movement, you came for the wrong reasons— I don't care who you are, I don't need you." In interviews at the time, Sanders suggested that dwelling on local issues was perhaps counterproductive, because it distracted activists from the real root of the problem— Washington. Sanders started a small monthly zine to promote the Liberty Union's agenda. It was called Movement.

"I once asked him what he meant by calling himself a 'socialist,' and he referred to an article that was already a touchstone of mine, which was Albert Einstein's 'Why Socialism?'" says Sanders' friend Jim Rader. "I think that Bernie's basic idea of socialism was just about as simple as Einstein's formulation." (In short, according to the physicist, capitalism is a soul-sucking construct that corrodes society.)

Sanders built his campaigns against a theme that would sound familiar to his supporters today— American society had been pushed to the brink of collapse by plutocrats and imperialists and radical change was needed to pull it back. "I have the very frightened feeling that if fundamental and radical change does not come about in the very near future that our nation, and, in fact, our entire civilization could soon be entering an economic dark age," he said in announcing his 1974 bid for Senate. Later that year, he sent an open letter to President Gerald Ford, warning of a "virtual Rockefeller family dictatorship over the nation" if Nelson Rockefeller was named vice president. He also called for the CIA to be disbanded immediately, in the wake of eye-popping revelations about the agency's misdeeds.

But Sanders was beginning to question whether Liberty Union had a future. He drew just six percent of the vote when he ran for governor in 1976 (the three other campaigns didn't fare any better), and he was drifting away from the global ambitions of Diamondstone, who was now advocating "a worldwide socialist revolution." After the last American troops left Saigon in 1975, the anti-war party was faced with an existential crisis. And Sanders faced one of his own. Liberty Union could claim a few victories— it helped to defeat a telephone rate increase and secured more funding for state child dental programs. But he believed that absent a serious change, the party would never be anything more than symbolic.

"That's what distinguished [Sanders] from leftists who were more invested in the symbolism than in the outcome," Sugarman says. "He read Marx, he understood Marx's critique of capitalism— but he also understood Marx doesn't give you too many prescriptions of how society should go forward."

Sanders had reason for introspection. He was struggling financially— a newspaper article during his 1974 race noted that he was running for office while on unemployment. His income came from sporadic carpentry and freelance articles, which made paying bills on time a constant struggle. Sanders, now single, was helping to raise a young son, and living in a city in which the working poor lacked access to daycare. Increasingly, Sanders' political gaze was focusing on his own backyard.

Meanwhile, Sanders and Diamondstone clashed about the direction of Liberty Union— and pretty much everything else. "When I was on the road, I would stop at his house and I'd sleep downstairs, and we'd yell at each other all night long, and sometime around 3 o'clock in the morning, we'd say, 'We gotta stop this,' so we could get some sleep," Diamondstone recalls. "Five minutes later we'd be yelling at each other again."

Sanders quit the party in 1977, and dismissed Liberty Union's future on his way out the door. "It certainly has not gone as far as I wanted it to go," he told the Associated Press, "and in that sense it's a failure." (The relationship between Sanders and Diamondstone continued to deteriorate; when Sanders campaigned for Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in 1984, Diamondstone followed him to every campaign stop, handing out leaflets calling the then-mayor a "quisling.")

Sanders emerged from his experience with the Liberty Union as confident as ever of the need for radical change in the nation's power structure, but less sure how to get there.

First, he had to get his life in order. "He was living in the back of an old brick building, and when he couldn't pay the [electric bill], he would take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord's outlet," says Nancy Barnett, an artist who lived next door to Sanders in Burlington. The fridge was often empty, but the apartment was littered with yellow legal pads filled with Sanders' writings. When he was eventually evicted, Sanders moved in with his friend Sugarman.

"The fact that neither of us could afford to live in the city where we worked was a source of great consternation to us and I think the beginning of a [mayoral] platform, honestly," Sugarman says of their roommate days.

Sanders kept busy building a company he had started with Barnett called the American People's Historical Society, which produced filmstrips for elementary school classrooms on topics including women in American history and New England heroes. It was a DIY operation— Sanders did all the male voices; Barnett did all the female ones. They used Sanders' son's walkie-talkies to create a beeping noise that would signal when to move to the next slide. The work took them up and down New England's back roads in Sanders' Volkswagen Dasher, as they sold copies of the slides to school administrators. "His cars were always breaking down," Barnett says. "He was extremely frugal. It was never important to him." When it snowed, Sanders (or whoever was in the car with him) would have to reach into the glove compartment to pull out a spare wiper blade and clear the windshield manually.

Sanders had little interest in making a profit from his educational film enterprise. Instead, after his falling-out with Liberty Union, he poured his share of the profits into his pièce de résistance— a documentary on the life of union leader Eugene Debs, who won nearly a million votes running for president from prison on the Socialist ticket in 1920.

"We had gone to New York and lined up Howard Da Silva, who was a big Broadway booming voice actor, to play Eugene Debs' voice," Barnett explains. "But that didn't quite work out, so Bernie ended up doing the narration of Debs' voice." Bernie Sanders is from Brooklyn; Debs was not. The movie also suffered from the filmmaker's reverence for his subject. Sanders, one reviewer opined, seemed "determined to administer Debs to the viewer as if it were an unpleasant, but necessary, medicine."

When Sanders tried to get the documentary aired on public television in 1978, he was rebuffed, either because of the political agenda, or because the documentary just wasn't very good. Sanders, fearful perhaps that even humble Vermont Public Broadcasting had fallen under the dominion of corporate media, cried censorship and fought back. Eventually, the Debs documentary was aired. "That was a breakthrough of sorts," Sugarman says. "That was actually our first successful fight."

The incident only hardened Sanders' skepticism of corporate power. Television, Sanders wrote in 1979, was a particularly pernicious evil, rooted in "the well-tested Hitlerian principle that people should be treated as morons and bombarded over and over again with the same simple phrases and ideas." Television stations were "attempting to brainwash people into submission and helplessness."

Not long after making the Debs documentary, Sanders got back in the political game. He ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981 as an independent, and he crafted a hyperlocal platform that cut across party lines— he opposed a waterfront condominium project, supported preserving a local hill for sledding, pushed to rein in utility companies, and urged bringing a minor league baseball team to town. His kitchen-table focus was underscored by his most popular campaign swag— free paper grocery bags with his name on them. Sanders was still, at heart, the neurotic socialist who picked fights with Diamondstone over Sigmund Freud's controversial protégé Wilhelm Reich, but he recognized that voters in Burlington wanted to hear what he thought about Burlington.

He won by 10 votes out of 8,650 cast, knocking off the longtime Democratic incumbent Gordon Paquette. After a decade on the outside, Bernie Sanders finally had a foot in the door— and a steady job. "It's so strange, just having money," he told the Associated Press at the time.

In the mayor's office, and later in the halls of Congress as a representative and then a senator, Sanders has followed a similar course to the one that got him to Washington. He's unafraid to raise hell about the corporate forces he fears are driving America into the ground— replace "Rockefeller" with "Koch" and his Liberty Union speeches don't sound dated— but always careful to keep Vermont in his sights. At times, Sanders has even showed a willingness to compromise that's disappointed longtime ideological allies. He has supported the F-35, Lockheed Martin's problem-plagued fighter jet that has led to hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns, which just so happens to be manufactured in Vermont. "He became what we call up here a 'Vermont Exceptionalist,'" Guma says, of the candidate's pragmatic streak.

Sanders has made some cosmetic adjustments too. "He's much more conscious of his appearance than he was," Sugarman says. "When he was first elected mayor we had to go out and buy him a couple of ties— he didn't own any."

The earliest polls of the presidential race give former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a commanding lead over Sanders, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, former Sen. Jim Webb, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, and whoever else is considering jumping into the field. But if Sanders defies the mighty odds to win the presidency, he and Sugarman may be reunited in Washington. Sanders has promised his old friend, who still teaches at the University of Vermont, the same position he held during the mayoral years in Burlington— an unpaid posting called "Secretary of Reality."

 

[Art Vandelay]

Hillary Clinton is going to lose:
She doesn’t even see the frustrated progressive wave that will nominate Bernie Sanders
Clinton's positioning on TPP is way too cute. When it passes with Dems' implicit support, grass roots will explode
BILL CURRY
Salon.com
MONDAY, JUN 22, 2015

Hillary Clinton went to New York’s Roosevelt Island earlier this month to relaunch her campaign for president. Her first kickoff fell flat, perhaps because she herself didn’t attend, opting instead to send a video greeting card in which people she still insists on calling ‘everyday Americans’ shared their life plans. (To go to school! Plant a garden! Get married!) She came on at the end to say she had plans of her own that include being president, and that she does it all for us.

She delivered a 45-minute speech that told us little more than that three-minute video. She still won’t say where she’d peg the minimum wage or if she’d ever rein in the surveillance state or get us out of Iraq. Most amazing is how she finesses the Trans Pacific Partnership that President Obama so covets. It’s the biggest deal in the history of commerce; its investor tribunals would substitute corporate for democratic will here and around the world — and Clinton hasn’t said boo about it. Some ask how she gets away with it. I’m not so sure she does.

Politicians have always ducked tough issues, but today’s Democrats are the worst. When the TPP came before the House, enough Democrats played it cute to leave the outcome in doubt till the very end. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t tip her hand until just before the vote. Many who voted no never said exactly why. Some want to curb currency manipulation. Some oppose the fast track process, others the secret tribunals or the intellectual property rules that actually restrain competition. If the caucus as a whole has a bottom line, no one knows what it is.

The TPP is a mystery because our leaders wish it so. We don’t know what’s in it because our president won’t let us read it, and not out of respect for precedent or protocol. George W. Bush showed us drafts of his trade agreements. We’re negotiating one right now with Europe, and Europeans get to read those drafts. If a comma gets cut from the TPP, hundreds of corporate lobbyists know in an instant. The only people who don’t know are the American people — and that’s only because our president thinks our knowing would ruin everything.

The process by which Congress considers the TPP is confusing in itself. The pact is still being negotiated by the 12 nations who’d be parties to it. The fight now is over legislation meant to grease the skids for it when it finally arrives. At issue are trade promotion authority or TPA — the ‘fast track’ by which Congress vows not to amend or filibuster a trade agreement it hasn’t even read– and trade adjustment assistance or TAA, which gives benefits (money, health insurance, job training) to workers who can prove to the federal government that they lost their jobs due to trade. Signed into law by John Kennedy, expanded by Bill Clinton and extended by George W. Bush, the half-century old program is set to expire in September. The bills now before Congress would keep it alive another six years.

Back in May the Senate approved a bill that included both TAA and TPA. On June 12, the House voted on both, but in separate bills under a rule requiring passage of each in order to send either to the Senate. The rule was alternatively described as an attempt to mirror the Senate bill, or a strategy to gain House passage, there being different majorities there for each provision. (Republicans are for trade promotion. Democrats are for trade assistance.) As a strategy for passage it was a dud. When fast track passed by eight votes (219 to 211), Democrats reversed field and bailed on the TAA just to derail the whole process.

The press called the June 12 votes a huge win for labor and a “humiliating defeat” (the Washington Post) for Obama. Reading such stories one might think fast track or even the TPP itself had suffered a crushing blow. Some on the left even called it historic. Paul Krugman wrote, “House Democrats shocked almost everyone by rejecting key provisions needed to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” To Krugman it seemed a watershed: “Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Democrats have been on the ideological defensive. Even when they won elections they seemed afraid to endorse clearly progressive positions… But that era appears to be over.”

I wouldn’t pop any corks quite yet. For the first time ever Congress hit the pause button on globalization, but that’s all it did. House Dems didn’t suddenly lurch left; they just did what they always do. In 1993 they voted no on NAFTA. In 2002 they voted against the Iraq War. In 2010 they passed an Obamacare bill with a public option. But they can’t ignore their president or their donors forever. In 2008 they resisted Bush’s bailout but finally gave in to Obama and Wall Street. Republicans held firm, thus setting in motion the Tea Party and the sad, sorry debacle of 2010.

On Thursday the Republicans did what any fool could have predicted: they passed a new rule and sent the TPA to the Senate sans worker assistance. We don’t know what will happen next, but we do know fast track has already passed both houses of Congress once. In the end, Obama, Boehner, McConnell and their global capital partners will likely get their way, but June 12 may yet prove historic. In 2008 House Republicans lost the bailout battle but planted the seeds of a grass-roots movement that would win wars. Progressives should examine the precedent.

Krugman’s right: there’s a rumbling out there, but most Democrats are a long way from hearing it, let alone joining in. If House Dems stand firm, they too may plant the seeds of a grass-roots movement. Much of their party will resist. Every political party is really many parties. The Democrats’ presidential, Senate, governors’ and donors’ parties all line up with global capital. Even in the House, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer is a staunch ‘free trader’ and Pelosi herself spent the week before the vote quietly imploring her caucus to swallow the poison pill.

No one knows where scores of Democrats really stand. Both parties are caught in a crossfire between their donors and their base. Republican voters are suspicious of the TPP and hate fast track, mostly because they hate Obama. Democratic voters hate fast track but accept the TPP, mostly because they love Obama. Republicans in Congress are civil because they can’t bash Democrats for doing what their base wishes they would do. Democrats in Congress are quiet because they don’t want their donors to think they mean what they say — and don’t know when someone may offer them something to take one for the team by switching sides.

It’s hard to follow the bouncing ball when the topic’s so opaque, the bill’s locked up like a nuclear code and everyone’s lying or speaking in such empty phrases that they may as well be lying. The press isn’t helping. When all coverage is about motives, message or strategy, it’s easier for politicians to hide their views. This week I told two liberal friends that Pelosi is trying to find “a path to yes on fast track.” (Her words) Both said Pelosi and Clinton had broken with Obama, are moving left and now oppose the deal. In terms of strategy and message it was true — all except the part about Clinton and Pelosi opposing the deal.

No one plays the game better than Hillary Clinton, the Harry Houdini of syntax. The question is whether it’s a winning game, and if so for whom. It isn’t a winning game for progressives. We only win when debate is specific, honest and brave. The TPP debate is like those we have every day over government. The more abstract the terms, the harder it is for us to win. If we find ourselves debating ‘government’ or ‘bureaucracy,’ we lose. If we talk Medicare or Social Security, we win. We even win on foreign aid but only when armed with the facts.

It’s the same with the TPP. Everyone wants more ‘global cooperation’ but no one wants to let Big Pharma stamp out generic drugs or let Big Tobacco tell us how they’ll label their products. And no one wants some secretive global tribunal telling a state legislature how to govern. If there’s an easier case to make, I’ve never seen it. You may ask why every Democrat in Congress doesn’t make it, but we’ve gone over that. Whether they’re in thrall to their donors, their consultants, their leaders or their ambitions, whoever or whatever holds them back, they just can’t do it.

Clinton spoke on Roosevelt Island the day after the House TTP vote. She said the word ‘trade’ once, when breathlessly observing that she could see the new World Trade Center over her shoulder. In a year she has made just one statement on the issue. Months ago, when asked a question by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell she said, “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security. And we have to do our part in making sure we have the…. skills to be competitive.”

The morning after Announcement II, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, appeared on “Meet the Press.” When asked her position on the TPP he managed to sound indignant: “She actually has been very clear about where she stands on trade…. First, does it grow jobs, grow wages and protect American workers and second, does it protect our national security…”

Podesta said Clinton would “render her final judgment” after the deal was done. That was it. Her non-answer would be her final answer until such time as it no longer mattered what she thought. Podesta’s performance may have tripped an alarm even in the tone-deaf Clinton camp. Later that day in Iowa, she talked for the first time on the record about the TPP. In a story headlined Trade Deal Comments Put Hillary Clinton at Odds With Her Former Boss, the Times told how she “bluntly suggested that the president should ‘listen to and work with’ Democrats to improve the deal and ensure better protections for American workers. If that cannot be done Mrs. Clinton said, ‘there should be no deal.’”

This may have been the story my liberal friends read. It reads as if Clinton came out swinging, but read it again and it’s clear she said even less there than she said to Andrea Mitchell. If Obama can’t work with Democratic House leaders who both support the TPP, there shouldn’t be a deal. But why wouldn’t he? Her verbal feint was sublimely subtle. Without changing her position, without even taking one, she repositioned herself on an issue roiling her party and nation. As message politics goes, it was state of the art. Too bad for Clinton it isn’t working.

Clinton’s trade talk is of a piece with her entire 2016 campaign. It’s also of a piece with Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Clinton insiders make no secret of her desire to emulate him. Obama’s 2008 campaign had three hallmarks. One was its fundraising. Obama was the first Democratic presidential campaign to outraise a Republican on Wall Street and the first of either party to crack the code of Internet fundraising. The second was its massive, web-driven, volunteer effort, probably the biggest of any presidential campaign in history.

The third was its message, at once fiercely populist and reassuringly centrist — and vague. Much of it came from chief strategist David Axelrod who opined that for too long Democrats had been mired down in issues. His campaigns were famous for selling personalities rather than platforms, for finding ways to reconcile our conflicts in the biographies of his candidates. It worked for Obama. “Yes we can,” audiences called out. “Do what?” few bothered to ask, or thought they had to.

After eight years of Obama, I’m not sure Clinton can run that race, or that anyone can. I don’t think she can enlist Wall Street oligarchs and recruit an army of dewy-eyed volunteers. Above all, I don’t think she can spout populist rhetoric without any policy specifics to back it up. Clinton insiders also ingratiate themselves to reporters by dishing about her need to seem more authentic. Someone should tell them it’s hard to seem real when you won’t tell people what you really think.

A bigger problem for Clinton may be that we know what she thinks. Her platform is like Obama’s trade deal; she won’t say what’s in it, but we can easily guess. It isn’t populism and it isn’t reform. The TPP? She never met a trade deal she didn’t like. The minimum wage? She and Obama let McDonald’s get the drop on them. The surveillance state? Her handling of her emails told us all we need to know of her views on transparency. More war in Iraq? For 12 years as a senator and secretary of state she was John McCain’s best friend. If she gets to be commander in chief, get ready to rumble.

She’s weakest on the sleeper issue of 2016: public corruption and the general debasement of politics and government. Voter disgust is so deep even consultants who make their real livings off corporate clients tell their political clients to talk about it. In her speech Clinton vowed to “wage and win four fights for you.” The first three were jobs, families and national security. The fourth was “reforming our government and revitalizing our democracy.” She vowed to overturn Citizens United and fight GOP efforts to disenfranchise the young, the poor and people of color, but then drifted off onto technology and cutting waste. Unlike nearly every Republican announcing for president, she never mentioned ethics or corruption.

Democratic elites don’t want to hear it but Hillary Clinton’s in trouble. It isn’t in all the data yet though you can find it if you look. In a straw poll taken in early June at a Wisconsin Democratic convention she edged out Bernie Sanders by just 8 points, 49% to 41%. In a poll of N.H. primary voters this week she beat Sanders by 41% to 31%. An Ohio poll had her in a dead heat with the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. If Sanders can poll 40% in a Wisconsin straw poll in June he can do it an Iowa caucus in January. Imagine a Hillary Clinton who just lost Iowa and New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders. It’s still hard to picture but it gets easier every day.

You don’t win your next race running someone else’s last one. Trying to do so, Clinton repeats her big mistake of 2008: not sensing the times. There are smaller changes she can make right now: hire better speech writers, including at least one with a sense of humor; put her family foundation under independent management; tell her husband to stop giving speeches or else start talking for free. But her whole campaign model is wrong. ‘Clinton Democrats’ hate to admit there are issues you can’t finesse or that they must ever choose between the middle class and the donor class. Clinton better figure it out now. When the data’s all in it will be too late.

Clinton resists change. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in either party who seems to feel the tectonic plates of our politics shifting, perhaps because he’s expected the change for so long. His is still an improbable candidacy, but less improbable than it was a month or even a week ago. If he clears out the second tier, his battle with Hillary could become epic, forcing not just her but the Democratic Party to choose between the middle class and the donor class; between corporate and democratic rule; the battle over trade carried over into a presidential election.

 

[Art Vandelay]

The difference between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in one paragraph.
JUN 17, 2015
DailyKos.com

Politico is out with a great article exploring the historic relationship between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

As you can imagine, Bernie was skeptical of a centrist Bill Clinton running for president in 1992, and immediately after Clinton won the election and appointed Hillary to lead health care reform, Bernie set to work attempting to convince her of the virtue of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system. As you can probably also imagine, he wasn't successful. Still, please do read what follows. The dialogue between Hillary and a Harvard Medical School physician supporting single-payer -- accompanying Bernie to his meeting at the White House -- is important for the record.

They got their meeting at the White House that month, and the two doctors laid out the case for single-payer to the first lady. “She said, ‘You make a convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?’” recalled Himmelstein. “And I said, “How about the president of the United States actually leading the American people?’ and she said, ‘Tell me something real.’ ”​

Wow. This paragraph -- the interaction it describes -- brilliantly highlights the core difference between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as candidates (and people!): Bernie believes that American politics can overcome the power of corporate wealth, Hillary is resigned to that power dictating the direction of our politics -- and public policy. (Unfortunately, some DC journalists feel the same way, which is why we get this "President of Reddit" crap from Vox.)
So, Democrats have a choice. One candidate believes that citizens -- and strong leaders representing those citizens -- can shape public policy. The other candidate believes that corporations -- like private health insurers with outrageously-wealthy CEOs -- have all the agency.

Choose wisely.

Want to know what sets Bernie Sanders apart from Hillary Clinton? Look at their donors.
Dylan Matthews
Vox.com
June 13, 2015

As the Democratic presidential primary progresses, you can expect Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to argue forcefully that Hillary Clinton, who held the first rally of her campaign today, is beholden to corporate interests, particularly the finance sector. And when he does so, you could imagine him citing these numbers:

This screenshot from Reddit user Bombed shows the OpenSecrets.org "career profiles" of Clinton and Sanders, summarizing their top contributors from 1989 to the present. That leaves out Sanders's time as mayor of Burlington, but includes both politicians' entire careers in federal politics. "The organizations themselves did not donate," OpenSecrets explains. "Rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families."

The differences could hardly be more striking. Out of Clinton's top 20 organizational donors, only two (EMILY's List and the University of California) aren't corporate. There are seven mega-banks, five corporate law/lobbying firms, and three big entertainment companies. Now, to be fair to Clinton, the vast majority of these donations came from individuals rather than corporate PACs, and as a senator from New York it's understandable that finance and media interests (not to mention New York ceramics giant Corning) would give to her heavily. But it's still a very corporate-heavy list.

By contrast, 19 of Sanders's top 20 donors are unions. The one non-labor group on the list is the American Association for Justice, an interest group for plaintiff's attorneys, perhaps the most reliable non-union Democratic constituency. This isn't too surprising. Sanders is, along with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), just about the most pro-labor member of the Senate. He has fought free trade agreements for decades and is a major opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he's critical of guest worker programs that he believes undercut Americans' wages, and he's pushed back on the Obama administration's education reform agenda. (Vermont, it should be said, is the only state in the union without charter schools.)

This is precisely the contrast Sanders wants to set up: Clinton's donor list reads bank, bank, bank, and his reads union, union, union. That won't be enough to win, not least because Democratic primary voters aren't actually more liberal than Clinton. But the threat of being tarred as a tool of finance could be enough to push Clinton in a more populist direction, which is what victory for Sanders would really look like.

 

[Art Vandelay]

Hillary Clinton Leads Presidential Hopefuls On Race
By Michael H. Cottman
BlackAmericaWeb.com
June 23, 2015

Hillary Clinton is distinguishing herself from the field of nearly 20 Republican presidential candidates by embracing African-Americans voters and boldly discussing a prickly subject her GOP opponents refuse to discuss: race.

While most of the GOP candidates have declined to mention race in any substantive way, Clinton has met with Black voters and used her campaign speeches to support critical issues that impact black voters.

On Saturday, Clinton spoke out about the murders in Charleston, South Carolina where Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, gunned down nine black parishioners who were gathered inside Emanuel AME Church for an evening prayer service last week.

“Once again, racist rhetoric has metastasized into racist violence,” Clinton said Saturday while addressing a summit of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco.

“Now, it’s tempting, it is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident, to believe that in today’s America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists,” Clinton said, in perhaps her most candid speech on race. “But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.”

​

Clinton’s remarks about the Charleston shootings underscores her commitment to reaching out to African Americans 17 months before voters head to the polls to elect the nation’s next president.

While many African-American voters complain that most presidential candidates wait until the final months – even weeks – of the campaign to reach out to Black voters, Clinton is already engaging them and hiring a notable team of African American advisors at all levels of her campaign.

“I know this is a difficult topic to talk about,” Clinton said. “I know that so many of us hoped by electing our first Black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. And our problem is not all kooks and Klansman,” she added. “It’s also in the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s in the offhand comments about not wanting “those people” in the neighborhood. Let’s be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear,” Clinton said.

Last week, during a campaign swing through South Carolina, Clinton called the family of Walter Scott to express her condolences after Scott, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed by an overzealous white police officer in South Carolina earlier this year. A spokesman for the Scott Family said Clinton called to offer her condolences and promised she was “going to work to make sure this doesn’t happen to another family.”

At a recent early childhood event in New Hampshire, Clinton called for universal preschool for all of America’s children. Only about half of the roughly 8.1 million 3- and 4-year olds in America are enrolled in pre-K, with only one in four enrolled in publicly funded pre-K.

Black educators have argued for years that many Black children are underserved and they support Clinton’s vision to push for quality education for four-year olds from low-and moderate-income families at or below the federal poverty level.

Clinton has also called for a broader vision for criminal justice reform; she has addressed racial profiling and how African-American men are far more likely to be stopped and searched by police; she has been vocal about voting rights for people with criminal records who have served their time; and she’s pushed back on discriminatory voter ID laws.

In recent weeks, Clinton has called for universal and automatic voter registration, which would register every American citizen at 18. She also supports at least 20 days of early voting nationwide, including evenings and weekends.

“All of these problems voting just didn’t happen by accident,” Clinton told an audience at the historically Black Texas Southern University. “And it is just wrong — it’s wrong — to try to prevent, undermine and inhibit Americans’ right to vote.”

In a clear sign that Clinton appreciates advice from African-American staffers, she has hired a number of black advisors. They include: Karen Finney, Senior Spokeswoman; HR/Diversity: Bernard Coleman; Tyrone Gayle, regional communication; LaDavia Drane, director of African-American outreach; Maya Harris, Senior Policy Advisor; political aides, Marlon Marshall, Brynne Craig and Tracey Lewis; Clay Middleton, a South Carolina advisor; and Charles Olivier, Deputy Chief Financial Officer.

“I know there are truths we don’t like to say out loud or discuss with our children,” Clinton said about race. “But we have to. That’s the only way we can possibly move forward together.”

In a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates where few ever discuss cultural intolerance, it’s gratifying to see Clinton confront the uncomfortable issue of racism head-on.

I once heard then-President Bill Clinton say that if America wants to have a serious conversation about race, emotions will need to be “rubbed raw.”

Hillary Clinton is starting the discussion on race in her own way: By using her presidential campaign bully pulpit.

What do you think?

 

[Art Vandelay]

Bernie Sanders Lags Hillary Clinton in Introducing Himself to Black Voters

Bernie Sanders Lags Hillary Clinton in Introducing Himself to Black Voters
By PATRICK HEALY and JONATHAN MARTIN
New York Times
JUNE 24, 2015

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is climbing in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has drawn thousands of people to rallies for his presidential campaign recently in Denver and Minneapolis. But the shooting last week in Charleston, S.C., has highlighted a daunting obstacle he faces in the Democratic primary contest: Black voters have shown little interest in him.

Even his own campaign advisers acknowledge that Mr. Sanders is virtually unknown to many African-Americans, an enormously important Democratic constituency.

Though he led sit-ins as a civil rights activist in the 1960s, helped the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. pull off a surprising campaign victory in Vermont in 1988, and espouses liberal policy ideas broadly popular with many Democrats, Mr. Sanders has had little direct experience with black voters as a politician in a state that is 95 percent white. And they have been largely absent from his campaign events so far.

Mr. Sanders, 73, had planned to start introducing himself to larger numbers of African-Americans last Sunday at a large gathering in Charleston, but he quickly postponed the event after the church killings. The massacre also revived debate over a highly charged issue on which Mr. Sanders has a mixed record: gun control.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is working assiduously to cement her support among black voters. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this week, 95 percent of nonwhite Democratic voters said they could see themselves supporting Mrs. Clinton for the nomination in the primary. Only about one-quarter of respondents said they could see themselves voting for Mr. Sanders.

And Mrs. Clinton is hardly sitting still: She has spoken out assertively on race relations and gun control over the past week, and she visited a black church on Tuesday near Ferguson, Mo., where the killing of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in August ignited protests.

Mr. Sanders has lamented “the ugly stain of racism that still taints our nation,” but he has yet to take the subject on in a forceful way.

Given the makeup of the Democratic primary electorate, Mr. Sanders’s capacity to win support among blacks represents a test of his relevance: It will help determine whether he can drain many votes from Mrs. Clinton or is bound to be merely a nuisance candidate with a following among the most ideologically driven liberal whites.

Mr. Sanders’s advisers concede that Mrs. Clinton is more familiar and popular among black Democrats, but they say his background and views will allow him to speak credibly to African-Americans in places like Charleston, Ferguson and elsewhere. His struggle, they say, is to introduce himself swiftly and on a broad scale so that his remarks resonate and have an impact.

“We’re reaching out, but it’s no secret that Bernie represents a state that is heavily Caucasian, and his decades of work on issues of importance to African-Americans aren’t known amid the national conversation on race that is underway,” said Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “I don’t think it’s presumptuous of him to speak out on these issues. And his message — the need for more good-paying jobs, and opening up higher education regardless of wealth and family background — will have strong appeal with African-Americans and many other voters.”

The challenge facing Mr. Sanders as a Ben & Jerry’s candidate seeking the nomination of President Obama’s party was on vivid display last month in Burlington, Vt., at his first campaign rally.

Nearly all the speakers who preceded him — including the two ice cream entrepreneurs — were white, as were nearly all the supporters, many of them in tie-dyed clothes, who thronged a park on the shores of Lake Champlain. His jeremiads about campaign-finance overhaul and climate change inspired cheers and ovations. But he made no mention of problems of deep concern to many African-Americans, like policing, gun control, racial inequities or the high numbers of black men in prison.

“The Bernie Sanders voter is still a Volvo-driving, financially comfortable liberal who is pretty much white,” said Paul Maslin, a pollster who worked for the 2004 presidential campaign of Vermont’s last Democratic contender, Howard Dean. “I don’t see how Bernie takes large numbers of black voters away from Hillary Clinton, and he needs to if he wants any shot at the nomination.”

David Axelrod, formerly Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, noted that insurgent Democrats like Gary Hart and Mr. Dean who were able to win over many white voters fell short because they could not attract blacks.

“There’s no doubt she understands coalition politics and she is burnishing her coalition,” Mr. Axelrod said of Mrs. Clinton. “You have to have a track record and some roots in these communities, and she does.”

Mr. Sanders, in a recent interview, said he believed his call for a “political revolution” to change an array of policies, such as ending tuition at public colleges, could win over black voters in the months ahead.

Indeed, when he visited New England College in Concord, N.H., last month, a few black and white undergraduates described how their student loans, ranging from $10,000 to $16,000, made them anxious about the future. Mr. Sanders responded with empathy but also with a fiery intensity that evoked his own days as a student activist, when he protested segregated campus housing at the University of Chicago and participated in the 1963 March on Washington.

Since then, though, his politics have been characterized by a focus on class-based solidarity and uplift, reflecting his style of democratic socialism. While Mr. Sanders endorsed the 1988 campaign of Mr. Jackson, who won the Vermont caucus that year, he also said at the time that he disagreed with Mr. Jackson about “whether the Democratic Party can be the real vehicle for social change,” and said a third party was necessary. (Mr. Jackson did not return messages seeking comment.)

Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, predicted that Mr. Sanders’s battles for equal rights and against income inequality would “resonate powerfully with African-American voters.”

He continued, “And we also believe that the way to win support from African-American voters in the primaries is to demonstrate that he is a viable candidate with a real chance to succeed by doing well in the early contests.”

One of those is the South Carolina primary, where Mr. Sanders’s challenge has been crystallized. The church massacre last week and the murder of a black man, Walter Scott, by a white police officer in April have thrust racial discrimination and gun access to the center of the campaign, in a state where blacks can represent a majority of primary voters.

Complicating matters for Mr. Sanders, the one issue on which he is not unambiguously to the left of Mrs. Clinton — gun control — is emerging as a critical litmus test. Representing a rural state with a rich hunting tradition, Mr. Sanders has a mixed record on guns. He first won a House seat in part because the incumbent Republican he defeated had supported an assault-weapons ban. (Mr. Sanders also supported the ban but opposed the Brady bill, which President Bill Clinton signed into law.)

By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has moved aggressively to emphasize her support for gun restrictions since the Charleston shootings, saying in an interview last week, “Let’s just cut to the chase: It’s guns.”

Mrs. Clinton, mindful of the biracial coalition Mr. Obama built in South Carolina in 2008 when he handed her a stinging loss, has already visited its African-American population centers twice. Mr. Sanders has yet to reschedule his first trip.

“She’s talking about the issues we care about,” said Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative who is black and is supporting Mrs. Clinton. “Whether it’s voting rights or police reform, Hillary is attacking them head-on.”

As for Mr. Sanders, he said, “I’m not hearing Bernie Sanders’s name at the barbershops.”

 

[Art Vandelay]

Bernie Sanders & Cornel West: The radical alliance that could change everything

Bernie Sanders & Cornel West: The radical alliance that could change everything
As the democratic socialist from Vermont tries to do the impossible, the firebrand academic could help
MATTHEW PULVER
Salon.com
JUNE 24, 2015

Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is already enjoying success that few could have predicted. Bernie is a big deal. Well, OK, if you’re a white progressive he’s a big deal. Otherwise, you may have no idea who he is, according to reporting this morning in the New York Times. The Times‘ Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin write that “black voters have shown little interest in [Sanders]” and that “[e]ven his own campaign advisers acknowledge that Mr. Sanders is virtually unknown to many African-Americans, an enormously important Democratic constituency.”

But as his presidential campaign gains altitude and attention, Sanders may be on the way to securing the most difficult black progressive endorsement there is: the blessing of Professor Cornel West, one of America’s leading public intellectuals. Celebrity is rare in American academe, but the eccentric West (along with MIT’s Noam Chomsky) is something of a superstar scholar. He’s our Slavoj Žižek, but with far better hair and a sense of fashion.

Speaking with Grit TV’s Laura Flanders in early June, the black academic icon was asked by the host if he will be supporting the increasingly popular candidate for president.

“I love brother Bernie,” West replied. “He tells the truth about Wall Street. He really does.”

Comments on Sanders at 4:52​

But West, who feels burned and spurned by President Obama, his team, and the Democratic Party generally, then turned immediately to the specter of Hillary Clinton. Sanders, though an independent socialist in the Senate, is running for the Democratic Party ticket, and West worried aloud about submission to the party hegemon, Secretary Clinton.

“I’m not a Hillary Clinton fan at all,” he said resolutely. “So if he uses his power to hand it over to her I’ll be deeply upset.”

West, ever-critical and stubbornly conscientious, was an early skeptic of then-Senator Obama’s campaign in 2007-08, only to sign on to the Obama team and do 65 events for the candidate after a conversation between the two convinced West of Obama’s progressive bona fides. Similarly, West has withheld a ringing and thorough endorsement of Sanders, citing Sanders’ positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“But I also think, in terms of foreign policy, on the one hand we have escalating anti-Jewish hatred around the world, and we’ve got to fight anti-Jewish hatred under all conditions,” West began. “On the other hand, we have a vicious Israeli occupation that needs to be highlighted, because occupations are wrong.”

West continued: “I don’t hear my dear brother Bernie hitting that, and I’m not gonna sell my precious Palestinian brothers and sisters down the river only because of U.S. politics. The truth cuts over and against whatever the political arrangement is. So we’ve got to be able to somehow keep track of anti-Jewish hatred, which is evil, and occupations of whatever sort—in this case, the vicious Israeli occupation that’s evil as well. And I think Bernie might pull back on some of those issues.”

Senator Sanders has caught some flak for what’s seen by some as a less-than-progressive position on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and its insanely disproportionate responses to extremists’ attacks from Gaza. Much of the recent criticism seems to be founded on a contentious town hall meeting with constituents in August 2014, when the senator and progressive pro-Palestine attendees descended into a shouting match, during which verbal fray he angrily told an interrupting interlocutor to “shut up!”

​

It must be said that Sanders’ positions and rhetoric on the Israeli occupation are reliably to the left of virtually all of Congress, if only marginally. But it must also be said, however, that being slightly leftward of the pack on Israel-Palestine in Washington is a far cry from active dissent in support of Palestinians’ rights to territory and safety. West voices the frustrations of many who see Sanders’ marginal progressivism on the conflict as much too little to affect the monolithic support which otherwise characterizes both parties. Some might even see Sanders as a curious, misshapen crag on that monolith.

Sanders appears a little (but only a little) freer to buck D.C.’s lock-step approval of Israeli occupation and aggression. The summer 2014 Israeli war on Gaza, which so angered the Vermont town hall attendees, was endorsed by 79 senators (40 Democrats and 39 Republicans) via Resolution 498, which Sanders refused to cosponsor. The resolution was adopted unanimously without a vote, so a refusal to cosponsor is something like a vote against the proclamation. However, Senators are permitted the right to object (which Sanders did not) when unanimous support for a resolution is requested, making Sanders’ refusal to cosponsor the measure something like a whisper of disapproval.

And whispers don’t stop wars.

The war on Gaza officially sanctioned by the U.S. Senate left more than 2,100 Gazans dead, 500 of them children, with the Israeli citizen death toll at 6, one of whom was a child. The (very much bipartisan) narrative that Hamas and other extremists’ rocket attacks share any sort of commensurability with the Israel Defense Forces’ assault is vehemently rejected by American leftists and many progressives—that is, much of the base on whose support Sanders’ campaign relies.

Sanders was also the first senator to boycott Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to congress in March of this year, just half a year after the Gaza war. But Sanders explained his rationale in terms of partisan etiquette, not moral objection to the Netanyahu government’s actions. Sanders cited the crass campaigning he saw in the prime minister’s visit, what he viewed as the “Congress of the United States being used as a prop or a photo opportunity for [Netanyahu’s] reelection campaign.” The internationally recognized criminality of the Israeli state’s occupation was left unmentioned as a reason to boycott the address.

That doesn’t cut it for West on Israel and Palestine. But even a passing grade from Professor West is tantamount to an endorsement these days, as West’s critical blade has been ground to a razor-sharp edge in the years since President Obama’s inauguration. West has weaponized his singular word-smithing and placed the president in his verbal crosshairs, calling Obama a “war criminal,” a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface,” a “global George Zimmerman,” a “black mascot of these Wall Street oligarchs,” a “drone presidency” and a “counterfeit.”

Senator Sanders is constitutionally incapable of committing most of the sins West attributes to Obama. While Obama might have been labeled a “socialist” by Republicans, he is in many ways a defender of the neoliberal status quo. Sanders is a proud democratic socialist. A Sanders foreign policy would very likely look less hawkish than Obama’s, and his would certainly be less trigger-happy than a potential Clinton Pentagon.

Though he’s become something of a pariah in black academic circles, West is still a captivating and rousing speaker and Sanders could perhaps use West on the campaign trail. He might not be someone Sanders brings along in Iowa or New Hampshire, but once the campaign trail swings south and to the cosmopolitan coasts, West might be a valuable voice in places Sanders’ unpolished, heavily Brooklynite earnestness doesn’t work as well. And Sanders could be the candidate West thought he was getting in Obama.

 

[COINTELPRO]

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[thoughtone]

source: CNN

Bernie Sanders: 'I'm not dismissive' of 'Black Lives Matter'

<cite class="el-editorial-source">Washington (CNN)</cite>Bernie Sanders said Sunday he sees racial injustice as a major problem, just one week after arguing on stage with "Black Lives Matter" protesters at a liberal gathering.

In an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," the Democratic presidential contender continued to cast the challenges minorities face as primarily economic.

"I'm not dismissive," he said. "I've been involved in the civil rights movement all of my life, and I believe that we have to deal with this issue of institutional racism."

Sanders, a Vermont senator, pointed to Martin Luther King, Jr., saying the civil rights leader "understood and was working on a poor people's march" when he was assassinated. He pointed to soaring unemployment figures for young African-Americans, and blamed an "unsustainable level of income and wealth inequality."

His comments came after Sanders shouted down "Black Lives Matter" protesters who disrupted his remarks at the Netroots Nation gathering in Phoenix. Sanders said he doesn't disagree with their message, but was irritated with being interrupted.

RELATED: Clinton decries 'racism' in law enforcement

Reaching minority voters is a key hurdle for Sanders to cross if he is to mount any type of significant challenge to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Sanders has fared much better in recent polls among white, liberal, college-educated voters than he has with the rest of the Democratic electorate.

Sanders also defended his views on gun rights, saying he supports laws that mandate background checks for gun buyers and would ban the sales of some guns, despite hailing from a rural state with few gun control laws.

Asked about why laws already on the books haven't stopped mentally unstable Americans from obtaining firearms, Sanders said: "Then we've got to make them stronger and we've got to make them more enforceable, that's what we've got to do."

Throughout the interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, though, Sanders continued to pivot to the issue on which he is most comfortable: economic inequality.

"We are having working people who are saying that it is absurd that almost all new income and all new wealth is going to the top 1%," he said.

 

[thoughtone]

source: The Hill

Team Clinton ‘worried’ about Bernie Sanders campaign

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign is “worried” about Bernie Sanders, whom a top Clinton aide described as a “serious force” in the 2016 battle.

“We are worried about him, sure. He will be a serious force for the campaign, and I don’t think that will diminish,” Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri said Monday in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

“It's to be expected that Sanders would do well in a Democratic primary, and he’s going to do well in Iowa in the Democratic caucus.”

Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, has emerged as Clinton's main foil in the Democratic primary.

While he's still more than 40 percentage points behind Clinton in virtually all national polls, he's greatly improved his stock in the early primary states.

A new Quinnipiac University poll released last week found he doubled his share of Democratic supporters in Iowa in just seven weeks. Some polls in New Hampshire show Sanders less than 10 points behind Clinton.

Palmieri said Sanders's rise won't prompt a shift toward negative campaigning and that Sanders's strong crowds only underscore the differences in the campaigning tactics between the two campaigns.

“We don’t need to attack each other. He'll run his campaign, we'll run ours. The imperatives for us are different. We think what works for her, particularly in Iowa, is doing a lot of small events, staying a long time, being one of the last people, if not the last person, to leave the room. That works better for us right now,” she said.

“It's going to be a slog, but I feel like she will win.”

 

[thoughtone]

source: Crooks and Liars

CNN Poll: Bernie Sanders Leads All Republican Candidates

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I must say this is a bit surprising in one way and not in another. In a new CNN-ORC poll, VT's Bernie Sanders joins Hillary Clinton in beating all the Republican candidates head to head.

A just released CNN poll finds Sanders out-polling all of the GOP's major candidates, though pretty much tied with Jeb Bush. Here's how Sanders stacks up:

SANDERS: 48%
BUSH: 47%

SANDERS: 48%
WALKER: 42%

SANDERS: 59%
TRUMP: 38%

If you limit the poll sample to just registered voters, Bush defeats Sanders by a single point. Either way, this credible poll suggests that Sanders is not just some pie-in-the-sky general election candidate. His more uphill battle may be the primary. But even there, he has some strengths. Polling out last week shows he's the only candidate from either side who has a net favorability rating.
​

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ADVERTISEMENT​

</center>I know Bernie has a positive favorability rating, but I think this poll shows just how bad the GOP Clown Car is for the Republicans. Every day one Republican candidate after another says something that's totally outrageous so they can get some traction in the media. That strategy is working as click bait, but in the minds of the voters, they look like crazy people.

 

[thoughtone]

Ted Cruz: Bernie Sanders Is the Only Democrat Standing Up to Corporate Cronyism



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[thoughtone]

 

[thoughtone]

Can't argue with facts.


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[QueEx]

Sanders says he will address racial divisions​

LONG GROVE, Iowa (AP) — After bounding atop a blue trailer in a community park, Bernie Sanders quickly reminded people here that Iowa had helped elect the nation's first black president.

The next step, he said, is addressing racial discrimination and the recent shootings of unarmed blacks by law enforcement.

"I know that I speak for all of you that we are sick and tired of reading about and seeing videos of unarmed African-Americans being shot," Sanders said Sunday at a Democratic picnic. "We know that if those individuals were white, the odds are very strong that would not have happened to them."

During three days of campaigning before largely white audiences in Iowa, the Democratic presidential candidate repeatedly vowed to address racism, police brutality and the nation's criminal justice system. It followed disruptions of the senator's appearances in Phoenix and Portland, Oregon, by Black Lives Matter protesters who say his message to cure economic inequality fails to address institutional racism.

Sanders, who represents predominantly white Vermont, has become Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic nomination but lagged behind the former secretary of state in building a coalition resembling the diverse voting bloc that twice elected Obama.

His message has focused heavily on middle-class economics, climate change and creating a single-payer health care system. But in a sign that he wants to diversify his support, Sanders has held events with black and Hispanic groups and made clear during appearances in Iowa that overcoming racial divisions would be a staple of his agenda.

At the Wing Ding fundraiser, a high-profile gathering of Democrats in northern Iowa, Sanders rattled off the names of shooting victims in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, New York and elsewhere. "On and on that list goes! That has got to end," Sanders said.

At the Iowa State Fair on Saturday, Sanders thanked the state's electorate "for their courage in voting for Obama in 2008. What you showed is that a state which is mostly white could go beyond the color of a candidate's skin and vote for somebody based on their character and their ideas."

During Sunday's picnic, Sanders said the country should be proud that it had become a "less discriminatory society" but said racism remains a major problem "that together we must overcome."

When the Senate returns from its summer recess, Sanders said he plans to introduce legislation that would address the role of private corporations in the nation's prison system. He frequently criticizes corporations that profit from the rise in the nation's prison population, especially involving young black men.

A positive step: The website BuzzFeed reported this weekend that Sanders' campaign reached out to the Black Lives Matter protest group to set up a meeting and apologized that "it took our campaign so long" to connect with leaders of the movement.

Or was it: In an interview Sunday with NBC's "Meet the Press," Sanders said the note was "sent out by a staffer, not by me" and without the senator's knowledge. He said he didn't think it was necessary to apologize to the protesters.

___

Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kthomasdc​

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fac0...sanders-says-he-will-address-racial-divisions

 

[asus123]

Show the world you have a vision for a better America. Bernie and Pope shirts available in time for Pope Francis visit to the US. All labor donated, and all profit goes to charity.
Check out here:
https://www.sunfrog.com/2016-Dream-Ticket-by-Bernie-amp-Pope.html?24738




We Want Bernie For President
"Enough is enough" are the words of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Lets elect a president with a voice for the real people of America.
Check out here:
https://www.sunfrog.com/We-Want-Bernie-For-President-4548-Black-Guys.html?24738



Bernie Sanders for president, 2016! He refuses to be bought out by big business and Wall Street. Hes a champion of the average American. There is no doubt this is the President we need next!
Check out here:
https://www.sunfrog.com/Feelthebern-We-NEED-Bernie-62175574-Guys.html?24738

 

[thoughtone]

Bernie Sanders Rally Attracts 10,000 in Charleston, South Carolina


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[thoughtone]

source: Raw Story

Bernie Sanders blasts ‘unfettered free trade’ as stock market reels and investors panic

Sen.Bernie Sanders (I) in New Hampshire

Only hours after delivering a stem-winder speech in New Hampshire blasting income inequality created by economic policies that help the rich get richer while the poor stay poor, Democratic presidential contender Sen Bernie Sanders (I) ripped into “unfettered free trade” that is devastating workers.

On Twitter this morning, Sanders wrote: “The results are in. Unfettered free trade has been a disaster for working Americans. It is high time we ended our disastrous trade policies.”

Sander’s tweet came as investors panicked in what some are calling “Black Monday,” with the Dow Jones dropping a 1,000 points this morning, the worst meltdown since 2008.

While small investors were in a frenzy- selling off their nest egg before it disappears only to have large institutional investors swoop in and scoop up stocks at bargain prices – Sanders pointed out that the U.S. has never seen so much income inequality, dating back to 1928 – the year before the stock market crash launched the Great Depression, according to the Concord Monitor.

“Today, we live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world,” he said. “But very few people in America know that because they’re working two to three jobs, they can’t afford to send their kids to college . . . almost all of the wealth and much of the income is going to the top 1 percent.”

Sanders went on to marvel at members of the struggling middle-class who continue to vote Republican.

“I will never understand why working-class and middle-class Republicans continue to vote against their own best interest,” he said, adding that the GOP is on a mission to “attack the needs of working families.”

Sanders’ message of economic populism has drawn huge crowds, including an overflow crowd in Salem Sunday night, and is likely to gain even more national media attention now as the country slips into economic chaos, however brief it might be.

 

[thoughtone]

Cornel West Endorses Bernie Sanders


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[thoughtone]

 

[thoughtone]

Bernie Sanders at Liberty University. (In The Belly of the Beast)

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[thoughtone]

 

[muckraker10021]

Can't argue with facts.


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Senator Bernie Sanders is one of the very few National U.S. elected politicians who is not $$$$$$$$$$ Owned by oligarchs, corporations or lobbyists. The corporate media of mass deception is doing it's best to make sure that the truth he tells about extreme income inequality and the lurch toward corporate fascism is not disseminated widely and understood by the American sheeple.

Bernie is attempting to awaken the American sheeple who are unaware about the current situation in the U.S. where 99 percent of all new income today going to the top 1 percent.
{READ}

​

If he has any serious chance of becoming the President of the United States in 2016 the power elite will contract wet workers to dispense with Bernie.​

September 7, 2011

..............................................................
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Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><img src="http://www.denyolar.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/attim-hafizaya-albert-einstain.jpg" width="200" align="right"></div>
- Albert Einstein -

................................................................

Below is a video of Alan Greenspan receiving a withering verbal bombast of reality from Senator Bernie Sanders in 2003. Listen to what he says about the BuShit economy. It’s all 1000% true. I posted this and I decoded Greenspans Bullshit answer on September 2010. The repost is below

Play the video below of now US senator Bernie Sanders confronting former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s bold face lies as Greenspan was testifying in front of a congressional committee.



Keep in mind this exchange occurred several years ago before the economy cratered & imploded in 2008. Everything senator Bernie Sanders said was 100% on point. Listen carefully to Greenspan’s cynical response to the litany of facts senator Sanders hits him with. Greenspan cannot counter what senator Sanders says.

Greenspan says:<blockquote>
“Major focus of monetary policy is to create an environment in this country which enables capital investment and innovation to advance, we are at the cutting edge of technologies in the world, we are doing an extraordinary job over the years and people flock to the United States, our immigration rates are very high and why, because they think this is a wonderful country to come to.”</blockquote>
Let me interpret Greenspan’s bull speak. What he essentially has said is that the US economy is being run for the benefit of big corporations not working class US citizens.

He said <i>”major focus of monetary policy is to create an environment in this country which enables capital investment and innovation to advance </i> That means outsourcing of jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Singapore etc. That means increased productivity.

When you hear the business report on the news talk about increased productivity and celebrate any increase, what does that really mean? It means that corporations are making more money by squeezing more work out of their remaining workers - (more hours worked, less vacation time, decrease in employee benefits etc.) - as they shed thousands of workers.

His comment about flocking immigrants is even more insulting to American workers. Flocking immigrants depress wages for US workers many who have spent $100,000 or more getting the college education they were told would solidify their path to the middle class & higher......................

..................As I’ve pointed out in other threads, the ‘business elites’ — the oligarchs, HAVE NO INTENTION , of hiring millions of Americans and paying them ‘living wages’ much less middle class wages with benefits.

They have outsourced as many jobs as they can overseas to places where they can pay a maximum of $300 per month for a six day work week with NO benefits.

BLS statistics are meaningless right now. They are counting people who work as little as one hour a week as being employed. The real unemployment number is 25%. There is a one year wait to get a job with the US military. I’ll post the madison ave. white paper when I get a chance. It tells advertisers to don’t bother advertising to people who make less than $90,000 a year, because their (lower & median middle class income, is not coming back.

Federal tax revenue is at a 55 year low. Obama wants to raise the capital gains back to 20% and raise the top personal income tax rate back to 39.6% and the top 1% want to kill him if they could. 60% of the US budget deficit is the BuShit tax cuts.


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The oligarchs plan for America is to have as many people as possible scrambling for survival as you see in the video below.




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[QueEx]

Why Most Black Voters Still
Aren’t Feeling Bernie Sanders

Despite his stances on the issues and overtures to Black Lives Matter, the Vermont senator still
polls far behind Hillary Clinton in the must-have-to-win voting bloc of African-American voters.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) greets nurses as he arrives at a Brunch With Bernie
campaign rally at the National Nurses United offices Aug. 10, 2015, in Oakland, Calif.​

By: Charles D. Ellison
The Root
October 20, 2015


Let many a progressive pundit and New Hampshire poll tell it, and Bernie Sanders is catching fire. Raking in a cool $2 million postdebate, the Vermont senator is the hottest thing since his one-hit-wonder state compatriot, the former Gov. Howard Dean, in 2004. Look at other polls and he’s either catching up or “neck and neck” with Democratic-primary front-runner Hillary Clinton.


But notice, that’s mostly Granite State hype, a place whose population is barely 1.5 percent black. The liberal bonfire fades into crackling embers once you throw a cold bucket of black votes on it. That’s one big reason a Washington Post-ABC News poll dropped today shows him stalled right where he was last month. Even after reversing himself on the significance of #BlackLivesMatter, the curmudgeon personification of progressive causes sweats uncomfortably once the Democratic primary puts virtually all-white Iowa and New Hampshire in its rearview and heads south for states electorally dominated by African Americans.


It’s the thing that’s stumping Sanders’ strategists and perhaps keeping the senator up at night: “The black people just aren’t that into me.” It’s not as if he’s not saying all the right things: Taking battering rams to institutional racism. Calling voter-ID pushers “cowards.” Poking big regulatory pitchforks at the Man on Wall Street. Freeing the underserved from incarceration. He’s even got a few prominent black thought leaders, like Karen Hunter, “feeling the Bern.”

Still, there’s something in the way he’s doing it that’s not clicking with most African-American voters. This isn’t an argument against Sanders. It’s genuine fascination with his dilemma, because no candidate can win the Democratic nomination without the black vote. Despite memorable debate lines and cover for an email-embattled Clinton, Sanders didn’t really budge all that much with black voters.

Here are three main reasons that’s the case ... and why it probably stays that way:

1. Bernie might be surging in the polls, but it’s his black polling numbers you should pay attention to. It’s not just today’s Washington Post-ABC News poll. As YouGov shows (pdf), more African Americans than any other major demographic group watched the Democratic debate—16 percent to only 15 percent of whites and 9 percent of Hispanics. More African Americans, 52 percent, say that Clinton won the debate over Sanders, at 13 percent.


That’s much better than YouGov’s polling right before (pdf) the debate, when he got only 4 percent black support. He actually dropped from 8 percent black support in a previous Sept. 28 poll (pdf). And when that same poll also matched Sanders directly against Clinton, African Americans overwhelmingly picked Clinton at 84 percent to his 16 percent.


Of course, a lot of this support is built on long-standing black loyalty to the Hill-Bill machine. Even when Public Policy Polling messed around (pdf) in early October with an “alternative Democratic primary” (throwing Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. Elizabeth Warren into the mix), black voters still picked Clinton over Sanders 47 percent to 15 percent.


We cite YouGov and PPP because they do something that CNN and most other pollsters won’t do: actually acknowledge black voters as a powerful electoral segment. Still, even as the postdebate CNN-ORC poll (pdf) relied on a bizarre “nonwhite” voter category, 63 percent had a favorable opinion of Clinton, versus 40 percent for Sanders—and 56 percent for Vice President Joe Biden.


2. Bernie should watch more black pastors on Sunday. While it’s still anecdotal, the core of Sanders’ black-voter problem could be this: He’s too depressing. Comedian Larry David couldn’t resist the temptation in last week’s SNL skit to call out Sanders’ aggressive “the sky is falling” ethos.


For sure, African-American voters generally love the public figures who claim to “keep it real” and cast rebellious shade at the “system.” But candidates who successfully woo black constituencies are those who can illustrate hope. As David Briggs of the Association of Religion Data Archives points out, the black community is the most religious: Christian church attendance is declining overall, but black church attendance remains solid, with 7 out of every 10 black Americans reading the Bible outside of church. Most major black political shifts or movements in America have never occurred without some form of black religious influence.

Sanders may be under the impression that he can find enough black voters to circumvent that through heavy reliance on a newfound alliance with young black activists. Wrong. Sanders’ ultraprogressive movement can’t expect to galvanize black voters without the inspirational “call and response” found every Sunday at your local black church. Sanders might be courageously blunt, but his messaging doesn’t strike the casual observer as necessarily uplifting or anywhere near the motivational-speaker approach that black voters gravitate to.


3. It’s generational. Sanders, undoubtedly, draws enormous political and fundraising energy from the voting bloc every candidate wants: under-30 millennials. And yet, from what we’ve established, it’s been mostly young white progressives giving him that Bern boost, crowds of whom pack Sanders rallies or actively troll social media to thrash detractors. Some have observed that this is problematic.


Apparently, this is one of a few tactical reasons behind Team Sanders’ frantic embrace of BLM. It’s also recognition that maybe the optics of too many aggressive white millennials’ public bashing of “disagreeable” black activists is not the best look once you hit heavily black Democratic stronghold states like South Carolina and Georgia. The current logic follows that with black activists now talking to—rather than crashing through—the Sanders campaign, black millennials should be just as ginned up about Sanders as white millennials, a notion fueled by a general perception that all black voters must be down with the cause.


But it’s a lot more complicated than that. Voters of color, of course, will be key to candidate success in 2016, but age will also play a greater role as senior voters (those over 50) continue to make a bigger play because of reliability and consistency (after all, those 30 and above are nearly 67 percent of the overall electorate). Black millennial voters might give Sanders a chance as he hits blacker states, but there’s no guarantee that will help, since youth-voter turnout dropped 6 percentage points between 2008 and 2012 and was just a paltry 19.9 percent in the 2014 election.

The open challenge for Sanders will be those older voters. As YouGov shows, support by age for Sanders drops large as the voter gets older, from 36 percent for ages 18-29 to 18 percent for those 45-64. That includes those black voters with all sorts of sentimental political attachments to a 24-year-old Clinton brand, something their kids wouldn’t know about.


Charles D. Ellison is a veteran political strategist and a contributing editor at The Root. He is also Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune, a contributor to The Hill, Sunday Washington insider for WDAS-FM in Philadelphia and a panelist on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews. Follow him on Twitter.
​

http://www.theroot.com/articles/pol...hy_black_voters_still_aren_t_feeling_him.html

 

[thoughtone]

source: The Business Standard News

Maher Says Americans are too Stupid to Vote for Bernie Sanders

Political comedian Bill Maher thinks Americans are too stupid to vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, even though he is the best candidate.

“Of all the candidates in the race, Sanders makes the most sense,” Maher said in a radio interview. “Of course that’s why the American public won’t vote for him. Bernie wants to scale back the Military Industrial Complex, end mass incarceration and introduce universal health care. But who wants that?”

Maher added Americans were terrified of the word socialism, even though we have many aspects of socialism, such as Medicare, the VA, social security and free K-12 education.

“Americans love all those things, because they don’t consider them to be socialism, even though they are,” Maher said.

Maher has frequently ranted about the lack of intelligence of the average American on his HBO show “Real Time.”

“You want an example of how stupid Americans are?” he said. “If you talk to the people who support Donald Trump, they’ll say, ‘Because he’s one of us.’ Oh yeah, Trump’s a billionaire, who flies around in a private jet and is married to a European model, but he understands working people.”

 

[muckraker10021]

Bill Maher is correct. Most American Sheeeple are Stupid!

They don't know that America's most favorite sport, the National Football League is 'democratic-socialism' ; all the teams split the money evenly and there is a salary cap on the amount each team can spend for players. The NBA also 'democratic-socialism'.

Gen X & Millennial Americans DO NOT READ

They have been conditioned via corporate television media (CBS, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, CNN, FOX) to have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

Any printed material longer than 300 words causes the neurons & synapses of the minds of most Gen X & Millennial Americans to freeze-up. This is a programmed response ingrained from watching hours of jump-cut videos where images flashed on screen for a millisecond are imprinted into your brain even though your eyes barely saw the image.

Bookstores nationwide are closing. People get their "news" from their smart phones reading 100 word blurbs. Ignorance is bliss.

The demise of hundreds of newspapers & serious magazines nationwide is emblematic of the dumbing down of America. This is exactly what the oligarchs who control the political $$$$$$$$$$$$ economy of America want. They want more dumb and stupid America sheeple who will look to corporate television as their only source of information and knowledge

Rupert Murdoch the majority shareholder of FOX FAKE News just bought National Geographic magazine & television, so look for more FOX type deliberate ignorance to fuck-up the 100 year old National Geographic.




New Rule: Income Inequality In America (Real...</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/KacyJungers" target="_blank">Reality_Based_World</a></i>



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How Did American's Become So STUPID?????

Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can’t read a simple sentence. There are some 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate – a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.​

From EMPIRE OF ILLUSION; The End Of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges page 44


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[muckraker10021]

source: The Business Standard News

Maher Says Americans are too Stupid to Vote for Bernie Sanders

.....................................“You want an example of how stupid Americans are?” he said. “If you talk to the people who support Donald Trump, they’ll say, ‘Because he’s one of us.’ Oh yeah, Trump’s a billionaire, who flies around in a private jet and is married to a European model, but he understands working people.”

 

[thoughtone]

 

[QueEx]

Origins ?

 

[thoughtone]

Origins ?

https://www.facebook.com/AfricanAmericansForBernie