You all know Bernie wants to make tuition at state colleges free and says he'll pay for it by

[PatrickforO]

imposing a tax on Wall Street speculators.

Here's what that tax will ALSO do:

I'm going to tell you a story about the 'stock-gate' scandal. Haven't heard of it? What a surprise! That's because the media in the USA is owned by 6, count them, 6 large corporations. So, I'm telling you:

The source is a happy little book called 'Web of Debt' by Ellen Brown.

This was first exposed in a 2004 Investors Business Daily article. Basically 'market makers' which are Wall Street investment bankers, are doing something illegal.

Oh, my goodness! Who would have thought that?

What they are doing is practicing an illegal practice called the 'naked short sell.' Basically, this is "a coordinated effort by hedge funds, broker deals and market makers to strip small and medium-sized public companies of their value.

You know, the ones YOU'VE invested in your 401K...

Between 1998 and 2004, this 'naked short selling' practice resulted in over 7,000 public companies being 'shorted out of existence.' Oh-oh. This resulted in a bunch of layoffs, too.

Basically, these Wall Streeters have a huge interest in doing this because they make a fee for every 'trade.'

The damage? As much as $1 to $3 trillion has been lost (this is YOUR 401K we're talking about here), and more than 1,200 hedge fund and offshore accounts have been involved in the scandal.

So, basically, our choice here is to:
A) allow the Wall Street greedheads to continue to rip us off, OR
B) put a tax on these transactions and use that money to pay for college tuition for our children and grandchildren!

So which would YOU rather do?

Golly, let me think...

[Snotcicles]

1. This exactly what is happening. A good example is the daily manipulation of ARNA

if anyone cares to observe.

[jberryhill]

2. What gets me about this kind of thing - from all candidates

Is that the president of the United States does not have the authority or ability to do it anyway.

I care about two and only two things during presidential elections:

1. Who is going to have sole authority to launch nukes, and
2. Who is going to be appointing Supreme Court justices.

For me, that's it. It is, incidentally, the sum total of my reasons for preferring Sanders, marginally, to Clinton

But I'm always amused at the relative turnout among presidential elections, mid-term elections, and assorted state races. If people gave an actual shit about any of this stuff, they'd vote. They don't.

Every presidential candidate has this roster of "I plan to do this, that and the other thing", and throughout the year people argue over differences among the candidates and their respective list of wonderful plans and ideas.

"So which would YOU rather do?"

I would absolutely want to see B happen.

I'd love to see the list of Congressional candidates, state legislators, governors, and all of the people necessary for whom I should vote to have a flying frog's fart of it actually happening. It's not going to happen because President Sanders wants it to happen. So what is the actual plan to have it happen.

[Vincardog]

3. The actual plan to have it happen. 1) Bernie proposes policies 2) We email, call

write lobby our representatives in support 3) The policy passes or we vote for new representatives
Bernie can't do it alone. He can only do anything with our help

[jberryhill]

5. "The policy passes or we vote for new representatives"

As if anyone voted in the mid-terms, which they don't.

[Vincardog]

7. Just keep on thinking happy thoughts and things will go your way

[jberryhill]

10. I see, and what is "my way" exactly?

As I said, my presidential vote is, consistently, based on two things, and that's why I'm voting for Sanders when the primary for my small state rolls around.

Is there a list of gubernatorial, congressional, and state candidates on board with this?

This idea has a two big pieces:

1. A specifically earmarked federal tax on trades (which as a standalone tax makes sense anyway, although I don't see how the same result is not obtained by capital gains, unless the idea is to collect it on trades taken at a loss, which is going to be an interesting sell); and

2. Some sort of federal policy on tuition at state educational institutions. What they charge varies wildly, and if the federal government, through this vehicle, effectively becomes "single payer for tuition", then it's not clear to me how the funds collected from the tax are allocated to per-student federal reimbursement of those institutions.

The second piece unpacks into a pretty complicated mechanism, given the wildly various ways in which state educational institution budgets, endowments and subsidies are arranged, and the way in which tuition factors into their budgets. These need to be re-worked and in some cases from the ground up. It will require a lot more than a phone call to your Congressman to get it to happen and require mobilization of a lot of resources.

I'm really not prone to "happy thoughts" which ignore the complexity of actually getting shit done, and am curious to know how this works beyond the realm of "happy thoughts".

I'm voting for Sanders for the reasons stated, but I'm apparently going to have to put up with bullshit personal digs for not necessarily buying into the magic wand theory of government.

[Vincardog]

12. I am glad you suppoer Bernie in the primary.

[PatrickforO]

4. Sanders apparently plans to use the bully pulpit.

Consider this. Obama built a political machine unlike anything ever seen before in 2008. He had us mobilized, millions of us. When he took office, most of us were ready to do our part to pressure our US Reps and Senators to make the things Obama said he wanted happen. But, Obama didn't use us. My feeling is that the bankers, who are VERY powerful, had a little chat with him after the TARP and ARRA dust had settled, and told him what they'd allow and what they would not. Did you notice how Obama changed his populist tune seemingly overnight in 2009? He became a cut, cut, cutter instead of advocating a second stimulus package - because ARRA really wasn't big enough.

Now, if you look at what has actually happened instead of what the corporate owned media is careful not to report, Obama has consistently shrunk the deficit at the expense of a few programs that help Americans. We're still hemorrhaging money for the forever war and the huge, bloated NSA structure. Not to mention the war on drugs.

But Obama actually put 'entitlements' on the table to cut.

These are neoliberal positions. More for Wall Street and the oligarchs; less for us.

Obama also never supported labor like he said he would, and most of the jobs that replaced the ones lost in the great recession were lower paying service jobs.

Now he is trying to get TPP through, which basically turns over the governance of participating nations to multi-national corporations.

If Bernie builds the kind of machine he seems to be building, particularly the mobilization of the Millennial generation, he will be able to use the bully pulpit, and I don't think he'll hesitate. Because there were 76 million Boomers and there are over 80 million Millennials. If the Millennials begin the same kind of political revolution the Boomers did back in the 60s and 70s, we can reverse some of the neoliberal capitalist cancer.

Hope this was sufficient to at least speak to your point.

[jberryhill]

6. "the same kind of political revolution the Boomers did back in the 60s and 70s"

The ones which gave us Nixon and Reagan?

[Vincardog]

8. No the one that ended the Vietnam war, discrimination in lending and the voting rights act, and got

Us the 18 year old vote.

[jberryhill]

13. The 18 year old vote, which is virtually unused

....and which has had mythic power ever since because "this time, 18 year olds are going to vote".

That one in particular was driven by the Vietnam conflict itself, and the fact that 18 year olds were being drafted to fight it. That dynamic made it a very compelling case.

Johnson, admirably and to his great credit, championed a lot of progressive social policies while deepening our involvement in Vietnam.

And, yes, now people can be ripped off by banks and credit card companies without regard to race, creed or color.

[Ron Green]

9. Google Gus Spaeth and Gar Alperovitz. Read some of their stuff and get back to us.

Politics and the government are just part of what must happen. An important part, though.

Your dismissive snark about the 60s is noted, but... we're in a quite different situation now.

[Ron Green]

11. This is a good example of moving resources away from an exploitative activity into a supporting one.

One of the things capitalism naturally does is squeeze human-supporting systems to feed profit-taking ones.

A Pesident who tells the truth about this fact will move us forward significantly.

[airplaneman]

14. I discovered Ellen Brown about a year ago

I strongly recommend her two websites:

http://ellenbrown.com/

http://itsourmoney.podbean.com/

She has pointed out how banks really work (its actually really bad what is really going on) and how life would be so much better for everyone if we had public banks that work for the people.

Check it out
-Airplane