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Playinghardball's JournalStand with Bernie for Our First Official Deadline Tonight... I just donated another $25.00!
Stand with Bernie for Our First Official Deadline Tonight
The first official fundraising deadline of our campaign is tonight.
The billionaire class already controls most of our economy, and now they have their sights set on the presidency. Tonight we have a chance to send a message right back to them in a language they’re sure to understand.
Make a contribution to our campaign now before our critical deadline. I can't wait to see what we will accomplish together.
https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/our-political-revolution?refcode=em150630am-don-ab-w
ICYMI. This is important....
Bernie Sanders raised $9 million from 250k small donors.HRC nets $6 million from 10 corporations. 4 are BIG banks.
Bernie Sanders is hot enough on the campaign trail to be drawing attacks
The relative comity of the race for the Democratic nomination for president was interrupted last week with an unexpectedly sharp attack video aimed in an unexpected direction..“Bernie Sanders is no progressive when it comes to guns,” said the narrator of a Web video produced by a "super PAC" supporting former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.
That the first direct attack of the Democratic primary would focus on guns – a second-tier issue -- and Sanders – a long-shot candidate – would have been hard to predict in a race dominated by front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton and the party’s search for an economic message. But as Sanders, the Vermont senator and a self-described socialist, rises in the polls, he’s also emerged as the top target – both for those wanting to supplant him as the liberal alternative to Clinton and those arguing that a liberal alternative isn’t necessary.
“It is clear that Bernie Sanders is the most interesting character in the Democratic nomination play at the moment,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist.
It’s also clear how Sanders became the hot target. Fueled by his unpolished appeal and unvarnished attacks on moneyed interests on Wall Street and in Washington, the Sanders campaign is gaining ground – particularly in all-important New Hampshire, where the Vermont senator is a well-known figure. A CNN/WMUR poll released last week found Sanders within 8 percentage points of Clinton. Although Sanders remains a distant challenger in other early-voting states, his status as the progressives’ protest to the Clinton candidacy is firming up – and the famously cautious Clinton appears unlikely to rely simply on her front-runner status to keep his challenge at bay.
Sanders has begun to take hits on three major themes -- gun control, where his record veers some from Democratic party line, his support among African Americans and Latinos, and his broader viability among voters in the general election.
Along with the O’Malley backers’ broadside on guns, a close Clinton ally last week labeled Sanders’ views “extreme.” A fellow Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, said on MSNBC that “Bernie is too liberal to gather enough votes in this country to be president.” She complained that journalists are “giving Bernie a pass,” particularly in comparison to Clinton, and called for his record to be more closely inspected.
He’s against trade – he’s against a whole lot of things that are unrealistic in this day and age,” McCaskill insisted.
More here: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-bernie-sanders-gun-control-20150629-story.html#page=1
Bernie Sanders gaining in 2016 polls for good reasons | Letter
To the Editor:
Forget Joe Biden, Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee. Next year's Democratic primary looks like a two-way race between U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders is gaining in the polls, and his campaign appearances are drawing huge crowds.
That's because the Vermont senator is the only candidate discussing the serious issues that interest serious voters. He defends Social Security, and supports free public higher education and single-payer health care. Sanders also wants to fight income inequality by raising taxes on the rich to pay for needed improvements to our deteriorating infrastructure. He also wants to create jobs that can't be exported, and he supports clean energy.
Things that Sanders opposes include bailouts for "too-big-to-fail" banks, National Security Administration spying on American citizens and ruinous "trade" deals like the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership. (TPP). This started with his 1993 vote against the North American Free Trade Treaty.
And on those three issues above, some grassroots Republicans are closer to Sanders' views than to those of their own party's candidates.
Like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before her, Hillary Clinton is only posing as a populist on the campaign trail. She's very much a pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street Democrat - as her record shows - and as her failure to unequivocally condemn TPP makes painfully clear.
Many in the media and the leadership of both major parties are dismissing Sanders because Wall Street and corporate America are behind Clinton. She has serious money, and they can't admit that serious issues could beat serious money. So they'll try to convince us the Sanders can't win because he'll bring out more progressive voters to cast ballots in the primaries, and they might vote for progressives in contested congressional primaries, too.
That may be a frightening prospect for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, party bosses and corporate-controlled media, but it's an encouraging one for the rest of us.
JACK HANNOLD
Clayton
http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/06/bernie_sanders_gaining_for_good_reasons_letter.html
Iowa labor leaders call for unions to endorse Sanders
‘We need a voice of our own, not an echo of the Republicans’CEDAR RAPIDS — Fourteen Iowa labor leaders are among more than 1,000 nationwide calling on unions to support 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
“I’m not often impressed with a candidate, but Sanders seems very genuine,” said Steve Abbott, president of CWA Local 7108 in Waterloo and head of the CWA’s Iowa state council.
“From my perspective, and I always listen to all of the candidates and have been close to many candidates over the years, what Bernie says is the truth,” said Abbott, who has been working on campaigns since 1980.
So he’s joined other labor leaders embracing Sanders as the only declared candidate, in either major party, “who challenges the billionaires who are trying to steal our pensions, our jobs, our homes, and what’s left of our democracy,” according to their statement at www.LaborforBernie.org.
“We need a presidential candidate willing to confront big money and its corrupting influence on American politics,” Abbott said. “That kind of leadership is not going to come from someone trying to raise a billion dollars from Wall Street banks and other business interests. We need a voice of our own, not an echo of the Republicans.”
Abbott expects a resolution along the lines of one approved by the South Carolina AFL-CIO executive board supporting Sanders and recommending his endorsement by the national labor organization will be approved at the Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO annual convention in August. Sanders, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, Hillary Clinton, former Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chaffee have been invited to speak, according to the Federation.
In addition to Abbott, other Iowa labor union members recommending union support for Sanders include:
Read more at http://www.kcrg.com/subject/news/iowa-labor-leaders-call-for-unions-to-endorse-sanders-20150627#ZhSCmjvISk6kKsPd.99
Labor for Bernie Kickstarts Effort to Get Unions Behind Sanders With Nearly 2,000 Union Backers
Friday, Jun 26, 2015
Labor for Bernie, a new nationwide network for union members, announced today the launch of their grassroots movement to push the AFL-CIO and other unaffiliated major labor organizations such as SEIU and the Teamsters toward endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign.
Almost 2,000 union members have signed onto a letter outlining the network’s goals. Labor for Bernie reports that more than a third of these Sanders supporters belong to building trades unions, with 137 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers signees alone. Other unions that showed significant representation in the letter include the Communications Workers of America, American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, Service Employees International Union, International Union of Operating Engineers, United Auto Workers and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
"Labor for Bernie 2016 won’t be a corporate-style, staff-driven, top-down campaign. It will reflect our commitment to creating fundamental change and the urgency of stronger grassroots organizing and political activity,” the letter reads. “We call on labor leaders, union members and working people to unite behind Bernie Sanders for a voice in the presidential political process and to elect the President working families need—a President who will answer to the 99 percent!”
The network’s website includes sample resolutions for rank and file activists hoping to push their locals and state-level federations of labor into endorsing Sanders. Thus far, AFL-CIO state-level federations from Vermont and South Carolina have chosen to do so.
"Bernie is running on a record of real accomplishment for workers, farmers, veterans, and millions of other blue-collar Americans," said Erin McKee, President of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, on the network’s website.
"But here's the real difference between him and all the rest: He's the candidate who truly believes in the power of grassroots organizing. Bernie has been to South Carolina over the past few years and some of our members got the chance to see that first hand when he met not only with labor unions but with the fast food workers fighting for $15 an hour and a union."
In late March, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka delivered a speech mentioning that an endorsement from the national organization is still up for grabs.
“It is early, and although many candidates are already in the race, the field remains open,” he said then. “And the labor movement’s doors are open to any candidate who is serious about transforming our economy with high and rising wages.”
Front-runner Hillary Clinton’s recent silence on the labor-opposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement led Trumka to say a few weeks later, in late May, that it was “conceivable” that the nationwide AFL-CIO would not endorse a candidate for president, instead focusing on the legislative races in 2016 if a candidate didn’t commit to a platform that they would want to fight for.
Since 1989, 19 of Sanders’ top 20 donors are members of unions from across the county, whereas Clinton’s top 20 is heavily populated by titans of finance. Labor for Bernie will be a new institutional campaign presence amid this fiscal backdrop.
More here: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18119/bernie_sanders_unions1
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