March 3, 2016

Robert Reich: Why the Critics of Bernienomics Are Just Blowing Smoke

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/robert-reich-why-critics-bernienomics-are-just-blowing-smoke


How Sanders's plan for a single payer healthcare system (among other policies), will benefit our economy.

Not a day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Berney Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up. (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.) They’re wrong. You need to know the truth, and spread it.

1. “Well, do the numbers add up?”

Yes, if you assume a 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth.

2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?”

They’re not out of the range of what’s possible. After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s.

3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?”

His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system.

March 2, 2016

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Shouldn't Be Welcoming Loan Sharks Into the Democratic Party

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-canova/debbie-wasserman-schultz-payday-loans_b_9360186.html


Why is my opponent -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- introducing legislation in Congress to deregulate an industry that is already profiting from ripping off millions of Americans?[/b

We know that the most vulnerable among us were hit the hardest during the 2008 financial crisis. Millions of people lost their jobs, their homes, and their bank accounts. That's enough to make you sick to your stomach. But for many, it got worse.

Predatory payday lenders stepped in to profit during the financial crisis. They targeted poor communities -- and people without access to credit from banks -- by offering them short-term loans at sky high interest rates.

On an annual basis, these companies charge late fees and rates as high as 300 to 400 percent and many companies have even charged up 1,900 percent interest on loans, which is obscene. Worse, they target people -- particularly people of color -- who are unable to pay the loan back. If they fall behind, they are offered another payday loan to help cover the cost of the prior payday loan, with fees and percentages get higher and higher, trapping them in an process that never ends.]

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THIS is a 'Democrat" ? AYFKM?
I guess the 'leadership" is planning on all of the disenfranchised republicans to finish coming over and finalize the conversion and change the name to ?.... THe Corporate PArty?

March 1, 2016

A Tweet from Naomi Klein

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

March 1, 2016

Bernie Sanders' Most Radical Idea Is One He Almost Never Mentions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-most-radical-idea-big-pharma_us_56d4c8b9e4b03260bf77e6b9


The presidential hopeful is harder on Big Pharma than he is on Wall Street.

The crowds always love the line. If they haven't heard it at a Feel The Bern rally before, they've seen it on TV. It's scripted and predictable, but the faithful love the script.

"Are you guys ready for a radical idea?" Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shouts. The audience screams in exultation. Sanders beams at the lectern … and says something in no way radical.

"Together we are gonna create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent," Sanders said in his New Hampshire primary victory speech. Sounds cool, but even Speaker Paul Ryan could sign off on the sentiment.

"We're gonna invest in jobs and education, not more jails and incarceration," he said on Twitter.

At an MSNBC town hall, it's raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Whatever Sanders says after his "radical" set up always, always gets an ovation.

But for all the branding, most of his economic policy platform is a prescription for the United States to do the things it already does to help working people -- just more. We've had a minimum wage since 1938. Raising it to $15 is ambitious, but not a radical change to the way the labor market is structured. Free tuition at state universities? We already have had 13 years of free education and reduced tuition for in-state college. The corporate lobbyists at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want the United States to spend more money on infrastructure, too. They don't want to break up Wall Street banks and reinstate Glass-Steagall, but even this reform is essentially conservative in nature. The banking system did pretty well from 1940 to 1990. Let's quit screwing around and go with that.

March 1, 2016

5 Ways Bernie Sanders Is Leading the Fight Against Big Pharma’s Rip-Offs

http://www.alternet.org/5-ways-bernie-sanders-leading-fight-against-big-pharmas-rip-offs

His accomplishments are impressive

Today in the US, pharmaceutical drugs are outrageously overpriced. These unfair prices are under widespread scrutiny for the first time, thanks in significant part to US senator and presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who has been vocal on the issue for years.

As it is, US citizens pay by far the highest prices in the world for their pharmaceutical medicines. As Sanders has pointed out in several speeches, as well as in the Democratic primary debates, last year almost one in five Americans ages 19 to 64 –which is 35 million people– opted not to fill their prescriptions because they did not have enough money to pay for them. ThinkProgress created the following chart to sum up the “High Cost of Prescription Drugs” in America:

February 29, 2016

RobertReich’s sobering msg for wealthy elites: You’ll soon be poor if you keep screwing over workers

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/02/robert-reichs-sobering-message-for-wealthy-elites-youll-soon-be-poor-if-you-keep-screwing-over-workers/

ou are the captains of American industry, the titans of Wall Street, and the billionaires who for decades have been the backbone of the Republican Party.

You’ve invested your millions in the GOP in order to get lower taxes, wider tax loopholes, bigger subsidies, more generous bailouts, less regulation, lengthier patents and copyrights and stronger market power allowing you to raise prices, weaker unions and bigger trade deals allowing you outsource abroad to reduce wages, easier bankruptcy for you but harder bankruptcy for homeowners and student debtors, and judges who will let you to engage in insider trading and who won’t prosecute you for white-collar crimes.

All of which have made you enormously wealthy. Congratulations.

But I have some disturbing news for you. You’re paying a big price – and about to pay far more.

First, as you may have noticed, most of your companies aren’t growing nearly as fast as they did before the Great Recession. Your sales are sputtering, and your stock prices are fragile.

That’s because you forgot that your workers are also consumers.....

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Unfortunately, they calculated that the global market would make up the difference for Screwing over US Workers.

February 29, 2016

Elizabeth Warren Highlights Key Weakness in Clinton's Wall Street Donation Defense

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liam-miller/elizabeth-warren-hillary-clinton_b_9346302.html

Warren doesn't put it in such harsh terms, but this is a scathing indictment of the Obama administration. If there were any question about why Obama has not been a Progressive, it is answered here.


Hillary Clinton has been fielding questions for months about her Wall Street speaking fees and campaign contributions, in every interview, town hall, and debate. And rightly so; we all know how the banks' fraudulent behavior tanked the economy, and everyone - Left, Right, and Center - is disgusted with what Citizens United has done to campaign finance. Clinton's defense has become streamlined and simple: sure, she took money from banks, but so did Obama - and he still passed very strict regulation on the banks. It seems effective; but there's a huge problem with this argument - so huge, in fact, that it transforms it from a defense into a powerful critique. To understand why, we turn to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass).

Warren recently published a report, titled Rigged Justice: 2016; How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy. She published an editorial at the same time, in which she outlines and interprets her findings. She starts off by referring to candidates "feverishly pitching their legislative agendas." As she shows, however, laws don't mean anything if they aren't enforced -- and it turns out, in far too many cases, they effectively haven't been. Here's Warren:

In a single year, in case after case, across many sectors of the economy, federal agencies caught big companies breaking the law -- defrauding taxpayers, covering up deadly safety problems, even precipitating the financial collapse in 2008 -- and let them off the hook with barely a slap on the wrist. Often, companies paid meager fines, which some will try to write off as a tax deduction.

In fact, under Obama not a single Wall Street CEO has been prosecuted for fraud. She goes on:

February 29, 2016

Hillary was offered a private briefing on Iraq Before her Vote - By an expert and passed

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-ritter/hillary-clinton-iraq-war-vote_b_9350340.html

The Meeting That Never Was: One UN Weapons Inspector's Effort to Educate Hillary Before Her Iraq Vote
Scott Ritter

Hillary Clinton was my Senator in 2002, and as a constituent who possessed unmatched qualifications on the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, I felt I had a duty to brief her; and as her constituent, she had a responsibility to give me a hearing. But she never did.

America heads to the polls tomorrow as part of "Super Tuesday," and supporters of Hillary Clinton hope they will be able to cement the inevitability of her status as the Democratic Party's nominee for president of the United States with an impressive victory. Politicians like to live in the moment, and Hillary Clinton is no different, cloaking herself in the aura of a woman who is well positioned to make the hard choices of governance based upon her "experience, wisdom, skepticism, and humility." But Hillary's "moment" was shaken to the core by the resignation Sunday -- two days before the "Super Tuesday" contests -- of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, from her position as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

Tulsi Gabbard's resignation came at the same time she announced her decision to throw her support behind Hillary Clinton's rival for the Democratic Party nomination, citing "the necessity to have a commander-in-chief who has foresight, who exercises good judgment ... who looks at the consequences of the actions they are willing to take before they take those actions so that we don't continue to find ourselves in these failures that have resulted in chaos in the Middle East and so much loss of life." Tulsi Gabbard, in looking toward the future of America post-Barack Obama, has refused to allow the politics of the moment to blind her to the reality of the past, and in doing so has shined a spotlight on an issue Hillary Clinton wishes would go away -- her vote in support of military action against Iraq in 2002.

"I have a much longer history than one vote, which I said was a mistake because of the way that it was done and how the Bush administration handled it," Hillary has said, trying to explain away her actions. The issue at hand, however, isn't simply one vote, but rather the processes behind the casting of that one vote which shed considerable light on the judgement of the individual involved. This isn't the first time I've called out Hillary Clinton on the utter hypocrisy of her vote to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002 -- in early 2007 I wrote a piece for AlterNet that addressed my concerns then, on the eve of her first bid for the Democratic Party nomination.

February 29, 2016

Clinton's Argument That Free College Is Bad Because Rich Kids Can Take Advantage Makes No Sense

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/clintons-argument-free-college-bad-because-rich-kids-can-take-advantage-it-makes-no

The same logic could apply to K-12 education, roads, parks, or any general public good.

At a town hall on CNN Tuesday night, Clinton reaffirmed her opposition to Bernie Sanders' plan to make all public universities tuition-free. In doing so, she repeated a somewhat bizarre talking point the media has allowed her to push almost entirely without challenge:

(snip)

There’s a few problems with this line of reasoning, the most apparent of which is that Donald Trump is exceedingly unlikely to send his kids to public school, as is Clinton. Her daughter Chelsea went to private school her whole life, which is sort of the point: those who cannot afford such luxuries ought not get into tens of thousands of dollars debt for the chance to do so. There are some on the left who make the argument that free public education has pitfalls, but it’s strange and counterproductive for someone claiming to be the standard bearer of the progressive mantle (the getting-things-done variety) to spend so much time arguing against a long-held progressive stance.

Above all, the argument that free public college is bad because rich people could take advantage of it is dubious because this logic could apply to any general public good: parks, K-12 education, roads, public works, NEA, public television, etc. As with Social Security, creating a “right” by making something universal enshrines it into the political culture and makes future inevitable attempts to chip away at it very difficult. Moreover, any benefits provided to the wealthy under Sanders' free college plan are more than offset by the fact that the wealthy, on his watch, would be paying meaningfully higher taxes. The idea that billionaires like Trump could somehow game the system by sending their children to these sexy, free public colleges—all the while paying much higher income, estate and capital gains taxes—doesn’t stand up to review.
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But, It's a foot in the door for her wall street buddies - isn't it. Damned inspiring

February 28, 2016

Sanders was the only White guy who showed up

"When the Congressional Black Caucus asked me to present my discovery of the illegal purge of Black voters in Florida, only one white guy showed: Bernie Sanders. Hillary: MIA. I'm tired of hearing that Sanders doesn't reach out to Black folk. He's been on the front lines since Selma. I don't endorse candidates — but I also don't tolerate bullshit over facts." - Greg Palast


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