April 1, 2016

Here's a good link for Bernie's Sheboygan, WI rally; Bernie about to speak

I tried 7 or 8 different feeds, including several from another post on this board, but either the stream was constantly cutting out or the sound was so bad I couldn't understand the speaker.

This is the one I found that works for the audio, but the video isn't good.

April 1, 2016

Bernie Sanders Will Make the Economy Great Again

This article in The Nation is by Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of Economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-will-make-the-economy-great-again/

<The United States economy currently spends 17.1 percent of GDP on healthcare, while the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and France spend between 9.1 and 11.7 percent, respectively. All of these countries perform better than the United States, according to standard public-health measures such as average life expectancy. Within the context of the current US economy, the difference between spending 10 versus 17 percent of GDP on healthcare amounts to $1.3 trillion. That $1.3 trillion mark-up in US healthcare spending flows mainly into the coffers of big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Do Sanders’s critics truly believe that it is impossible to devise a system whose administrative features roughly approximate those in Germany, Japan, the UK, France, Australia, or Canada? They have not advanced any serious arguments to support such a claim. Indeed, many of Sanders’s critics themselves have been proponents of single-payer prior to Sanders’s having incorporated it into his platform.>

<The economy overall will also benefit from the gains in equality tied to the minimum-wage increase. Greater equality means working people have more spending power, which in turn supports greater overall demand in the economy. Greater equality also means less money is available to flow into the types of hyper-speculative financial practices that led to the 2008–09 Wall Street crash.>

<The tax rates supported by Sanders includes 0.5 percent on all stock trades, 0.1 percent on all bond trades, and 0.005 percent on the underlying values of derivative trades, such as the value of a stock in a stock-option asset. These tax rates amount to $5 on the trading of a $1,000 stock; $1 on the trading of a $1,000 bond; and 5 cents through trading, for example, a stock option in which the value of the underlying stock itself is worth $1,000. By contrast, the average US consumer currently pays an average of 8.4 percent in overall sales taxes.>

<In a recent study that I co-authored with James Heintz and Thomas Herndon, we estimated that the Inclusive Prosperity Act could generate around $300 billion per year in new federal tax revenues (amounting to 1.7 percent of US GDP). This is after allowing that Wall Street trading would decline by an implausibly large 50 percent due to the tax. The Sanders campaign has estimated the cost of his free-college-tuition program at $75 billion per year. The $300 billion per year from the Wall Street tax could therefore cover this college-tuition program in full four times over. The Wall Street tax revenues could then provide something like another $225 billion to finance, for example, public investments in clean energy and infrastructure.>

April 1, 2016

Morning Joe giving major props to Bernie and talking about rigged DNC primary process

There is another thread that is mischaracterizing Morning Joe's coverage as negative to Bernie Sanders. I have not been watching them and was kind of shocked to see how favorable they actually have been to Bernie.

After the 3 landslide victories in WA, UT and AK last Saturday, Minka is asking how stupid is it that after these victories all every talk show host wanted to ask Bernie was if he would support Hillary after she wins:

Here is a very good discussion from this morning on the crowd Bernie drew yesterday in the South Bronx. (The comment "it smelled like Woodstock" came from the NBC reporter following the Sanders campaign who was there, and was clearly a reference to people smoking pot which is hardly shocking.) Minka is saying that she realizes that Hillary's camp talking about Bernie's tone is a joke because all he's doing is talking about issues.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1623240

There is plenty of talk about the enthusiasm over the issues at Bernie's rallies and an "intellectual connection".

April 1, 2016

Bernie's March fundraising tops February

$43.823 million with 25 minutes to go versus $43.499 for the month of February.

April 1, 2016

Bernie's campaign press release responds to Hillary's latest lie

https://berniesanders.com/press-release/clintons-support-oil-gas-industry-lobbyists/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=tw160331

<NEW YORK – Bernie Sanders’ campaign spokesman Michael Briggs issued the following statement on Thursday after Hillary Clinton said she was “sick of the Sanders’ campaign lying about” contributions she received from the fossil fuel industry:

“The truth is that Secretary Clinton has relied heavily on funds from lobbyists working for the oil, gas and coal industry. According to an analysis by Greenpeace, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her super PAC have received more than $4.5 million from the fossil fuel industry. In fact, 57 oil, gas and coal industry lobbyists have directly contributed to Clinton’s campaign, with 43 of them contributing the maximum allowed for the primary. Eleven of those 53 lobbyists are working as bundlers and have raised over $1.1 million in bundled contributions between them.

“It’s no wonder that back in December Clinton refused to agree to stop accepting money from the fossil fuel industry when pressed at a town hall, saying, ‘I’m not going to do a litmus test on them.’

“If Secretary Clinton wants to discuss this and other important issues she should stop stalling and agree to a debate in New York before the April 19 primary election.”>

There are links to analyses by both Greenpeace and the Huffington Post on Clinton’s support from the oil, gas and coal industry, as well as details on her lobbyist bundlers, at the linked response from the Sanders campaign.

March 31, 2016

TYT: Hillary Clinton's Web of Questionable Donors

A great TYT video from 3/30 on some of the people who have been doing fundraisers for Hillary over the last month or so: links to Wall Street, big pharma, fracking, the NRA, the defense industry, etc.

And an interesting story about how a high frequency stock trader from Chicago who has been a big contributor to Hillary and the Clinton Foundation somehow got on a prestigious panel of scientists who wondered why he was there. When ABC News asked how he got appointed, he quickly resigned.

March 30, 2016

Hillary Clinton, the candidate of We Can't Do Anything Because of Republicans

Hillary has explained why we can't have a single payer healthcare plan because Republicans will block it. So why would we even try?

Yesterday, in her ever evolving explanations of why she doesn't support free tuition at state colleges and universities, she explained to an audience in Wisconsin that states would have to cooperate and spend some of their own money in addition to what the federal government provided to them and Scott Walker is never going to spend $300 million in Wisconsin to support it!

Erin Burnett played Bernie the clip of Hillary's comments and he responded, yes the states would need to cooperate. And some states would, like California and many others. And if Wisconsin didn't, they would see a lot more of their kids go out of state to college and many would never come back.

Sounds like a pretty good answer to me. Do the Republicans want to lay down across the tracks saying no free college tuition in my state and have the federal money for it reallocated to states that are taking in their kids who migrate out?

Perhaps Hillary's campaign slogan should come from Nancy Reagan: "Just Say No!"

Does Hillary Clinton really have any supporters who aren't upper income? And if so, why?

March 30, 2016

2 great tribute songs to Bernie

The most beautiful version of "This Land is Your Land" that I've ever heard by a Vermont group called Signal Kitchen.

And an original composition (in Spanish) by El Quemazon.

Translated lyrics:

He’s the man with a vision
to better this country.
Running for president
but the rich don’t want him.
Bernie Sanders is his name.
Now you're going to feel his burn.

New York is the state where he was born.
Brooklyn where he grew up.
As kid he started noticing
the rich getting richer
and the poor working longer hours.
Still many don't make enough to survive.

He's the son of Immigrants
who came in search of better lives.
Working to succeed
like we all do every day.
We come here with the same dream:
Provide our families a better chance at life.

The rich and the media don't like him
and they’re scared that he can win.
He wants college to be free
so our children can progress.
He believes health care is for all.
Not a business, but a human right.

Years ago, in Chicago, he was arrested
for protesting against segregation.
He doesn’t care about the color of your skin
to him we are all children of God.
Many call him Robin Hood
others call him The Bern.

Fighting for the rights of the people
even law enforcement could not stop him.
He'll keep battling until he becomes
president of this nation.
Bernie Sanders is his name.
This is his corrido The Bern!

&ebc=ANyPxKq_7XqbwEtMJhLx-2SktIrKnCaDwTfy3IIXoileeSyqGrDhiGMkodt_EkQqNVp9aw0QDxeLTtPz1aLh8A8yH_VXumgf0A

March 29, 2016

I smell direct coordination between MSNBC and Hillary's campaign

Sunday in a Meet the Press Interview, Chuck Todd went after Bernie in a bizarre fashion. He was showing clips from Bernie's rallies in which the crowd booed at the mention of Hillary Clinton's name. Then he showed one in February where Bernie raised his hands when the crowd started booing Hillary to quiet it. Todd says this was the last time we could find that you did that. (What an incredibly obscure and odd thing for MSNBC to be researching.) And then Todd pushed him repeatedly that if he was really going to stay in the race despite Hillary's overwhelming lead (he started with the absurd claim that Bernie needed 73% of the remaining delegates before Bernie cut him off and corrected him), would he go easier on Hillary?

Then on Monday morning, a Clinton campaign spokesperson says maybe she won't debate in New York if Bernie doesn't "change the tone", in line with what Todd had been pushing.

Last night, Chris Hayes goes after Susan Sarandon to take a Hillary Clinton loyalty oath, which she would not do despite his persistence. And today, there is a hit piece from an online rag of dubious origin asking Bernie to bring his "surrogate" Susan Sarandon in line and that intentionally misrepresents what she said.

It's clear to anybody who watches MSNBC that they are in the tank for Hillary. But I hadn't thought about the possibility of them actually coordinating for MSNBC to pursue certain lines of questioning to create stories for the campaign. So am I paranoid, or does anybody else think MSNBC might be taking instructions from Hillary's campaign on this kind of stuff?

March 29, 2016

Finally I agree with Hillary on something

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/02/hillary-calls-for-lobbyist-shaming-new-hampshire

<Asked at a town hall meeting at New Hampshire's Henniker College how to handle the increasing role of moneyed interests in Washington, Hillary Clinton told supporters that lobbyists should be exposed and publicly called out.

"Maybe use social media? Maybe make a concerted effort to really call these people out all the time, get some social pressure on them, get people to know their names," Clinton suggested, pointing, with obvious relish, to how the New York Daily News has taken to calling the National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre "Jihadi Wayne" for his refusal to support blocking individuals on the "no fly list" from getting gun permits.>

<Out of all the presidential candidates, Republican or Democrat, Clinton has raised the most money—$717,000—from lobbyist bundlers.>

This reads like something out of The Onion, or at least The Onion before IAC (with Board member Chelsea Clinton) bought it.