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Don't want a lackluster first female president. Would be unforunate if America got Margaret Thatchered.
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Bernie Sanders Running for US President
- Thread starter TurkeyOnRye
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Don't want a lackluster first female president. Would be unforunate if America got Margaret Thatchered.
Defeating Argentina would be cool, & much cheaper than our other wars.
dust1n
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America does own enough little islands around the world, come to think of.
News you can be happy about... well old news
"It's an unusual day when liberal Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Patrick Leahy, and Bernie Sanders join conservatives Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul in voting against a measure to keep the government operating. Thursday was one of those days.
Nine Democrats and one independent joined 12 mostly conservative Republicans (see list below) in voting against a continuing resolution (CR) that nevertheless passed (78-22) on Thursday.
Some conservatives voted no because they oppose Obamacare, amnesty, and other liberal government programs; but the liberals voted no because they oppose U.S. involvement in Syria's civil war.
The CR included an amendment providing $500 million in Pentagon funds to equip and train the so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels to fight ISIS/ISIL. Because that amendment was attached to the CR, liberals can now tell their constituents they were voting against war -- not in favor of a government shutdown."
Anti-War Liberals Join Fiscal Conservatives in Rejecting CR
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Bernie today in Time Magazine:
"I voted against the Patriot Act every time, and it still needs major reform.
I welcome a federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency does not have the legal authority to collect and store data on all U.S. telephone calls. Now Congress should rewrite the expiring eavesdropping provision in the so-called USA Patriot Act and include strong new limits to protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.
Let me be clear: We must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack. We can and must do so, however, in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society.
Do we really want to live in a country where the NSA gathers data on virtually every single phone call in the United States—including as many as 5 billion cellphone records per day? I don’t. Do we really want our government to collect our emails, see our text messages, know everyone’s Internet browsing history, monitor bank and credit card transactions, keep tabs on people’s social networks? I don’t.
Unfortunately, this sort of Orwellian surveillance, conducted under provisions of the Patriot Act, invades the privacy of millions of law-abiding Americans.
The surveillance law originally was passed by Congress in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I voted against it. I voted against reauthorizing the law in 2005 when I was still in the House and voted “no” again in 2011 in the Senate when Congress passed the most-recent four-year extension of the law. I believed then and am even more convinced today that the law gave the government far too much power to spy on Americans and that it provided too little oversight or disclosure.
The law expires at the end of this month, and Congress already has begun to debate how to revise and improve the law. We should give intelligence and law enforcement authorities the strong tools they need to investigate suspected terrorists, but the law also must contain strong safeguards to protect our civil liberties. Under legislation I have proposed, intelligence and law enforcement authorities would be required to establish a reasonable suspicion, based on specific information, in order to secure court approval to monitor business records related to a specific terrorism suspect. In renewing the surveillance law, Congress also should reassert its proper role overseeing how intelligence agencies use, or abuse, the law that our intelligence community has operated in a way that even they knew the American public and Congress would not approve.
We should strike a balance that weighs the need to be vigilant and aggressive in protecting the American people from the very real danger of terrorist attacks without undermining the constitutional rights that make us a free country."
Senator Bernie Sanders: Rewrite Patriot Act to Protect Privacy
In other daily Bernie News:
"Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling upon President Obama to cancel his plans to visit Nike's corporate headquarters this week as part of the White House's push to drum up support for a major new trade agreement
Sanders said the shoe giant, which has moved many of its manufacturing jobs to cheaper markets overseas, only epitomizes how previous trade deals "have failed American workers."
Wednesday afternoon and obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the self-identified socialist, who is now running for president as a Democrat, says the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, would only boost Nike's profits while doing nothing to increase manufacturing jobs here.
"While manufacturing may not be the most glamorous job, I'm sure that there are workers across America, from Baltimore to Los Angeles to Vermont to Ferguson, who would be more than happy to be paid $15-$20 an hour to manufacture the Nike products they buy," Sanders wrote....
...Sanders said TPP would "do nothing to encourage Nike to create one manufacturing job in this country," and would only boost its executives' compensation.
He cited a study that Nike employs more than 300,000 workers in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is just 56 cents an hour and labor unions are banned.
"If Nike can sell a pair of LeBron XII Elite iD shoes online for $320 in this country, it should be making these shoes and other products here, not in Vietnam or China.""
Bernie Sanders criticizes Obama's planned Nike visit to promote trade deal - LA Times
"
Because fundraising numbers like these are a tool for candidates floating in the second-tier of the presidential campaign to show that they can raise money. So the numbers get fudged and stretched and removed from context and put into new contexts. In reality, they don't really tell us much of anything.
This article is being written well after Sanders announced his haul because we wanted to wait until 24 hours after each of this week's new candidates made their announcements, to see how they compare. We reached out to the campaigns of Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee to ask how much each had raised. None responded. (Thanks!) So we have four figures: Sanders', Marco Rubio's, Rand Paul's, and Ted Cruz's. The latter two topped a million in a bit over 24 hours, so this comparison is not entirely even.
Which campaigns are happy with. When I wrote about Ted Cruz's fundraising last month, I used an early $500,000 figure. In short order, Cruz's press secretary emailed with the above update. Sure, raising that million took about 26 hours, but what's two hours among campaigns?
Paul's campaign, meanwhile, emphasized that the $1 million it raised was online only, implying that much more was raised elsewhere. Rubio and Cruz and their allies also made sure the press knew about their big-money contributions and commitments to campaigns and related super PACs. Tens of millions of dollars washing around. These guys must be serious!
Hillary Clinton didn't announce how much she raised in her first 24 hours. Why not? Because she is going to win the Democratic nomination. Clinton and Jeb Bush, expected to be at the top of each party's money totals, want to spend months accruing as much money as possible; the game they're playing is against each other as much as it is against the rest of their fields.
Sanders got what he was looking for from announcing his 24-hour total, a few ruminations that included, "hmm, maybe this is a thing." (That he ended up getting a more modest $1.5 million over the next three days might curtail some of those ruminations.) Sanders needs to prove he's viable. Clinton doesn't. (And his total certainly benefitted from being the only place not-Hillary-Clinton money could go at the moment.)
So why didn't Carson and Fiorina offer what they'd raised? They still may, but if they don't, it's fair to assume that the numbers were not quite what the other candidates had announced. Better to leave the subject to the optimistic imaginations of supporters than to remove all doubt.
But what about Huckabee? The former Arkansas governor is at least as viable as Ted Cruz. For one thing, it's only been 48 hours since his announcement, so it could be coming. For another, his campaign launch crippled his website for some time, which certainly lowered his total. Being a second-tier candidate who announces third-tier fundraising numbers is a particularly bad decision.
Fundraising is grueling and a long-term endeavor. It can and does shift as the dynamics of races shift. By announcing their one-day totals, the campaigns that have done so have really all made the same announcement: We want to be taken seriously. To that end, the ploy worked."
Bernie Sanders outraised the top presidential candidates on his first day. So what? - The Washington Post
"I regularly check the r/politics subreddit to see what people are interested in, and these days it seems that what they are interested in is the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
By the same token, a not-very-persuasive Peter Beinart article urging readers "Don't underestimate Bernie Sanders" has garnered well over 10,000 Facebook shares.
In the polls, Sanders is nowhere. On the internet, he is everywhere.
How did this obscure and not especially charismatic left-winger become an internet sensation? The answer speaks to the workings of the modern social web, but also to the ways in which squeezing a nation of hundreds of millions into a narrow framework of two-party politics leaves millions of people feeling voiceless.
Bernie Sanders is viral because he's not trying to win
Sanders's virality doesn't show that he has a chance to win. If anything, it's the opposite. His virality stems, in part, from the fact that he isn't even trying. Most politicians are trying, on some level, for mainstream influence. Even a long-shot candidate like Martin O'Malley really might become the Democratic nominee if Hillary Clinton is struck by lightning or suffers some unforeseen meltdown.
Sanders isn't like that. He's not going to win no matter what, and he knows it. After all, he is an avowed socialist with zero interest in big-dollar fundraising who's not afraid to say he thinks the US should fundamentally transform itself into a different kind of country.
Give 'em hell, Bernie. (Mic/ABC)
That leaves him free to just come out and say things that nobody making a serious bid for national office would say. Case in point: his recent exchange with ABC News's George Stephanopoulos. Here, Sanders praised the Nordic social model. When Stephanopoulos said it would be impolitic to say America should emulate foreign nations, Sanders said he didn't care. Sanders isn't going to be president no matter what he says to George Stephanopoulos, so he might as well say what he thinks.
That's not really a path to victory, but it's certainly a path to social shares.
A small minority of Americans is a lot of people
The American party system is doubly unusual in the democratic world for having only two parties represented in the national legislature while containing many more citizens than a typical country. In Canada, there are six parliamentary parties representing a population that's about a tenth the size of America's. Tiny Israel has 10 parties in its Knesset.
Many of these parties, of course, have no hope of leading a government. But that's not their purpose in life. The idea is that their leaders will speak their minds and zealously advocate for minority viewpoints.
Nobody knows exactly how many Americans agree with Sanders that a Nordic social model would be a good idea — is it 15 percent? 5 percent? It's more than zero percent. And yet zero percent of nationally prominent politicians call for it. Sanders is changing that dynamic, and it's making him an internet superstar. After all, in a country of 310 million people, even a marginal ideological viewpoint can easily secure millions of adherents and tens of thousands of social shares.
However many budding democratic socialists there are in America, it's more than enough to put you on the top of Chartbeat even if it isn't even close to putting Sanders in the White House.
The social web is broadening the conversation
The hunt for web traffic is, famously, something that sometimes compromises journalistic quality. And certainly to the extent that Sanders mania creates a traffic incentive to overhype his actual odds of influencing national policy, that's a problem.
But to the extent that it creates an incentive to talk about his ideas — the merits of single-payer health care or a much larger welfare state — it's a useful change. Conventional political journalism is obsessed to a fault with the question of speculating about what is and is not realistic, to the exclusion of discussing the much wider range of not-so-realistic ideas that may be interesting or important.
Sanders's virality — or Elizabeth Warren's — is a reminder that the world of informing and entertaining is not circumscribed by the narrow limits of electioneering, and the incentive to chase that audience offers a useful corrective to an excessively narrow political discourse."
How Bernie Sanders became the president of Reddit - Vox
Also:
Bernie Sanders, über-feminist: Making America more Scandinavian would mark a gender equality breakthrough - Salon.com
"U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders Wednesday filed a bill to break up the country’s biggest banks, saying the six largest financial institutions in the United States now have $10 trillion in assets, or almost 60 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product."
John Gregg: Too Bernie to Fail? | Valley News
"The Canadian province of Alberta was founded in 1905. Since then, the governing party has changed only four times, and only twice since 1935. So Tuesday's election, knocking the Progressive Conservative Party out of power for the first time in 44 years, would be a political earthquake under any circumstances. Even more surprising, however, was the identity of the winner. The successful challenge to the dynastic leadership of Canada's most conservative province did not come from the right but from the left, in the form of new premier Rachel Notley and the traditionally democratic socialist label of the New Democratic Party.
As the brilliant Canadian journalist Jeet Heer puts it, "Imagine if a political party made up of Chris Hayes, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren swept into power in Texas and Mississippi." For reasons I will discuss, this is somewhat overstated, but it still captures the basic flavor of the event. Even a few months ago, the idea of the NDP — which held four out of 87 seats in Alberta's legislative assembly and got less than 10 percent of the popular vote in the 2012 elections — capturing an absolute majority might have seemed fantastical, no matter how unpopular the government of Premier Jim Prentice was. How did this happen?"
Why Canada's election shocker wasn't all that surprising
"I voted against the Patriot Act every time, and it still needs major reform.
I welcome a federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency does not have the legal authority to collect and store data on all U.S. telephone calls. Now Congress should rewrite the expiring eavesdropping provision in the so-called USA Patriot Act and include strong new limits to protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.
Let me be clear: We must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack. We can and must do so, however, in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society.
Do we really want to live in a country where the NSA gathers data on virtually every single phone call in the United States—including as many as 5 billion cellphone records per day? I don’t. Do we really want our government to collect our emails, see our text messages, know everyone’s Internet browsing history, monitor bank and credit card transactions, keep tabs on people’s social networks? I don’t.
Unfortunately, this sort of Orwellian surveillance, conducted under provisions of the Patriot Act, invades the privacy of millions of law-abiding Americans.
The surveillance law originally was passed by Congress in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I voted against it. I voted against reauthorizing the law in 2005 when I was still in the House and voted “no” again in 2011 in the Senate when Congress passed the most-recent four-year extension of the law. I believed then and am even more convinced today that the law gave the government far too much power to spy on Americans and that it provided too little oversight or disclosure.
The law expires at the end of this month, and Congress already has begun to debate how to revise and improve the law. We should give intelligence and law enforcement authorities the strong tools they need to investigate suspected terrorists, but the law also must contain strong safeguards to protect our civil liberties. Under legislation I have proposed, intelligence and law enforcement authorities would be required to establish a reasonable suspicion, based on specific information, in order to secure court approval to monitor business records related to a specific terrorism suspect. In renewing the surveillance law, Congress also should reassert its proper role overseeing how intelligence agencies use, or abuse, the law that our intelligence community has operated in a way that even they knew the American public and Congress would not approve.
We should strike a balance that weighs the need to be vigilant and aggressive in protecting the American people from the very real danger of terrorist attacks without undermining the constitutional rights that make us a free country."
Senator Bernie Sanders: Rewrite Patriot Act to Protect Privacy
In other daily Bernie News:
"Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is calling upon President Obama to cancel his plans to visit Nike's corporate headquarters this week as part of the White House's push to drum up support for a major new trade agreement
Sanders said the shoe giant, which has moved many of its manufacturing jobs to cheaper markets overseas, only epitomizes how previous trade deals "have failed American workers."
Wednesday afternoon and obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the self-identified socialist, who is now running for president as a Democrat, says the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, would only boost Nike's profits while doing nothing to increase manufacturing jobs here.
"While manufacturing may not be the most glamorous job, I'm sure that there are workers across America, from Baltimore to Los Angeles to Vermont to Ferguson, who would be more than happy to be paid $15-$20 an hour to manufacture the Nike products they buy," Sanders wrote....
...Sanders said TPP would "do nothing to encourage Nike to create one manufacturing job in this country," and would only boost its executives' compensation.
He cited a study that Nike employs more than 300,000 workers in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is just 56 cents an hour and labor unions are banned.
"If Nike can sell a pair of LeBron XII Elite iD shoes online for $320 in this country, it should be making these shoes and other products here, not in Vietnam or China.""
Bernie Sanders criticizes Obama's planned Nike visit to promote trade deal - LA Times
"
Because fundraising numbers like these are a tool for candidates floating in the second-tier of the presidential campaign to show that they can raise money. So the numbers get fudged and stretched and removed from context and put into new contexts. In reality, they don't really tell us much of anything.
This article is being written well after Sanders announced his haul because we wanted to wait until 24 hours after each of this week's new candidates made their announcements, to see how they compare. We reached out to the campaigns of Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee to ask how much each had raised. None responded. (Thanks!) So we have four figures: Sanders', Marco Rubio's, Rand Paul's, and Ted Cruz's. The latter two topped a million in a bit over 24 hours, so this comparison is not entirely even.
Which campaigns are happy with. When I wrote about Ted Cruz's fundraising last month, I used an early $500,000 figure. In short order, Cruz's press secretary emailed with the above update. Sure, raising that million took about 26 hours, but what's two hours among campaigns?
Paul's campaign, meanwhile, emphasized that the $1 million it raised was online only, implying that much more was raised elsewhere. Rubio and Cruz and their allies also made sure the press knew about their big-money contributions and commitments to campaigns and related super PACs. Tens of millions of dollars washing around. These guys must be serious!
Hillary Clinton didn't announce how much she raised in her first 24 hours. Why not? Because she is going to win the Democratic nomination. Clinton and Jeb Bush, expected to be at the top of each party's money totals, want to spend months accruing as much money as possible; the game they're playing is against each other as much as it is against the rest of their fields.
Sanders got what he was looking for from announcing his 24-hour total, a few ruminations that included, "hmm, maybe this is a thing." (That he ended up getting a more modest $1.5 million over the next three days might curtail some of those ruminations.) Sanders needs to prove he's viable. Clinton doesn't. (And his total certainly benefitted from being the only place not-Hillary-Clinton money could go at the moment.)
So why didn't Carson and Fiorina offer what they'd raised? They still may, but if they don't, it's fair to assume that the numbers were not quite what the other candidates had announced. Better to leave the subject to the optimistic imaginations of supporters than to remove all doubt.
But what about Huckabee? The former Arkansas governor is at least as viable as Ted Cruz. For one thing, it's only been 48 hours since his announcement, so it could be coming. For another, his campaign launch crippled his website for some time, which certainly lowered his total. Being a second-tier candidate who announces third-tier fundraising numbers is a particularly bad decision.
Fundraising is grueling and a long-term endeavor. It can and does shift as the dynamics of races shift. By announcing their one-day totals, the campaigns that have done so have really all made the same announcement: We want to be taken seriously. To that end, the ploy worked."
Bernie Sanders outraised the top presidential candidates on his first day. So what? - The Washington Post
"I regularly check the r/politics subreddit to see what people are interested in, and these days it seems that what they are interested in is the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
By the same token, a not-very-persuasive Peter Beinart article urging readers "Don't underestimate Bernie Sanders" has garnered well over 10,000 Facebook shares.
In the polls, Sanders is nowhere. On the internet, he is everywhere.
How did this obscure and not especially charismatic left-winger become an internet sensation? The answer speaks to the workings of the modern social web, but also to the ways in which squeezing a nation of hundreds of millions into a narrow framework of two-party politics leaves millions of people feeling voiceless.
Bernie Sanders is viral because he's not trying to win
Sanders's virality doesn't show that he has a chance to win. If anything, it's the opposite. His virality stems, in part, from the fact that he isn't even trying. Most politicians are trying, on some level, for mainstream influence. Even a long-shot candidate like Martin O'Malley really might become the Democratic nominee if Hillary Clinton is struck by lightning or suffers some unforeseen meltdown.
Sanders isn't like that. He's not going to win no matter what, and he knows it. After all, he is an avowed socialist with zero interest in big-dollar fundraising who's not afraid to say he thinks the US should fundamentally transform itself into a different kind of country.
Give 'em hell, Bernie. (Mic/ABC)
That leaves him free to just come out and say things that nobody making a serious bid for national office would say. Case in point: his recent exchange with ABC News's George Stephanopoulos. Here, Sanders praised the Nordic social model. When Stephanopoulos said it would be impolitic to say America should emulate foreign nations, Sanders said he didn't care. Sanders isn't going to be president no matter what he says to George Stephanopoulos, so he might as well say what he thinks.
That's not really a path to victory, but it's certainly a path to social shares.
A small minority of Americans is a lot of people
The American party system is doubly unusual in the democratic world for having only two parties represented in the national legislature while containing many more citizens than a typical country. In Canada, there are six parliamentary parties representing a population that's about a tenth the size of America's. Tiny Israel has 10 parties in its Knesset.
Many of these parties, of course, have no hope of leading a government. But that's not their purpose in life. The idea is that their leaders will speak their minds and zealously advocate for minority viewpoints.
Nobody knows exactly how many Americans agree with Sanders that a Nordic social model would be a good idea — is it 15 percent? 5 percent? It's more than zero percent. And yet zero percent of nationally prominent politicians call for it. Sanders is changing that dynamic, and it's making him an internet superstar. After all, in a country of 310 million people, even a marginal ideological viewpoint can easily secure millions of adherents and tens of thousands of social shares.
However many budding democratic socialists there are in America, it's more than enough to put you on the top of Chartbeat even if it isn't even close to putting Sanders in the White House.
The social web is broadening the conversation
The hunt for web traffic is, famously, something that sometimes compromises journalistic quality. And certainly to the extent that Sanders mania creates a traffic incentive to overhype his actual odds of influencing national policy, that's a problem.
But to the extent that it creates an incentive to talk about his ideas — the merits of single-payer health care or a much larger welfare state — it's a useful change. Conventional political journalism is obsessed to a fault with the question of speculating about what is and is not realistic, to the exclusion of discussing the much wider range of not-so-realistic ideas that may be interesting or important.
Sanders's virality — or Elizabeth Warren's — is a reminder that the world of informing and entertaining is not circumscribed by the narrow limits of electioneering, and the incentive to chase that audience offers a useful corrective to an excessively narrow political discourse."
How Bernie Sanders became the president of Reddit - Vox
Also:
Bernie Sanders, über-feminist: Making America more Scandinavian would mark a gender equality breakthrough - Salon.com
"U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders Wednesday filed a bill to break up the country’s biggest banks, saying the six largest financial institutions in the United States now have $10 trillion in assets, or almost 60 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product."
John Gregg: Too Bernie to Fail? | Valley News
"The Canadian province of Alberta was founded in 1905. Since then, the governing party has changed only four times, and only twice since 1935. So Tuesday's election, knocking the Progressive Conservative Party out of power for the first time in 44 years, would be a political earthquake under any circumstances. Even more surprising, however, was the identity of the winner. The successful challenge to the dynastic leadership of Canada's most conservative province did not come from the right but from the left, in the form of new premier Rachel Notley and the traditionally democratic socialist label of the New Democratic Party.
As the brilliant Canadian journalist Jeet Heer puts it, "Imagine if a political party made up of Chris Hayes, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren swept into power in Texas and Mississippi." For reasons I will discuss, this is somewhat overstated, but it still captures the basic flavor of the event. Even a few months ago, the idea of the NDP — which held four out of 87 seats in Alberta's legislative assembly and got less than 10 percent of the popular vote in the 2012 elections — capturing an absolute majority might have seemed fantastical, no matter how unpopular the government of Premier Jim Prentice was. How did this happen?"
Why Canada's election shocker wasn't all that surprising
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Bernie Sanders will Steal the Ron Paulers - Here's Why - IVN.us
"Remember those old days when Ron Paul came out of nowhere to raise over $4 million online in a single day … twice?
Well that was 8 years ago. Before the development of Instagram. When Twitter was still a little tweet. And when “online donations” was a foreign concept to most political consultants.
And although political consultants and commentators seem to now understand the power of the Internet, they haven’t quite grasped just WHY Ron Paul was so effective online.
Contrary to popular belief, Ron Paul’s first presidential campaign (the one that raised a lot more money than his campaign in 2012), was not very tech savvy.
Huhhh? You might say.
In reality, it was Ron Paul’s supporters who were the tech titans of the day. From Trevor Lyman, who worked on money bombs and raised enough to fly a blimp over stadiums, to Anthony Astolfi, who built the very first “Students for Ron Paul” website, to Michael Nystrom to Eric Nordstrom… these names never traveled to the big screen TV.
And on that new video sharing platform called “YouTube,” eLIB3RTY jabbed at emotions while Aimee Allen belted out popular songs for the R3volution.
So what does this have to do with anything?
By 2012, Ron Paul went from being an extreme dark horse in the race for president to a viable candidate. And contrary to popular opinion again, he came relatively close to winning the nomination because he simply played the Republican delegate game better than anyone else — until the GOP establishment kept changing the rules on the perilous Paulites.
Now, in 2016, his son, Rand Paul (who was “drafted” to run for Senate by his father’s supporters), has more and more become a real part of mainstream politics. As a consequence, he has been more calculating and has less of an authentic anti-establishment ruse to the political passers-by.
So what’s that got to do with Ron Paulers and Bernie Sanders?
The thing that political consultants, journalists, and logic don’t seem to grasp is that Ron Paul did not have a fervent following because a bunch of young, tech-savvy folks believe lock-step in his libertarian philosophy. The fact of the matter is that most of them LOVED two things about Ron Paul: his authenticity and his anti-establishment appeal. He appeared to be the only candidate on the slate willing to run for the nation’s highest office without bowing down to the rules of today’s political game.
Sure, there’s a lot of die-hard libertarians in the Paul camp. And there’s a lot of conspiracy-loving, Alex Jones-reading R3volutionaries who will follow you through the comment sections of the Internet. But there are a hell of a lot more people, especially young folks, who just want someone who stands for serious change.
They followed the hope of Barack Obama, and nothing changed. They are refusing to register with either political party, because nothing changes. And they are recognizing that politics is not really about the players like Rand Paul or Barack Obama … it’s about the game they are willing to play.
So in an era when more Americans identify as both socialist and libertarian, what are we to take from this? It’s not that they believe in the ideology — they believe in the alternate opportunity.
Bernie Sanders, an independent who joined the Democratic Party only to run for president, appears to be the only candidate today that will run for president without playing the game."
World’s Richest 80 People Own Same Amount as World’s Bottom 50% | Dissident Voice
First, the findings:
1. The richest 80 individuals own as much as do all of the poorest half of humanity.
2. During 2009-2014, the wealth of the 80 richest people doubled, yet the wealth of the bottom 50% declined slightly.
Now, the sources:
These data are calculated from Forbes magazine, regarding the world’s richest individuals, and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014, regarding the global wealth-distribution.
"Remember those old days when Ron Paul came out of nowhere to raise over $4 million online in a single day … twice?
Well that was 8 years ago. Before the development of Instagram. When Twitter was still a little tweet. And when “online donations” was a foreign concept to most political consultants.
And although political consultants and commentators seem to now understand the power of the Internet, they haven’t quite grasped just WHY Ron Paul was so effective online.
Contrary to popular belief, Ron Paul’s first presidential campaign (the one that raised a lot more money than his campaign in 2012), was not very tech savvy.
Huhhh? You might say.
In reality, it was Ron Paul’s supporters who were the tech titans of the day. From Trevor Lyman, who worked on money bombs and raised enough to fly a blimp over stadiums, to Anthony Astolfi, who built the very first “Students for Ron Paul” website, to Michael Nystrom to Eric Nordstrom… these names never traveled to the big screen TV.
And on that new video sharing platform called “YouTube,” eLIB3RTY jabbed at emotions while Aimee Allen belted out popular songs for the R3volution.
So what does this have to do with anything?
By 2012, Ron Paul went from being an extreme dark horse in the race for president to a viable candidate. And contrary to popular opinion again, he came relatively close to winning the nomination because he simply played the Republican delegate game better than anyone else — until the GOP establishment kept changing the rules on the perilous Paulites.
Now, in 2016, his son, Rand Paul (who was “drafted” to run for Senate by his father’s supporters), has more and more become a real part of mainstream politics. As a consequence, he has been more calculating and has less of an authentic anti-establishment ruse to the political passers-by.
So what’s that got to do with Ron Paulers and Bernie Sanders?
The thing that political consultants, journalists, and logic don’t seem to grasp is that Ron Paul did not have a fervent following because a bunch of young, tech-savvy folks believe lock-step in his libertarian philosophy. The fact of the matter is that most of them LOVED two things about Ron Paul: his authenticity and his anti-establishment appeal. He appeared to be the only candidate on the slate willing to run for the nation’s highest office without bowing down to the rules of today’s political game.
Sure, there’s a lot of die-hard libertarians in the Paul camp. And there’s a lot of conspiracy-loving, Alex Jones-reading R3volutionaries who will follow you through the comment sections of the Internet. But there are a hell of a lot more people, especially young folks, who just want someone who stands for serious change.
They followed the hope of Barack Obama, and nothing changed. They are refusing to register with either political party, because nothing changes. And they are recognizing that politics is not really about the players like Rand Paul or Barack Obama … it’s about the game they are willing to play.
So in an era when more Americans identify as both socialist and libertarian, what are we to take from this? It’s not that they believe in the ideology — they believe in the alternate opportunity.
Bernie Sanders, an independent who joined the Democratic Party only to run for president, appears to be the only candidate today that will run for president without playing the game."
World’s Richest 80 People Own Same Amount as World’s Bottom 50% | Dissident Voice
First, the findings:
1. The richest 80 individuals own as much as do all of the poorest half of humanity.
2. During 2009-2014, the wealth of the 80 richest people doubled, yet the wealth of the bottom 50% declined slightly.
Now, the sources:
These data are calculated from Forbes magazine, regarding the world’s richest individuals, and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014, regarding the global wealth-distribution.
dust1n
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"American voter turnout has long lagged behind that of most countries. A new Pew survey released this month found that among developed countries the United States had higher voter turnout in the last national election than only Japan, Chile, and Switzerland:
This lower voter turnout has consequences – it is a well-established fact that the groups of people that do not vote tend to have more progressive views. Thus lower voter turnout tends to benefit conservative political parties.
In the 2006 film American Blackout, which chronciled voter suppression, then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) explained how high turnout was a “nightmare” for the elites who rule America:
SANDERS: The truth of the matter is that the media, large corporations, the people who control politically our country today do not want you to participate. They want a low turnout of primarily upper middle class people, they want big money to dominate the political process. Their nightmare is that young people, lower income people, working people jump into the process. They do not want that."
Bernie Sanders perfectly sums up why elites love apathetic voters - Salon.com
Hillary Clinton, from 1999 to 2015
Bernie Sanders, from 1989-2015
One Chart Shows the Biggest Difference Between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton - Mic
This lower voter turnout has consequences – it is a well-established fact that the groups of people that do not vote tend to have more progressive views. Thus lower voter turnout tends to benefit conservative political parties.
In the 2006 film American Blackout, which chronciled voter suppression, then-Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) explained how high turnout was a “nightmare” for the elites who rule America:
SANDERS: The truth of the matter is that the media, large corporations, the people who control politically our country today do not want you to participate. They want a low turnout of primarily upper middle class people, they want big money to dominate the political process. Their nightmare is that young people, lower income people, working people jump into the process. They do not want that."
Bernie Sanders perfectly sums up why elites love apathetic voters - Salon.com
Hillary Clinton, from 1999 to 2015
Bernie Sanders, from 1989-2015
One Chart Shows the Biggest Difference Between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton - Mic
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
I still don't think the damage that has been done to the left in America, from socialists on, has been repaired enough for someone who the word socialist can actually apply to can win.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
I see it more as left wing bed-wetting. There is practically zero chance of Saunders getting the Democratic nod, let alone winning the Presidential race. It does keep those on the left distracted though and that is always good.
dust1n
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I see it more as left wing bed-wetting. There is practically zero chance of Saunders getting the Democratic nod, let alone winning the Presidential race. It does keep those on the left distracted though and that is always good.
Don't worry, it keeps me from having to actually worry about voting after the primaries. I hope a right-wing candidate wins; it tends to be the best way to get the left to actually care about injustices and so fourth. It will be nice to see protesting on a regular basis again.
dust1n
Zindīq
Daily News:
"Higher education ought to be considered a "right," Sanders said in an interview with The Huffington Post. Similarly, he has previously argued for large increases in government tuition assistance. By upping federal aid by $18 billion, matched by states, all Americans could effectively have two years of free college at public universities across the nation.
Sanders' goals are laudable in many ways. However, such a proposal is less left-wing than it might appear, and the language of "rights" is politically problematic. It's very easy for free college to be effectively regressive, so any such program should be part of a broad program of material security.
Now, Sanders is undoubtedly correct in many things. First, he is right that the number one driver of rising costs at public schools is declining support from state governments. More and more, public schools are funded through tuition (rather undermining the whole "public" nature), which is increasingly obtained by going into debt. Sanders is also right to point to this skyrocketing debt as a major economic drag in an era of stagnant or declining wages for graduates, especially given the utterly unjustifiable fact that it's very difficult to discharge that debt during bankruptcy proceedings.
However, the most important fact about higher education is that only a minority of people go to college. Though the proportion of people with a college degree has been rising for a long time, as of 2012, only about 40 percent of the population held a two-year degree or higher. That 40 percent, of course, overwhelmingly overlaps with the upper 40 percent of America's income distribution.
The upshot here is that free college will inexorably tend to benefit the rich disproportionately, both because wealthy people are vastly more likely to go to college, and because a college degree sharply increases their earning potential. (Ironically, as I can personally testify, high prices can actually benefit the poor sometimes, through need-based aid funded by wealthy students' tuition.)
Does that mean free college is always bad? Not necessarily. A two-year plan, as Sanders roughly sketched out, is a better one, because poorer people who do attend college typically go to two-year community colleges or similarly abbreviated programs. His funding mechanism might be improved, though. Income-based repayment, wherein college is free at the point of access, but one must pay a percentage of one's income for a number of years afterward, would be egalitarian, progressive, and have universal access. But insofar as the focus is on provision for the actually needy, and not on the prestigious four-year colleges that get the vast majority of media attention, Sanders' plan is to the good."
Bernie Sanders is wrong: College is not a right
"Higher education ought to be considered a "right," Sanders said in an interview with The Huffington Post. Similarly, he has previously argued for large increases in government tuition assistance. By upping federal aid by $18 billion, matched by states, all Americans could effectively have two years of free college at public universities across the nation.
Sanders' goals are laudable in many ways. However, such a proposal is less left-wing than it might appear, and the language of "rights" is politically problematic. It's very easy for free college to be effectively regressive, so any such program should be part of a broad program of material security.
Now, Sanders is undoubtedly correct in many things. First, he is right that the number one driver of rising costs at public schools is declining support from state governments. More and more, public schools are funded through tuition (rather undermining the whole "public" nature), which is increasingly obtained by going into debt. Sanders is also right to point to this skyrocketing debt as a major economic drag in an era of stagnant or declining wages for graduates, especially given the utterly unjustifiable fact that it's very difficult to discharge that debt during bankruptcy proceedings.
However, the most important fact about higher education is that only a minority of people go to college. Though the proportion of people with a college degree has been rising for a long time, as of 2012, only about 40 percent of the population held a two-year degree or higher. That 40 percent, of course, overwhelmingly overlaps with the upper 40 percent of America's income distribution.
The upshot here is that free college will inexorably tend to benefit the rich disproportionately, both because wealthy people are vastly more likely to go to college, and because a college degree sharply increases their earning potential. (Ironically, as I can personally testify, high prices can actually benefit the poor sometimes, through need-based aid funded by wealthy students' tuition.)
Does that mean free college is always bad? Not necessarily. A two-year plan, as Sanders roughly sketched out, is a better one, because poorer people who do attend college typically go to two-year community colleges or similarly abbreviated programs. His funding mechanism might be improved, though. Income-based repayment, wherein college is free at the point of access, but one must pay a percentage of one's income for a number of years afterward, would be egalitarian, progressive, and have universal access. But insofar as the focus is on provision for the actually needy, and not on the prestigious four-year colleges that get the vast majority of media attention, Sanders' plan is to the good."
Bernie Sanders is wrong: College is not a right
Would that be to correct or perpetrate them?
<snicker> <snicker>
dust1n
Zindīq
Whatever works.
TurkeyOnRye
Well-Known Member
I see it more as left wing bed-wetting. There is practically zero chance of Saunders getting the Democratic nod, let alone winning the Presidential race. It does keep those on the left distracted though and that is always good.
Says the canuck whose vested interest in US politics appears to be maintaining a frontline to duck behind. For many of us here in the states, we're growing rather sick of doing all the heavy lifting to reap none of the benefits. Even if he doesn't win, it'll be worth having a flicker of rationality thrown into the insane circus that the US political process has become. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
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YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
If you say so, Turk.
He's right though.....we pay the taxes, do the killing, & get all the bad press for protecting your miserable country!
We're idiots.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
I am very much one of those sorts. If hard work was all it took, like they say it does, then I'd be in a much better position.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
The free-trade movement doomed us from the get-go, and this was quite predictable (anyone remember H. Ross Perot's rather prophetic words?).
So, why did the politicians go in this direction? Answer: short-term gain that would make them look good. American's inability to think long term has long been our bugaboo.
So, why did the politicians go in this direction? Answer: short-term gain that would make them look good. American's inability to think long term has long been our bugaboo.
who is that and what did they say?
dust1n
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TurkeyOnRye
Well-Known Member
The unfortunate reality is that in many sectors of the country, work has almost no direct correlation to earnings. In fact, the opposite is often the case. Financial speculation is the get-richer-quick scheme of the very wealthy. Essentially, it means you don't have to work for new income; you let your money work for you. Meanwhile, breadwinners of modest households work 40+ hours per week and can barely make rent. But they're the selfish ones obviously. The idea that today's conservative Republican politics are the answer to this dilemma is beyond mind-boggling.