Bernie's In

Just for the record, I'm not the one with the evangelical message about a messiah who's going to ignite miraculous change, urging everyone to have faith in that outcome, without any facts or evidence to support the possibility, just a pronouncement to "feel the bern". Your not reading my posts is your petulance and narrow mindedness and your loss.

The way you mis-characterize Bernie supporters, while turning it personal, is why I have to say these things.

The way you take everything about this election personal, while mis-characterizing my commentary, is why I respond.

I take attacks personal, not discussion.

Two articles by Robert Reich

Who Lost the White Working Class?
TUESDAY, JANUARY 19, 2016
Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?

The conventional answer is that Republicans skillfully played the race card.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party.

Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens” (Ronald Reagan popularized the term), being soft on black crime (George W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ads in 1988), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action).

The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.”

But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class.

Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.

But they’ve done little to change the widening structural imbalances in the economy that have hurt the working class.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, but didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.

I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it.

Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

The Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners to drown.

Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.

And they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform?

You get an economic structure favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful – while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security.

Why haven’t Democrats done more? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations.

In part, it was because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determined electoral outcomes.

Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

“Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years.

Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain.

Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos.

This would give them the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliative programs papering over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.

But to do this they’d have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.

Will they? If not, a third party might emerge that does it instead.


Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics
SATURDAY, JANUARY 16, 2016
1. “He’d never beat Trump or Cruz in a general election.”

Wrong. According to the latest polls, Bernie is the strongest Democratic candidate in the general election, defeating both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in hypothetical matchups. (The latest Real Clear Politics averages of all polls shows Bernie beating Trump by a larger margin than Hillary beats Trump, and Bernie beating Cruz while Hillary loses to Cruz.)

2. “He couldn’t get any of his ideas implemented because Congress would reject them.”

If both house of Congress remain in Republican hands, no Democrat will be able to get much legislation through Congress, and will have to rely instead on executive orders and regulations. But there’s a higher likelihood of kicking Republicans out if Bernie’s “political revolution” continues to surge around America, bringing with it millions of young people and other voters, and keeping them politically engaged.

3. “America would never elect a socialist.”

P-l-e-a-s-e. America’s most successful and beloved government programs are social insurance – Social Security and Medicare. A highway is a shared social expenditure, as is the military and public parks and schools. The problem is we now have excessive socialism for the rich (bailouts of Wall Street, subsidies for Big Ag and Big Pharma, monopolization by cable companies and giant health insurers, giant tax-deductible CEO pay packages) – all of which Bernie wants to end or prevent.

4. “His single-payer healthcare proposal would cost so much it would require raising taxes on the middle class.”

This is a duplicitous argument. Studies show that a single-payer system would be far cheaper than our current system, which relies on private for-profit health insurers, because a single-payer system wouldn’t spend huge sums on advertising, marketing, executive pay, and billing. So even if the Sanders single-payer plan did require some higher taxes, Americans would come out way ahead because they’d save far more than that on health insurance.

5. “His plan for paying for college with a tax on Wall Street trades would mean colleges would run by government rules.”

Baloney. Three-quarters of college students today already attend public universities financed largely by state governments, and they’re not run by government rules. The real problem is too many young people still can’t afford a college education. The move toward free public higher education that began in the 1950s with the G.I. Bill and extended into the 1960s came to an abrupt stop in the 1980s. We must restart it.

6. “He’s too old.”

Untrue. He’s in great health. Have you seen how agile and forceful he is as he campaigns around the country? These days, 70s are the new 60s. (He’s younger than four of the nine Supreme Court justices.) In any event, the issue isn’t age; it’s having the right values. FDR was paralyzed, and JFK had both Addison’s and Crohn’s diseases, but they were great presidents because they fought adamantly for social and economic justice.

And you never have to have the last word, either.

Ignored.

Sometimes Conservative Republicans are more easygoing and light hearted than Socialists.

I've met you, and I can agree with that!

Don't know why people curse socialism. Socialism is Medicare, Social Security, the nation's infrastructure, unemployment insurance -
How ya gonna get along without social programs?

It's only when the government takes over all matters of business/commerce.

Business/commerce practically is the government right now.

I think cicerone put hs finger on it. Social programs themselves aren't the problem - as long as they can be paid for and don't become self-defeating by destroying the incentive for the economic activity required to do so. However, worldwide the track record for government-run economies and industries is pretty dismal.

To cite a particularly noteworthy example, state run Petroleun companies in Latin America, from Mexico to Brazil and Venezuels are graft-ridden inefficient and particularly wasteful. Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves and depends utterly on export production for it's economic life. Production has been steadily declining since the Chavistas took over the country, and to make matters worse their social welfare programs destroyed most Venezuelan industry, thereby increasing their dependence on the declining production of an incompetently run company. The result is inflation well over 100% annually (no one trusts the government figures) and an impending liquidity and debt crisis together with the collapse of their economy.

That's a scary thought.

But we have never run oil companies like that, except to give them lots of free money, which I oppose. Trouble is, right wing people seem to think all we can afford is to give the military an open ended credit card, while telling us we can't afford infrastructure, medicare and such. The government creates jobs and prosperity when money is spent on highways and such. What right wing people are saying is, we can't kill the incentive for economic activity, but they only apply this to the wealthy. No trickle down ever hits the worker, from the inception of Reagan's trickle down to now.

A good infrastructure is necessary for a growing economy. That's Econ 101.

Lash, you might read this - it's written by someone of whom you recently expressed admiration. I didn't say you might want to read this, because I don't think you Bernie followers want to hear about anything not flattering of Bernie. This addresses an ancient American "elephant in the room", and it very succinctly points out a clearly hypocritical stance by our beloved "Democratic Socialist".

Excerpt:

For those of us interested in how the left prioritizes its various radicalisms, Sanders’s answer is illuminating. The spectacle of a socialist candidate opposing reparations as “divisive” (there are few political labels more divisive in the minds of Americans than socialist) is only rivaled by the implausibility of Sanders posing as a pragmatist. Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is “nil,” a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform. The chances of a President Sanders coaxing a Republican Congress to pass a $1 trillion jobs and infrastructure bill are also nil. Considering Sanders’s proposal for single-payer health-care, Paul Krugman asks, “Is there any realistic prospect that a drastic overhaul could be enacted any time soon—say, in the next eight years? No.”...


...If not even an avowed socialist can be bothered to grapple with reparations, if the question really is that far beyond the pale, if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing, that the victims of contract lending deserve nothing, that the victims of debt peonage deserve nothing, that that political plunder of black communities entitle them to nothing, if this is the candidate of the radical left—then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children. Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy. One cannot propose to plunder a people, incur a moral and monetary debt, propose to never pay it back, and then claim to be seriously engaging in the fight against white supremacy.

My hope was to talk to Sanders directly, before writing this article. I reached out repeatedly to his campaign over the past three days. The Sanders campaign did not respond.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-reparations/424602/

GOD, I LOVE Ta-Nehisi Coates!

Medicaid, education, Planned Parenthood, and welfare are subject to huge cuts in failing red states.

While the left wing in this country points out how inept GOP heavy states are at balancing their budgets, there may be a larger monster lurking beneath the depths that we’re missing. Maybe it’s a purposeful agenda — the outcome of bankrupting a state seems to certainly play in the favor of right-wing agendas.

Yesterday, I reported on the ineptitude of the Kansas state governor, Sam Brownback and how he has governed his state into severe debt by drastically cutting income taxes. While the state lost $4 billion in revenue since 2012, it’s only projected to be in debt by about half a billion by the end of this year. The easy fix would be to reinstate the old income tax laws, but that isn’t Brownback’s plan. He plans on staying the course and eliminating income taxes altogether in his state.

His plan will cost his state BILLIONS in revenue over the next few years.

Brownback’s proposed fix is to start slashing funds for social programs that benefit low-income citizens. He plans on redistricting schools to “fix” education funding, undoubtedly shafting poorer students from getting proper funding while even the wealthier districts lose funding as well. Medicaid is also seen as a “problem area.”



And it really is a perfect GOP plan, isn’t it?

Brownback gets to take the red pen to programs the GOP has railed against for YEARS without looking like a complete monster, because he gets to shrug and say, “Well, we don’t have any money.”

Arizona is another GOP-heavy state where former Governor Jan Brewer has left the state in financial ruins — a projected one billion dollar shortfall by the end of this fiscal year — a disaster that fanatical ultra-conservative Gov. Doug Ducey is going to have to solve.

During the 2009 recession, the AZ budget shortfall was $1.6 billion, and education, medicaid and other programs were deeply cut during that time. While the former governor raised sales tax to pull AZ out of that mess, somewhat, social services took a beating. Parks were closed. School nurses laid off.



It looks like Ducey will follow in his predecessors footsteps when the time comes and once again social programs will hang in the balance. Ducey has already promised to dismantle the medicaid expansion that helped hundreds of thousands of Arizonans acquire health care.

After years of denouncing welfare, women’s services and other infrastructure programs some Republicans are making good on their threats and trying to create a tax-free utopia — for those who can afford it.

The chart below shows that Arizona and Kansas really can’t afford to keep taking from their students, yet they will, even though they are in the bottom five of student spending:

Teachability
Teachability

Why would people keep voting for these dunces if they’re dismantling help for those who need it most?

Well, they use issues to their advantage that every right wing ear wants to hear (READ: racism, anti-immigration, sexism, guns, bigotry, homophobia, etc.) to garner votes and pass their malignant agendas that hurt people from ALL parties. Income level also plays a part in willingness to help poorer residents.

We should know as a nation that poverty knows no party. We know that unemployment is a problem of the left and right because most Americans are one lay-off or misstep away from losing their jobs. These are not partisan issues.

The Centrist Word
The Centrist Word

Fox News would have Americans believe that it is the only the left that experience poverty and have a “mooching mentality” and that by offering no incentive to unemployed or low-income people this would help people grab themselves by the bootstraps and lift their self out of poverty — but it is the red states who require more federal aid because their own states are not willing to extend relief.

Bottom line: Stingy red states who only look out for the rich, eventually cost all Americans with their federal tax dollars.

I' not aware of any free money our goivernment has given oil companies, but I agree we have been wise enough to let them produce wealth for us all.

It's interesting to note that there was damn little trickledown from Obama's 2008 infrastructure spending program. The verious Federal and State bureaucracies used the money to take care of themselves while the country suffered in a serious recession.

Government doesn't create either jobs or wealth. It consumes the wealth of others who on average would otherwise usually spend it in more beneficial economic ways in creating new enterprises and new demand. Investment in business activities generally created a good deal more employment and propperity per dollar than does government spending for anything. That said we need government for essential services and some (not all) of our infrastructure.

The ongoing sad and even tragic fiasco in Venezuela is an excellent example of the worst aspects of misguided government efforts to control economic activity. The results for thre Venezuelan people are far short of what was promised to them by their "saviors' in the "Bolivarian revolution".

Thank you Rev. This is what I have been trying to point out to the democratic populace in an inarticulate way. I agree with this article completely, but the Bernie radicals wont even read it. Too close to fact for them.