SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby RocketMan » Tue Apr 16, 2019 11:19 am

If a leftist goes on Fox, he'd better be as on point as Bernie. It can be done. Just sayin'. :partydance:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/vide ... 1555426250

In an effort to speak to Trump voters, the Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders went on Fox News to front a town hall. Sanders is the first Democratic presidential candidate to appear on the network for such an event. Hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum tried their best to undercut the senator for Vermont but with each question he seemed to come out on top with rapturous applause from the Pennsylvania audience. From healthcare to immigration, climate change, abortion and the minimum wage, Sanders impressed the audience and frustrated the hosts.


SEEMS to be working better than Queen Cersei's (that's not a slur, she herself says she identifies with her) famous "Deplorables Gambit".

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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Apr 16, 2019 1:16 pm

RocketMan » Tue Apr 16, 2019 11:19 am wrote:If a leftist goes on Fox, he'd better be as on point as Bernie. It can be done. Just sayin'. :partydance:


He totally killed btw.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 16, 2019 1:19 pm

He totally killed btw.


yes he did and I worked for Bernie in 2016, it was a really great time and I agree/satisfied with Bernie in what he has said about the investigation into the interference in our elections and many other things
It will take some time getting to know all the candidates before deciding who to work for this time
I still have my pink Bernie Bag, Bernie Pin and extra bumper sticker

here's his website

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Apr 16, 2019 2:54 pm

As I was going door to door for Bernie, I kept running into the Jerkies of the world who harangued me with every conceivable reason not to vote for the candidate with whose policies they clearly most agreed. The basic gist of their argument was, "Nobody has attacked Bernie yet. His views, like yours and mine, are just too damn radical. We need to stop the evil that is Trump, and to do so we must compromise (as always)."

I was dumbfounded by the ferocity of their beliefs. It's as they had all somehow been Skinnerily trained to triangulate their own political beliefs! I tried every approach I could think of.

First, I tried floating the idea that Trump offered the best chance in our lifetime for a candidate whose goals we actually agreed with to get elected. No, too risky.

Then I tried explaining the fact that Clinton, out of all possible candidates to run in opposition to Trump, was in actuality the one uniquely positioned to lose to a buffoon like Trump, considering that Trump's very nomination demonstrated just how fatigued Americans had become with the status quo that Clinton represented. But, no, "conventional wisdom" had somehow assured these self-triangulaters that Clinton could never lose.

Finally, I attempted to discuss the failures of Kerry and Gore in terms of not pulling off the gloves when articulating their policy differences with Dubya. Even if Sanders were somehow to lose to Trump, I argued, wouldn't it even be worth possible defeat just to have our shared vision for a less unequal society that recognized our humans right to healthcare and education put on the table for once in a national debate that corporate media could not simply ignore? No, Trump was just too dangerous. Must triangulate.

Can I assume that my arguments work better on y'all than they did on them? When we desperately seek reasons not to support most viable candidates with whom we most agree on policy issues and whose entire political careers most closely match our own political beliefs in our efforts to "win", doesn't our self-censorship continue to allow corporations and billionaires to completely define the legitimate parameters of our entire political debate?
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Apr 16, 2019 11:44 pm

Bernie Sanders and the Science of Smears
The media’s focus on personality is designed to shift attention away from dangerous ideas

By MATT TAIBBI


The satirist Ambrose Bierce, author of the Devil’s Dictionary, once defined radicalism as “the conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today.”

What Bierce wittily captured — that today’s radicals are tomorrow’s normies — means that at any given moment, the current political establishment will be fighting off the inevitable.

The Brahmins of today don’t battle with ideas, because as Bierce pointed out, their belief systems are usually regressive and unpopular, only they don’t know it yet. The battle is almost always waged instead over personality, because while certain “radical” ideas may be unstoppable, individual politicians are easily villainized, delaying change — a little.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders made headlines this week by taking on the Center for American Progress, long known as a messaging arm of the mainstream Democratic Party. Sanders wrote a letter criticizing the CAP board for playing a “destructive role” in the “critical mission to defeat Donald Trump,” a critique seemingly crafted in response to recent efforts by ThinkProgress, a news site founded by CAP, to paint Sanders as a hypocrite for being a millionaire author.

The Sanders letter to CAP formalized the rift between the Democratic establishment and the labor-based movement of millions Sanders represents. That we’re talking about a petty PR battle and not the hardcore disagreement about policy and (especially) campaign funding sources that created this divide is Exhibit A proving the old propaganda method is still working.

The practice of painting dissident challenges as selfish, hypocritical acts — as opposed to the selfless altruism of corporate-funded candidates — has been going on forever. Long before Sanders was framed as a thin-skinned, cranky narcissist who’s “all about himself,” Dennis Kucinich went through the same thing.

Kucinich was/is living proof of the Bierce aphorism. When he announced his run for president in October of 2003, the Ohio congressman “stood up against corporate interests,” promised to revoke NAFTA, endorsed decriminalization of marijuana, called for universal health care and trumpeted “amnesty and legalization for illegal immigrants.”

He was the only candidate promising to withdraw troops from Iraq, and in those jingoistic years after 9/11, he not only brought an imam on stage for his launch, he took a shot at Columbus Day. From the New York Times account:

“The Cleveland event had a tailored multicultural appeal, starting out with prayers from a rabbi, an imam and a Baptist preacher. The speakers were racially diverse, and Mr. Kucinich took a moment to acknowledge the American Indian communities on Columbus Day.”

Many of these ideas are now blue-state orthodoxy. “Universal health care” is an official goal of the Democratic Party, even if the party doesn’t mean it in the same way Kucinich did. He was right about Iraq — he was the only one right about Iraq in that field — and significant parts of the electorate are beginning to suspect he was right about NAFTA, the legalization of marijuana and a bunch of other things.

Kucinich may even have been ahead of the curve on Columbus Day: four states and 50 cities now celebrate “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” instead.

But back in the 2000s, when Kucinich still had a small voice in national politics, he was routinely denounced as something worse than a radical: a kook, nut and egomaniac. I covered both of the Kucinich runs for the presidency and saw how frustrated he became over time as his ideas were ignored and his campaigns were denounced as indulgences.

What little coverage he got tended to be stuffed below the fold, and focused on him as a “lower-tier” eccentric, a vegan who dabbled in ventriloquism, wore wing-tips and was too short (the standard modifier attached to him was “elfin,” as in “the elfin peace candidate”).

Reporters from 2008 will remember the “hot mic” debate exchange between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, when the contenders whispered about thinning a field of eight that included Kucinich and Mike Gravel.

“We should try to have a more serious… smaller group,” Edwards offered, leading to the following exchange:

Clinton: Well, we’ve got to cut the number, because they are just being trivialized.
Edwards: They are not serious.
Clinton: No.

About the seriousness: when asked later that year by Wolf Blitzer why he was the only candidate who’d had a chance to vote on the Patriot Act to vote against it, Kucinich shot back, “Because I read it.” He was probably right that none of the others had.

But he was seen as the unserious one. By 2010, when he was opposing the Affordable Care Act for many of the same reasons driving today’s Medicare-for-All movement, even would-be liberal commentators like Markos Moulitsas were denouncing him. He was a modern Nader, pushing “unrealistic” and “self-defeating” politics, someone who’d never accomplished anything.

The treatment of Kucinich was pure high school. I used to get an unpleasant pang of recognition listening to the cool kids on the press plane laughing at the “lefty elf” who refused to get the hint he wasn’t wanted on the debate stage.

Back when Sanders didn’t seem like a threat to win anything, he got much of the same. He was dismissed as a geek and a wallflower who’d be defined by whether he chose to be a help or a hindrance to the real candidate, Clinton. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy in early 2015 mock-welcomed Bernie to the race, insisting the entrance of the “loner” would be a “plus” for the Clinton campaign, since he would “occupy the space to the left of Clinton, thus denying it to more plausible candidates, such as Martin O’Malley.”

It wasn’t until Sanders started piling up delegates that he began to take on the villainous characteristics for which he is now infamous. After he won primaries in 2016, suddenly reporters ripped him as a divisive narcissist with three houses who was the ideological mirror of Donald Trump, boasting racist, sexist and violent followers.

This was all part of the age-old technique of focusing on the person instead of the ideas or the movement behind them. Sanders wasn’t winning in 2016 because Bernie Sanders is some great stump act — he isn’t. A fair portion of his support was coming from people who were fed up with both parties even before he decided to run.

The easiest way to avoid dealing with uncomfortable truths is to create an ick factor around the politician benefiting from them. That was Sanders in 2016 and it’s still him, mainly. However, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii have also been pre-emptively dipped in the ick this cycle, cast as crippled politicians whose mere presence in the race will “undermine” Democrats in the end.

Additionally, and I could see it coming even a year ago, politicians benefiting from domestic discontent with the status quo are being denounced as Kremlin favorites as well as selfish agents of division.

On the day Gabbard announced her run for the presidency, MSNBC ran a story claiming Russian-linked social media accounts were pushing a “possible campaign of support” for the Hawaii Democrat. The story was sourced to the firm New Knowledge, which had been caught by the Times faking an almost identical story about Russian trolls and Alabama Republican Roy Moore.

Sanders was described as the Kremlin candidate in the Washington Post just a few days ago. This was unsurprising since the Post was asking as far back as the fall of 2017 how Democrats would respond to Putin playing dirty tricks for Sanders in 2020.

There are people who will protest that descriptions of such Russian activity boosting Sanders are rooted in fact, as efforts to reach his supports are described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of the Internet Research Agency. That’s fine. I would counsel anyone who thinks Russia is responsible for the rise of Sanders or people like Gabbard or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should go out and interview voters around the country, especially in remote areas.

The anger toward the political establishment that drives support for such politicians began to be visible over a decade ago, long before Sanders or Gabbard were factors in any kind in national politics.

Those voters aren’t selfish, or hypocrites, or Kremlin favorites, and they’re not going anywhere. What a lot of DC-based reporters and analysts don’t grasp is that if you remove Bernie Sanders from the scene, there will still be millions of people out there mad about income inequality. Remove Gabbard, and discontent about the human and financial costs of our military commitments will still be rampant. Removing Warren won’t cancel out anger about Wall Street corruption.

Covering personalities instead of political movements only delays things for a while. Sooner or later, the conservatism of tomorrow arrives. You can only delay the inevitable for so long.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... rs-823138/
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 10:24 am

Mainstream, centrist Democrats are The Enemy of the People.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/cenk-uy ... nders.html

A top progressive pundit says mainstream Democrats are worried about Bernie Sanders winning the White House in 2020

Sen. Bernie Sanders is making mainstream Democrats nervous.

But some of the presidential candidate’s supporters say it’s not because they’re worried Sanders can’t defeat President Donald Trump in 2020. It’s because he can, they say.

The Vermont democratic socialist may have surprised the party’s establishment with his strong performance so far. He’s been polling second, behind only former Vice President Joe Biden, who has yet to enter the race. Sanders also took the lead in an Emerson poll released Tuesday. He raised more than $18 million in the first quarter of 2019, the most money of any Democratic contender. And his base of loyal followers, who made him a force in the 2016 primary, has not gone anywhere.

“Bernie right now has a better chance of winning than the rest of field combined,” said Cenk Uygur, founder of progressive news network TYT and host of “The Young Turks,” who supported Sanders in 2016. Uygur has not decided whom he will back in 2020, but says he likes Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Uygur said the establishment’s concerns about Sanders raised in a New York Times article on Tuesday, will only make Sanders stronger.

The article quotes party insiders who fear that Sanders’ campaign will complicate efforts to defeat Trump. Their goal is to stop him from gaining more ground and certainly to thwart his chances of becoming the Democratic 2020 nominee.

David Brock, a political consultant, told the Times: “There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner.”

Brock told the paper that he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence “sooner rather than later.”

The Sanders campaign was not available for comment. The Democratic National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Already, a fight has erupted between Sanders and the Center for American Progress, a think tank that has ties to Hillary Clinton.

But Uygur sees another reason for the establishment’s concerns about Sanders: “The big Dem donors are not worried he’s going to lose the general election, they’re worried he’s going to win,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby Elvis » Sun Apr 21, 2019 5:07 pm

David Brock, a political consultant, told the Times: “There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner.”

Brock told the paper that he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence “sooner rather than later.”


:barf:

David Brock makes me ill. It is he who should be purged from politics.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby RocketMan » Mon Apr 22, 2019 11:23 am

Looks like Bern's team is mos def prepared for this shit...



The choice of Comms Director is paying off already.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby liminalOyster » Tue Apr 23, 2019 11:44 pm

I Was Bernie’s Biggest Critic in 2016—I’ve Changed My Mind
Bernie Sanders can beat Donald Trump—and it would be an epic act of self-destruction for Democrats to try and hobble his campaign.
By Peter Daou TODAY 2:09 PM

If you had told me in the spring of 2016 that three years later I’d be touting the merits of the Bernie Sanders campaign—taking flak from Hillary Clinton supporters for not being loyal enough to her—I would have laughed and asked what alternate reality you lived in. But life and politics have a way of taking unexpected turns, and here I am writing about the considerable strengths Sanders brings to the 2020 election.

I do so not to endorse Sanders or to minimize the large and diverse Democratic field. It is early in the primary and voters should take the time to assess all their options. I am going through that process myself, studying how the candidates campaign, how they deal with the corporate media, what policies they’re putting forward. The reason I’ve focused on Sanders in recent weeks is because I am concerned that festering anger from the 2016 primary is causing a rift in the electorate that Trump and the Republican Party can—and will—successfully exploit.

Bernie Sanders is unquestionably in the top tier of candidates for the Democratic nomination, and it would be an epic act of self-destruction for Democrats to plunge into an internecine conflict over his candidacy at a time when they need to marshal every asset to defeat Trump and his GOP cronies. I am calling on Democrats, progressives, and leftists to hit the pause button, to table our disagreements, no matter how intense, as we fight to preserve the rule of law and the last semblance of our democracy. We owe it to ourselves and our country.

My political and personal evolution since 2016 has caught some people off guard. I’m often asked how a staunch Hillary Clinton advocate and former Sanders critic could reverse course. The answer is simpler than it appears. I spent fifteen years before the 2016 election as a progressive activist, a critic of the Democratic Party’s meekness in the face of GOP extremism, and a supporter of the policies Bernie Sanders promotes.

After months of self-reflection about my own role in the 2016 primary, I realized I was among the far too many Clinton and Sanders supporters who got caught up in an ugly family dispute that spiraled out of control. We’ve all experienced those explosive fights. In the heat of the moment, we see each other as enemies rather than human beings who largely share the same goals. So I began to reach out to repair what had been broken. On Twitter, I unblocked Sanders supporters who I had argued with. I tried to see things from their perspective and I asked them to do the same. There’s still some residual anger and skepticism, but the healing process has given me invaluable perspective, and I can now look at the 2020 primary through a clear lens.

This is what I see: An extremist GOP that is methodically consolidating power, stacking the courts with far-right ideologues and making a mockery of the rule of law. It is everything we feared from a Trump presidency, and worse. And I see that Bernie Sanders is a strong frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination. He leads Trump in several match-ups. He has millions of dedicated supporters. He is raising tens of millions of dollars from small donors. He is a seasoned campaigner with a presidential race under his belt.

Virtually every state and national poll shows Sanders at or near the top of the Democratic field. Polls are fluid at this stage, but Sanders is a known quantity and his base of support is solid. His proven appeal to young voters and independents is a powerful asset, and his ability to deliver a well-crafted and unapologetic progressive message to Americans across the political spectrum is crucial if Democrats hope to take on an increasingly extremist GOP.

He is not without his flaws and inconsistencies. He needs to do more outreach to black voters, the base of the Democratic Party. His positions have sometimes been at odds with the principles he touts. But that holds true for every candidate and politician.

Most importantly, Sanders has played a central role in advocating enlightened, compassionate, forward-looking policies like Medicare for All, free public college, a living wage, and more. In the heat of the 2016 primary, I was reluctant to give Sanders credit for moving the national debate to the left. But it is impossible to deny the important role he has played, and continues to play, in countering the far right’s extremist ideas.

During the most ferocious debates of the Clinton-Sanders contest, I repeatedly implored Sanders supporters who disliked Clinton to focus on the ultimate prize: defeating the authoritarian right. I argued that her positions were immeasurably superior to Trump’s and that tearing her down was a grave mistake when we faced the prospect of white-nationalist rule. The same holds true today for Sanders. Trying to hobble his campaign is a reckless mission.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The recently released Mueller report reveals extensive corruption and lawlessness by Trump and his cronies. Republican leaders have abdicated their constitutionally mandated oversight in order to cover for Trump’s abuses of power. Trump has convinced his MAGA followers that journalists are “enemies of the people.” Meanwhile, the powerful right-wing media apparatus, spearheaded by Fox News, churns out a steady stream of spin and propaganda designed to stoke fear and division among Americans. White House officials are engaged in a relentless assault on truth and facts, undermining the sense of a shared reality essential to a functioning society. Their declarations have become increasingly Orwellian. “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what is happening,” Trump insisted. Rudy Giuliani told Chuck Todd that “truth isn’t truth.”

Under cover of this Trumpian chaos, fundamental rights are being eroded by a Republican Party that lacks even a rudimentary moral compass. Migrant children are being stolen from their parents and detained in frigid holding cells. The EPA has become an arm of big polluters. The poor and sick are losing health coverage to fund tax cuts for the superrich, who barter 8-figure condos on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row while nearly half the population can’t afford a $400 emergency expense.

Alarmingly, the ferocity of the GOP’s attack on our norms and values is met with timidity from the Democratic Party leadership. Even after grassroots activists and voters generated a 2018 blue wave that swept Democrats back into power in the House, the party leadership has proven incapable (or unwilling) to rise to the historic challenge of facing down encroaching fascism. There are no saviors coming to rescue us. We must become our own leaders. To defeat Trump and to reverse the rising tide of white nationalism that threatens the foundations of our democracy, we must have the courage to set aside old grievances for the greater good. Bernie Sanders is not the only candidate who can defeat Trump, but he’s certainly one of them. And he should not be treated as the enemy.

https://www.thenation.com/article/peter ... itic-2016/
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby stickdog99 » Wed Apr 24, 2019 1:27 am

liminalOyster » 24 Apr 2019 03:44 wrote:
I Was Bernie’s Biggest Critic in 2016—I’ve Changed My Mind
Bernie Sanders can beat Donald Trump—and it would be an epic act of self-destruction for Democrats to try and hobble his campaign.
By Peter Daou


So Peter Daou is actually willing to give democracy a chance in a Democratic party Presidential primary this time around?

How gracious and perspicacious of him.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby RocketMan » Wed Apr 24, 2019 3:00 am

Damn, I hope Bernie's constitution stays as good as it is. He's gonna need it. And the Dems are going to throw everything including the kitchen sink at him. I bet Hillary's too petty to shut up and heads will explode when Biden fizzles.

It's gonna be a rough ride.

Despite the warranted pessimism here and elsewhere, I really feel some kind of inflection point, to use the parlance of amoral Washington policy wonks, is at hand. The PTB are tipping their hand increasingly (see Assange) and an increasing amount of people are not taking things sitting down.

stickdog99 » Wed Apr 24, 2019 8:27 am wrote:
liminalOyster » 24 Apr 2019 03:44 wrote:
I Was Bernie’s Biggest Critic in 2016—I’ve Changed My Mind
Bernie Sanders can beat Donald Trump—and it would be an epic act of self-destruction for Democrats to try and hobble his campaign.
By Peter Daou


So Peter Daou is actually willing to give democracy a chance in a Democratic party Presidential primary this time around?

How gracious and perspicacious of him.
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby stickdog99 » Wed Apr 24, 2019 6:20 am

Joe Biden's Credit Card Sponsored Bankruptcy Is Only for the Rich Bill

Joe Biden's greatest betrayal: The one Senate vote that makes it hard to support a Biden run

As a Senator in Delaware, Biden shepherded to passage a law that decimated bankruptcy protection for milllions.

...

In light of what occurred in its wake, this law is easily one of the most disgraceful aspects of the Bush and Biden legacies. The harm it did to middle-class Americans, especially during the crushing events of the recession four years later, is immeasurable. The bill made it nearly impossible for average families to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, also known as "clean slate" bankruptcies intended to discharge nearly all debts, a matter of a few years before they'd need it the most. The bill instituted an all new means test to determine whether debtors with insurmountable financial hardships earned enough income to pay back all or part of their unsecured debts, specifically credit debt. If they earned too much, a clean slate bankruptcy became impossible, and they'd be forced to file Chapter 13, which would force debtors to pay back their debt over a five-year timeline, thus legalizing neo-indentured-servitude to creditors.

...

As if all of this wasn't bad enough, the Biden-supported legislation prioritized credit card debt repayment over child support repayment, forcing women who are owed back support to negotiate with credit card companies over the debts owed by their exes. Furthermore, the term "debtor" was changed by the BAPCPA to "household" so that the new means test would take into account the total earnings of an entire household, rather than one debtor -- including, for example, a teen daughter's babysitting money.

Worse yet, the bill contained nothing to crack down on abusive practices by predatory lenders, including punitive interest rates and penalties.

Unforgivably, Joe Biden was one of the leading cheerleaders of the bill.

Expecting penitence now from Biden is, of course, wishful thinking, considering his loyalty to home state of Delaware, which is the primary reason Biden supported every effort to screw middle class debtors. It turns out Delaware, specifically Wilmington, is the home base for a not insignificant number of credit card companies. During the Reagan '80s, a spate of new state laws were implemented to lure creditors from Manhattan to Wilmington by offering attractive tax incentives as well as defanging usury laws to allow companies such as Bank of America and Chase to charge significantly more onerous interest rates.

Put another way, the Bankruptcy Bill was great Biden and his Delawarean benefactors, but a financial atrocity for millions of families, made worse by the financial crisis and crippling recession that followed. While thousands of financial institutions received billions of dollars in relief during the recession, ordinary Americans who were hammered by medical and mortgage debt, not to mention record-smashing job losses, were more or less screwed. One study indicated that the BAPCPA "likely prevented a substantial increase in bankruptcy filings" during the recession: Even given the depth of the crisis, the number of bankruptcies rose to only around 1.5 million in 2010, which is 25 percent lower than the average number of bankruptcies per year prior to the bill's passage during a relatively healthy economy.


Uncle Joe has always served his masters.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby stickdog99 » Wed Apr 24, 2019 6:40 am

More on Biden

...

The party continued to be represented and led by mostly white men. And while officially Democrats remained on the progressive side, supporting reproductive rights, civil rights, and affirmative action, a contingent of Those Guys, Joe Biden notable among them, made folksy rationalizations for abrogating, rather than expanding and more fiercely protecting, new rights and protections. Those Guys soothed; Those Guys were familiar; Those Guys enjoyed their own power and wanted to reassure everyone that it wasn’t really going to be so dramatically reapportioned.

A young Joe Biden was reliably anti-abortion, claiming that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and that he did not believe that “a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” He voted consistently for the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 legislative rider which forbid government-funded insurance programs from paying for abortion, making abortion all but inaccessible to poor people. In 1981, he proposed the “Biden Amendment,” prohibiting foreign aid to be used in any biomedical research related to abortion. The next year, he supported Jesse Helms’s amendment barring foreign NGOs receiving United States aid from using that aid to perform abortion. Biden was one of two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary to vote for the 1982 Hatch Amendment, which would have effectively nullified Roe by turning abortion rights back to federal and state legislatures. At the time, he expressed concern about whether he had “a right to impose” his anti-abortion views on the nation. Then he went ahead and imposed those views anyway.

Over the decades, Biden has evolved on the issue, yet into the 1990s and 2000s, he voted for the so-called “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.” And he regularly declined to fully support the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have banned the wide variety of oppressive state restrictions on abortion.

...

Biden wasn’t simply a comforter of patriarchal impulses toward controlling women’s bodies. Though he campaigned in 1972 as a strong supporter of civil rights, and initially voted in favor of school busing legislation intended to integrate schools in both the North and South, Biden changed his tune a couple of years into his Senate tenure. Faced with angry pressure from white constituents rearing back from integration measures that would mean busing white children into black neighborhoods, Biden previewed his anti-abortion agreement with Republican Jesse Helms by siding with him on anti-busing measures, calling the approach to school integration “a bankrupt concept” and “asinine policy.” Biden’s anti-busing stance offered an out for his Democratic colleagues, several of whom also turned on busing, helping to defeat the legislation.

In later decades, Biden’s legislative efforts reinforced other kinds of racial disparities. In 1988, he co-sponsored legislation that enacted mandatory-minimum sentences for drug possession, including higher sentences for those in possession of crack over powder cocaine, a ruling that specifically targeted poorer African-American and Latino populations, while letting wealthier white drug users off the hook. He wrote the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act signed by Bill Clinton, which helped strengthen and codify what has become the United States’ carceral state, and was an enthusiastic supporter of Clinton’s punishing welfare-reform policy. Biden was one of his party’s transmitters of what Bouie has called “sensitivity to the fears and anxieties of his white constituents.”

But even those constituents — those guys in diners, worried about jobs and mounting debt — haven’t always been served by him. Biden, the senator from Delaware, where many credit card companies and banks are incorporated, has long advocated on behalf of those financial entities. This is one of the ironies of his role as blue-collar Everyman; that guy is regularly screwed by the very companies Biden represents. As beneficiary of enormous campaign donations from his home state’s financial behemoth MBNA, in 1999 Biden voted to repeal Glass-Steagall legislation that, since 1933, had separated commercial and investment banking, paving the way for the financial crisis. Biden was one of a handful of Democrats to oppose a measure that would have required credit card companies to warn consumers of the risks of only paying the minimum due on their credit card bills and worked against legislation that would have increased protections for those whose debts mounted thanks to medical bills and for those in the military.

In the mid-2000s, he was a major Democratic supporter of a bill that made it harder for individuals, many of them struggling with enormous credit card debt, to declare bankruptcy. In a 2002 negotiation over the bill, Democrats added an amendment that targeted anti-abortion protesters, a move that both sweetened it for Democrats and made it less palatable to Republicans. (In a livid letter to the New York Times, calling the bankruptcy bill “unconscionable” and noting that it particularly imperiled female-headed households and used abortion as a strategic wedge, Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard Law professor and advocate for consumer reforms, wondered whether “politicians like Mr. Biden … believe they can give credit-card companies the right to elbow out women and children so long as they rally behind an issue like abortion? The message is unmistakable: on an economic issue that attracts millions of dollars of industry support, women have no real political importance.”)

Then, of course, there was his stewardship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which hit its infamous nadir with the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. Biden was reluctant even to let Anita Hill testify as to how Thomas had repeatedly sexually harassed her, since — as he would explain afterward — he had given his word to a Republican colleague, in the Senate gym, that he’d make sure Thomas’s confirmation was speedy. When Hill did testify, and was treated with disrespect and disregard by leering and patronizing Republicans on the committee, Biden did not defend her or rebuke them; he permitted her ill treatment. Perhaps most crucially, he declined to call any of the three women — Rose Jourdain, Angela Wright, and Sukari Hardnett — who were willing to testify about their own experiences of Thomas’s inappropriate behavior, and thereby corroborate Hill’s claims.

In talking to the Washington Post the year after those hearings, Biden would offer up a pretty good description of the forces that have shaped the political universe, and his role in it, through his decades in political life. “That last hearing was not about Clarence Thomas, it was not about Anita Hill,” he told E.J. Dionne. “It was about a massive power struggle going on in this country, a power struggle between women and men, and a power struggle between minorities and the majority, and it’s a reflection of the schizophrenic personality of the American public now with regard to both those issues, feminism and race.”

Biden is correct that these have been the major power struggles. What he seems less willing to admit is that over and over again, he has been on the wrong side of them.

To be fair to Biden, that is not the whole story of his political career. Because, yes, he has done good and progressive things as well. He has, in many ways, truly “evolved.” Biden pays lip service to supporting abortion, though he has also said, even as a pro-choice senator, that “abortion is always wrong,” and his spokesperson declined to tell the New York Times, this week, whether or not he still supports a ban on federal funding for abortion services. As vice-president, Biden famously became an engaged supporter of gay marriage. He has worked to extend the Voting Rights Act and amendments to the Fair Housing Act. In 2010, he supported a bill that reduced those sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. He has voiced some support for $15 minimum-wage measures and has said that the vote he regrets most was the one to repeal Glass-Steagall legislation.

His great feminist achievement was the Violence Against Women Act, a crucial piece of legislation that Republicans remain eager to let lapse, and which is understood in many circles to have been a form of repentance for Biden’s horrifying failures regarding Anita Hill’s testimony. He works with an Obama-founded organization called “It’s On Us,” the premise of which is that it is men’s responsibility to stop sexual assault and harassment. Even in that, though, Biden is That Guy: the paternalistic lawmaker for whom it is perhaps easier to write legislation protecting women than it is to simply listen to, believe, and take seriously women, their stories of harassment, or their decisions about their own bodies and health care.

Biden has managed to squeak out some mild expressions of regret for the impact of the crime bill and his role in the Hill hearings. But most of them feel empty, as if he is unwilling to acknowledge the active role he actually played. In his 2007 book, Biden continued to call school busing “a liberal train wreck.” He was willing to defend the crime bill up through 2014. More recently, as his party — finally — shows some meager signs of being willing to move away from That Guy and toward policy and representation that better serves and acknowledges its actual base, he has grown more vocally critical of his crime legislation, but oddly not of himself and his role in it. This January, at a Martin Luther King Day event in New York, Biden said passively of the crack-powder sentencing disparities, “It was a big mistake that was made.”

There was similar denial of his own active role — his own power — just this week, at an event at which Biden refused to acknowledge any degree to which the grotesque treatment of Anita Hill was on him. “She paid a terrible price,” Biden said on Tuesday. “To this day, I wish I could have done something.” Biden has repeatedly commented in recent years that he “owes” Hill “an apology,” yet has never bothered to pay her the respect of proffering one directly. Hill herself has described a family joke: When the doorbell rings when they’re not expecting company, she says, “We say, ‘Is that Joe Biden coming to apologize?’” ...

Biden’s willingness to be That Guy has not worked against him; it has aggressively worked for him. When he was running in the 2008 Democratic primary, Biden made a set of crude remarks about his competitor and Senate colleague Barack Obama, whom he called “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” It was the paternalistic phrasing of America’s inner That Guy. And when Barack Obama won his party’s nomination, becoming the first African-American major party nominee for the presidency, Biden was selected as his running mate, surely and absolutely as That kind of Guy who would comfort Those other Guys and let them know that this president was going to be friendly to them. Obama won. And Joe Biden got a new lease on progressive life.

As vice-president, Biden surged in popularity. Obama’s fondness for him radiated a kind of nonabrasive reassurance that no one was mad at That Guy! Biden became the man who profited from the very biases he expressed. ...

Much of what Democrats blame Republicans for was enabled, quite literally, by Biden: Justices whose confirmation to the Supreme Court he rubber-stamped worked to disembowel affirmative action, collective bargaining rights, reproductive rights, voting rights. (Just look at Georgia, where curtailed voting rights may have helped Brian Kemp ascend to the governor’s mansion, where this week he praised and may soon sign a six-week abortion ban, leaving Stacey Abrams conveniently free to be Joe Biden’s imaginary running mate.) In his years in power, Biden and his party (elected thanks to a nonwhite base enfranchised in the 1960s) built the carceral state that disproportionately imprisons and disenfranchises people of color, as part of what Michelle Alexander has described as the New Jim Crow. With his failure to treat seriously claims of sexual harassment made against powerful men on their way to accruing more power (claims rooted in prohibitions that emerged from the feminist and civil-rights movements of the 1970s), Biden created a precedent that surely made it easier for accused harassers, including Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, to nonetheless ascend. Economic chasms and racial wealth gaps have yawned open, in part thanks to Joe Biden’s defenses of credit card companies, his support of that odious welfare-reform bill, his eagerness to support the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

In other words, a Supreme Court and decades of federal legislation shaped in part by Joe Biden and his party have managed to reverse many of the achievements of the 20th century’s most transformative social movements: the very achievements that had provoked the kind of backlash that politicians like Joe Biden were put in place to quell.

Very often, we are told — by people on television and in political media, perhaps by the people in our social circle and our families — that Joe Biden is the only way that Democrats can win in 2020. It’s a version of what we have been told over and over and over again for 50 years. But when I look at these last decades, I don’t actually see how much we’ve won with a party run by Those Guys. I see how much we’ve lost.
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Apr 25, 2019 11:41 am

Man, fuck this. If Amy Klobuchar or Beto the Snork had been up there and given the "correct" load of shit answer, would they have been cheered? Even despite their reflective records which are *anything but* aligned with those most vulnerable to social forces, etc?

It drives me nuts that even our sole hope for a fucking blah moderate progressive ever winning the presidency is held to this bananas double standard. Dude is almost 80. I get that "I was at the March on Washington" isn't what anyone wants to hear here. But FFS.

OTOH, Bernie, man, come the fuck on and get some help with this which is going to pose a real problem for you.

Bernie Sanders Met With Boos After Name-Dropping Martin Luther King at She the People Summit
Loren Elliott/Reuters

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was met with audible groans from the audience Wednesday night at the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston for his response to a question on the rise of white nationalism. Sanders, one of eight Democratic contenders for 2020 featured at the summit, which described itself as “the first-ever presidential candidate forum focused on women of color,” prompted boos from the crowd after defaulting to his usual talking points about immigration reform and mentioning his attendance at the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King when asked how he’d handle the issue of white-supremacist violence and what specifically he’d do for women of color. The questioner, former NYC Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs Sayu Bhojwani, later tweeted that Sanders “had a rough time” with the question but “came around.” Others were less forgiving. “Bernie was asked important questions and he answered none of them,” tweeted disability-rights advocate Stephanie Olarte. “It is so sad that the moderators ask the questions in different forms to get an answer Y NADA.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sa ... ple-summit
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Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3

Postby RocketMan » Thu Apr 25, 2019 1:58 pm

They will grab on to anything they can use against him and hold on viciously. They can't very well pin the anti-semitism bullshit on him, so they're going with white male chauvinist. Fuck 'em. The double (triple/quadruple) standards are blatant WRT other candidates.

liminalOyster » Thu Apr 25, 2019 6:41 pm wrote:Man, fuck this. If Amy Klobuchar or Beto the Snork had been up there and given the "correct" load of shit answer, would they have been cheered? Even despite their reflective records which are *anything but* aligned with those most vulnerable to social forces, etc?

It drives me nuts that even our sole hope for a fucking blah moderate progressive ever winning the presidency is held to this bananas double standard. Dude is almost 80. I get that "I was at the March on Washington" isn't what anyone wants to hear here. But FFS.

OTOH, Bernie, man, come the fuck on and get some help with this which is going to pose a real problem for you.

Bernie Sanders Met With Boos After Name-Dropping Martin Luther King at She the People Summit
Loren Elliott/Reuters

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was met with audible groans from the audience Wednesday night at the She the People Presidential Forum in Houston for his response to a question on the rise of white nationalism. Sanders, one of eight Democratic contenders for 2020 featured at the summit, which described itself as “the first-ever presidential candidate forum focused on women of color,” prompted boos from the crowd after defaulting to his usual talking points about immigration reform and mentioning his attendance at the March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King when asked how he’d handle the issue of white-supremacist violence and what specifically he’d do for women of color. The questioner, former NYC Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs Sayu Bhojwani, later tweeted that Sanders “had a rough time” with the question but “came around.” Others were less forgiving. “Bernie was asked important questions and he answered none of them,” tweeted disability-rights advocate Stephanie Olarte. “It is so sad that the moderators ask the questions in different forms to get an answer Y NADA.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sa ... ple-summit
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