What Bernie Sanders Has Already Won

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When Sen. Bernie Sanders initially began running for president, his hope was to “trigger the conversation” about the way the economic and political system is rigged by the billionaires and their corporations. He wanted to begin a movement around a vision of how the country could be run for We the People instead of a few billionaires and their giant corporations, and give that movement momentum.

That was the idea; start a movement out of a campaign that could get a “for-the-people” message out. All the people he brought in would take it from there.

The arguments that would prompt Sanders to contemplate not running were clear and compelling. Sanders wasn’t going to be getting the huge-dollar donations that keep so many other candidates going. He might not be able to get the resources to travel to and have rallies in enough of the primary states to be heard at all, and might not meet the threshold for getting into the presidential primary debates. The risk was that he might get whipped so badly that people would for decades run from the idea of running for office on Sanders’ progressive themes.

Nonetheless, Sanders decided to run and spoke his message. Then BANG, look what started happening. On the first day after announcing his campaign he raised $1.5 million in small-donor campaign donations. In just two months he raised $15 million.

BANG! What Sanders didn’t know was that he was bringing a match to a gasoline convention. With huge rallies and huge enthusiasm, in just a short time he is leading (as of Friday) in two out of three recent polls in New Hampshire, the only state other than Vermont where he has real name recognition.

Suddenly the game has shifted. People realized that Sanders is more than a fringe candidate. He could plausibly win the nomination.

But as we talk about Sanders “winning,” here is the thing: He HAS won.

Nobody expected to be actually talking about him being the nominee and all that. But whether he is or not, the discussion Sanders wanted HAS been triggered, and an amazing list of supporters now exists. Now there is the hope that he and we can build a movement out of it that lasts past this election.

Regardless of the Democratic nominee, we will all need to work on making sure an anti-immigrant, anti-Social Security, pro-billionaire, pro-hate candidate doesn’t get elected president and destroy the country. Look back at the ‘W’ Bush legacy of a country almost destroyed. Financial collapse, war, how many lives gone? This new “Trump” GOP is now much, much worse than the Bush era – regardless of which billionaire-backed (or billionaire) candidate they nominate.

Meanwhile, a progressive populist uprising is also happening in the United Kingdom, with Jeremy Corbyn running to lead the Labour Party. The Labour party had drifted so far to the right that they apologized for spending money on public needs and are supporting austerity measures. Corbyn says that the UK needs to go back to being the real Labour party, and has called for renationalizing the railroads, energy companies and other privatized services so the people benefit instead of thew already-wealthy few. Then – BANG! – he went to the top of the polls. So many people (lots of them young) started signing up to join the Labour Party that the Tony Blair wing of the party is trying to stop new people from being allowed to join! What’s being called “feeling the Bern,” and the establishment reaction, is not just a U.S. phenomenon.

On one level, at least, Bernie Sanders has already won. Fixing our country’s problems is not just about electing a president. Billionaire money has taken over many statehouses – where they gerrymander the districts to keep themselves in power. Sanders likes to say that there are two primary sources of power, “organized people and organized money,” and that when people across lines of race, gender, class, nationality, and sexual orientation reject right-wing wedge politics and come together, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish.”

Irrespective of the results of the primaries, We the People need to take it from here.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF. Sign up here for the CAF daily summary and/or for the Progress Breakfast.

The Wild Ride Gets Wilder – Only Government Spending Can Fix This

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The world is out of balance. Everyone’s nervous. There is a glut of money floating around the world and no one offers a “safe place” to put it. The stock market is way up, way down, way up, way down – sometimes all on the same day. China’s currency is having dramatic swings while the U.S. has an enormous, humongous trade deficit.

Super-wealthy people are making and losing hundreds of millions (sometimes billions) in a day – none of it on making or doing actual things that matter. Inequality is soaring. (The top 25 hedge fund managers earn more than all kindergarten teachers in the U.S. combined.) And all around the world, there’s very little actual economic growth.

Meanwhile, most people barely (or don’t) have enough to get by.

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The Democrat/Republican Divide On Social Security

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The differences between Democratic presidential candidates and most Republican candidates on Social Security — and retirement security in general — could emerge as a “sleeper issue” in the 2016 campaign.

Friday’s post, Martin O’Malley Offers Strong Plan To Expand Retirement Security, looked at the retirement crisis facing aging Americans and Democratic presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders’ plans to boost retirement security. (Hillary Clinton has not released plan beyond saying she would be open to raising the income cap on Social Security taxes to help shore up the program’s finance.)

These candidates want to expand retirement security because Democrats generally have a “we are all in this together” and “it takes a village” approach to taking care of each other, which includes the elderly. Republicans have a very different “each of us on our own” approach to society. This applies to retirement security with Republicans largely believing that retirement income and even to a large extent healthcare should be more, or even entirely, up to the individual.

Most current Republican presidential candidates, with the notable exception of Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee, follow this “on your own” philosophy, offering plans to raise the retirement age, raise the early retirement age, means-test benefits, cut benefits, partially privatize it with some of the money going into Wall Street-managed personal accounts or just privatize the program entirely with all of it going into Wall Street-managed personal accounts. (Note that God/Mother Turtle likes to weigh in with coincident stock-market drops when Republicans start discussing putting Social Security into stock. The stock market dropped 1000 points last week, and has fallen more than 10% recently.)

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Trump: Don’t Make Corporations Pay Their Taxes

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Republican economics has been stated a thousand ways by a thousand (always paid) voices. But the basic idea behind all the schemes has been hard to pin down. Finally Republican front-runner Donald Trump has spelled it out in a way anyone can understand.

Thursday’s Progressive Breakfast (you should subscribe, it’s free, it’s really good) contains a story in which Trump clearly articulates the Republican/Billionaire/Wall Street case for a low-or-zero tax on corporate profits: “because they don’t want to pay the tax.”

Trump Sides With Multinationals
Donald Trump backs repatriation in Time interview: “Pfizer is talking about moving to Ireland. Or someplace else … Do you know how big that is? It would wipe out New Jersey … They have $2.5 trillion sitting out of the country that they can’t get back because they don’t want to pay the tax. Nor would I … We should let them back in. Everybody. Even if you paid nothing it would be a good deal. Because they’ll take that money then and use it for other things. But they’ll pay something. Ten percent, they’ll pay something.”

There it is in a nutshell. The Republican case for low or no taxes: “because they don’t want to pay the tax.”

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Bernie Sanders Proposes To Boost Worker-Ownership Of Companies

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Businesses are run for a profit that goes into the pockets of the business’ “investors.” To be an investor requires that you have money. This is a rigged system that by definition channels the returns and gains of our economy to the people who have money in the first place.

That system forces a terrible business model: investors try to squeeze money out of businesses as fast as they can. Then they move on. People who put the money in have even more money, but leave behind them a trail of squeezed-out ruin. This squeezing of the business involves squeezing the workers, squeezing the product, squeezing the customers and squeezing the government out of any taxes that might be owed.

This is bad for America’s long-term economy, people, environment and — since it brings about intense concentration of wealth — bad for our democracy, too. But hey, it’s great for a few already-wealthy people at the top.

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Support My Work Without Spending A Dime

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If you would like to support the work I do, here is a way to do that without spending a dime. Click here and vote for Institute for America’s Future, my employer.

When you get there, choose the following:

Institute for America’s Future
Institute for America’s Future develops an economic agenda and message to promote economic populism in the United States, fighting austerity and economic inequality while organizing to protect Social Security and rein in Wall Street.

Once more: Click here and vote for Institute for America’s Future, my employer.

Windows 10 Doesn’t Work

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Here are my experiences with Windows 10 so far.

1) After a few days it started saying it wasn’t “activated. Some of the things you can usually do stopped working, like personalization. There was nothing I could do. I managed to find a phone number (!), Microsoft support told me I have to reinstall the Windows 7 that came with the computer (not 8) and then update to 10 again. Of course this involves first backing up all my files, and then finding the CDs and reinstalling all my apps, etc. (Note that the place where it says you can revert back to Windows 8 did not work even though it has been less than a month.)

2) Skype doesn’t work. At first it just wouldn’t quit no matter what without a restart. After a while it started not opening much of the time. Then crashing on opening. I could get it to work one out of 4 tries. But then it started crashing during calls.

3) OneDrive decided it isn’t installed anymore, keeps saying install me, won’t install.

4) Here’s the big one. All of a sudden all of my files are “read only.” They can’t be changed back. So I can’t run things like Quicken at all.

5) And now Windows itself just crashes spontaneously, even if the only thing I’m using is Solitaire.

Good thing I have been switching over to a Chromebook. But all my files, Skype and Quicken…

Note – post updated to add the part about Onedrive.

Virtually Speaking Today 6PT/9ET

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Click here to listen live or later.

Presidential primary campaigns and authenticity; policing America. Sara Robinson and Dave Johnson discuss the absence of coverage of mainstream policy alternatives that are both effective public policy and poll very well, the contrast between the marginalization of the Sanders campaign, and impediments that the symbiotic relationships between cops and prosecutors create cops commit violent crime.

The 2015 Virtually Speaking Media Panel: Andrew Jerrell Jones, Avedon Carol, Charles Lenchner, Cliff Schecter, David Dayen, Dave Johnson, David Waldman, digby, Gaius Publius, Isaiah Poole, Joan McCarter, Marcy Wheeler, RJ Eskow, Sara Robinson, Spocko, Stuart Zechman, Susan Madrak

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/virtuallyspeaking/2015/08/16/sara-robinson-dave-johnson-vs-sundays

Are Unions An ‘Us’ Or A ‘Them’?

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Divide and conquer works. When you face a strong enemy it’s always a good strategy to find ways to break them apart into smaller units that can be fought separately. A state initiative to gut California’s public-employee pension and healthcare benefits is trying to do just that.

A well-funded campaign is underway (again) to take advantage of the state’s constitutional amendment initiative process, this time to place a proposition called the “Voter Empowerment Act of 2016” on the 2016 ballot. The initiative would require that voters approve any pension and health benefits in contracts for new teachers, nurses, police and other government employees as well as any pension enhancements for existing employees.

This initiative follows a pattern well-known to California public-interest advocates. Ballot initiatives must receive 585,407 signatures to qualify, and corporate/billionaire-funded initiatives hire paid signature gatherers to get this done. Then they launch a well-funded, deceit-filled campaign to scare voters.

Similar anti-pension campaign have been, are and will be underway in states and municipalities across the country.

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