Tag: Bernie Sanders

Media Silent As Sanders Overtakes Trump In Every Major Poll

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Source:Occupydemocrats.com

Author: Steven Bernstein

Emphasis Mine

We are all aware of the constant Republican whining about “mainstream liberal media bias,” especially after last week’s outpouring of crocodile tears about the “gotcha questions” from debate moderators at CNBC. The candidates showed outrageous rancor against CNBC’s moderators and with the complicit assistance from the mainstream media sucessfully framed this as a story about the candidate-moderator relationship rather than the candidates’ inability to respond to the debate questions themselves. It is beginning to appear that the issue isn’t a “liberal” or “conservative” bias, but rather an establishment bias – consider, for instance that Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) has quietly lead Donald Trump in a presidential match in almost every recent poll with nary a word from the media.

In fact, according to RealClear Politics, in a general election: Sanders vs. Trump, Sanders is up by 9 points over Trump, 50 percent to 41 percent in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from October 29. In another recent poll from CNN/ORC, Sanders also leads Trump by 9 points, 53 percent to 44 percent. In last week’s Quinnipiac poll, Sanders leads Trump by 2 points, 46 percent to 44 percent. And in the summary averages from RealClear Politics as of Wednesday morning, Sanders leads Trump by 3.2 points.

Writing for the Hill, Brent Budowsky points out that these polls – absent any media coverage of a potential landslide victory for Sanders trouncing Trump in a head-to-head match-up – should let us “dismiss the myth of liberal media.” These polls suggest that a Sanders victory is highly plausible, and the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is hardly a liberal publication, but as Budowsky brilliantly puts it: “when America’s premier journal of capitalism releases a poll showing the democratic socialist candidate defeating by a landslide margin the capitalist who dominates television news, methinks it is liberals, not conservatives, who have the better argument against bias!” 

In his four decades since entering politics in the 1970’s, Sanders has remained consistent to his original views on Wall Street and the banks, poverty, the environment, women’s rights, income disparities, the plight of the working class, and his ideas about the corporate media. He believes that the media “tends to trivialize the important issues…They want to cover campaign fights, not campaign debates…They over-rely on entertaining soundbites. Their news agenda is about generating profits, not producing quality journalism that will educate the voters.” It should be of no surprise that the media is threatened by Sanders and his ideas – trying to educate and empower folks to take-back control of their government. Why would the media report on polls that show the real possibility of a President Sanders?

See:http://www.occupydemocrats.com/media-silent-as-sanders-overtakes-trump-in-every-major-poll/

The Bernie Effect Puts Corporate Greed Center Stage at Dem Debate, and Hillary Holds Her Own

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Steve Rosenfelt

Emphasis Mine

The Democratic Party’s first presidential debate of its 2016 candidates showed the country that the party has stronger candidates and a clearer common agenda than many people may have expected after a summer dominated by the antics of angry Republicans.

Despite what individual candidates may claim, there was not a clear winner. Bernie Sanders, after a nervous start in his first nationally televised debate, found his footing and demonstrated how he fundamentally has reshaped the Democratic Party, pushing all the candidates to embrace his strong views about income inequality and the need for dramatic responses to capitalistic excess. There has not been a presidential debate in recent memory with such a detailed economic discussion and the need for remedies that would boost wages, workplace benefits, healthcare and other pocketbook concerns. All the candidates supported a federal family leave law for mothers of newborns, for example. And all agreed that wealthy Americans should foot the bill.

Hillary Clinton also demonstrated why she is the front-runner and likely to remain so. Where Sanders was passionate and emphatic, she was poised and forcefully pushed policy specifics that she said could be enacted and make a difference. She firmly rejected the moderator’s characterizations that she took politically expedient positions and said she was proud to be a “progressive” who “wants to get things done.” On a string of issues, she was not a centrist Democrat in the mold of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, saying, for example that she supported stronger gun controls, criminal justice reform, comprehensive immigration reform, medical marijuana and opposed the latest international trade agreement.

The other three candidates were largely asterisks to the Sanders-Clinton interchange. Ex-Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chaffee, ex-Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, and ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley sought to distinguish their records and values—with O’Malley giving the most detailed prescriptions. But in most instances their comments lingered in the debate’s shadows, with the exception of O’Malley’s closing remarks where he said that unlike the two previous Republican presidential debates, no candidate denigrated women, made racist statements about immigrants or spoke ill of the other candidates.

There were important differences, however, between the positions taken by Sanders and Clinton on a half-dozen issues, which illustrates both how much Sanders has pushed the Democratic Party to the left—and how Clinton has staked out saavy positions that may sound more progressive to Sanders backers than would prove to be the case if elected. Without Sanders’ presence in the race, it is doubtful that Wall Street’s excesses, which is shorthand for where and how wealth is accumulated but not shared, would be targeted for reforms by all the candidates.

For example, Sanders wanted to increase Social Security retirement benefits and would pay for that by removing a cap that only taxes the first $118,000 of income. Clinton said that she would raise payments for impoverished seniors, especially women. Sanders said he favored a Nevada ballot measure legalizing recreational marijuana, while Clinton said she only favored legalizing medical marijuana. Sanders wants tuition at public colleges and universities to be free, saying he would pay for that with a Wall Street financial transaction tax. Clinton said that she would like free tuition too, but would include a weekly 10-hour work requirement. Only on gun control was Clinton to the left of Sanders, who did a poor job of responding to her attack on his stance—where he has opposed militarized weapons but supported hunters’ rights.

On the crucial issue of reigning in Wall Street’s excessive greed, Sanders said that he would break up the biggest banks and restore the Depression Era Glass-Steagall Act, which barred commercial banks from investing in speculative financial deals. Clinton said that she would not restore Glass-Steagall but instead spoke of regulating speculators and risky investments, jailing executives who break the law, and looking for the emerging threats posed by non-traditional firms. Sanders replied that she was “niave” if she thought Wall Street would do the right thing because a president was pressuring them.

Nonetheless, these stances by Clinton are shrewd, in so far as they show that she agrees with most of what Sanders is saying is the problem, but her solutions—while clearly left of center—aren’t as threatening to their targets and sound more moderate. While Democrats may be wringing their hands over these differences, saying that they represent a gulf between systemic and incremental reform, it’s noteworthy that there’s almost no crossover or common ground with the Republican candidates, with the exception of saying criminal justice reform for non-violent crimes was needed.

On matters of war and peace, while the candidates had some differences—all were opposed to the kind of adventuristic foreign policy of the Bush Administration, which launched a war of choice in Iraq and ignited chaos in the region that continues. They did not want to send ground troops into Syria, nor did any of them believe that Russia’s Putin was trustworthy. They praised President Obama’s restraint for what Sanders termed a “quagmire within a quagmire.”

The candidates, especially Sanders and Webb, said that none of their progressive agenda items would become a reality unless there were changes to the current campaign finance system, where several hundred of the wealthiest Americans are bankrolling most of the presidential campaigns and congressional contests. While Webb pointedly told Sanders that his grassroots “revolution” was not going to happen, Sanders repeatedly said that a record high voter turnout and public protests would force Congress to respond.

Stepping back from the debate stage, it was a good night for all the Democrats. Nobody made any mistakes. All the candidates gave strong presentations of their positions, even if Sanders got off to a somewhat tense start and Clinton showed right off the bat that she was comfortable on the stage. There were even moments of levity, such as when Sanders told the audience and country that everyone was tired of hearing about Clinton’s private e-mail server when she was the Secretary of State—for which she thanked him. And Sanders, unlike any of the other candidates, mentioned the name of African-Americans killed by police in an answer that strongly supported the Black Lives Matter movement.

Another big takeaway is that this debate will probably prompt Vice President Joe Biden to recconsider his presidential ambitions. With Sanders setting the domestic agenda and Clinton embracing much of what he says, but presenting it in a smoother way that likely to have greater appeal across the country—outside its liberal epicenters—there seems to be no void that a Biden candidacy could fill. if anything, Clinton is running to defend Obama’s record and legacy, while Sanders is running to take it to a new orbit, where federal safety net programs would be expanded to assist working- and middle-class Americans.

As the candidates continue to campaign in coming weeks, it clearly helps Clinton that Sanders is a strong campaigner and revving up the Democratic base. If she continues to be the front runner, she will have to find ways to bring Bernie’s base into her fold. That will be worth watching. In the meantime, Sanders has made a career of confounding expectations and has the stamina of a long-distance runner. The contest for the 2016 Democratic nomination isn’t over by any means, but it’s getting more compelling.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s retirement crisis, democracy and voting rights, and campaigns and elections. He is the author of “Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting” (AlterNet Books, 2008).

 

see: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-effect-puts-corporate-greed-center-stage-dem-debate-and-hillary-holds-her-own?akid=13573.123424.VMHO9O&rd=1&src=newsletter1044031&t=2

Bernie Sanders Is Ayn Rand’s Worst Nightmare: He’s Changing How We View Socialism — and Exposing Free Market Parasites

Conservatives have long wielded ‘socialism’ as a pejorative — but Sanders owns it and is transforming politics.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Conor Lynch

Emphasis Mine

Since Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., launched his campaign for president this spring, he has gone from being a fringe candidate of the left to a serious challenger of Hillary Clinton, who has long been considered a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. When Sanders started gaining traction at the beginning of the summer, most shrugged him off as the new Ralph Nader, or even the Ron Paul of the left, an insurgent who would attract a dedicated but slim following.

Today, these comparisons are looking less accurate, and Sanders is no longer a fringe candidate. Last week, the Sanders campaign released its fundraising results for the third quarter of 2015, and not only did it nearly match Clinton’s third quarter results in cash, but broke the fundraising record in small donations. Indeed, the Sanders campaign has reached one million individual donations faster than both of President Obama’s historic campaigns (in 2008, Obama didn’t reach one million until February).

As one would expect, as Sanders has surged, the American right (and center) have gone from ignoring him to attacking him, and the barbs have been predictable indeed. The most common sound something like this: “Socialism has already been tried and it failed,” “There is no free stuff,” “He wants to steal from the job-creators.” Of course, these are familiar attacks that have long wielded against the Democrats, but with a man who does not shun the “socialist” label, they have become even sharper.

First things first: The word “socialism” has become so freely used by the right that it has all but lost the meaning that it once possessed. Since even before the Cold War, the word socialism has been a pejorative in America. When people on the right say, “Socialism has already been tried,” they are by and large thinking of 20th-century communism in the East, i.e., a totalitarian state with a centrally planned economy. If this were the sole definition of socialism, then these anti-socialists would be entirely correct. When considering 20th century communism, it is clear that centrally planned economies without markets do not work in the long run (and black markets become an inevitable feature). At this point in history, markets are necessary for human innovation and wealth creation. But as the economist (and communist, according to Bill O’Reilly) Robert Reich points out his his new book “Saving Capitalism,” the free market vs. government debate is mostly pointless. In order to have a functioning market, there need to be rules, and for rules of the market there needs to be government; the real debate should be whether those rules are working for everyone or just the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

The point is, “socialism” does not necessarily mean centrally planned economies, as most on the right believe. The original definition of socialism was something like this: the collective ownership of the means of production and distribution. In this sense, worker-owned businesses (i.e. worker co-ops) are very “socialistic,” and Sanders has appropriately put forth a plan to increase worker ownership. The word socialism can also mean “Social Democracy” — this is what best describes Bernie Sanders’s philosophy — which involves a market economy with socialistic programs. The most common example of this sort of economic system can be found in the Scandinavian countries, which have hardly “failed.” Indeed, Scandinavian countries have all been previously ranked among the highest in the world when it comes to “ease of doing business,” “global innovation,” and “prosperity.”

The second-most common claim on the right came from the sagging Rand Paul last month, when he said that “Bernie Sanders is offering you free stuff…but guess what, there is no free lunch.” This kind of assumption is not new, and can be traced back to Ronald Reagan and those infamous “welfare queens,” a sad dog-whistle that haunts us to this day. Of course, it’s not about “free stuff,” but fairness. Indeed, when some facts are introduced, this assumption is revealed as a myth that has long been used by the right wing to divide the middle class (particularly along racial lines). Rand Paul seems to be entirely ignorant (willfully, I’m sure) that it is not lazy unemployed people that strain Americas welfare system, but working class people who are not being paid livable wages by corporations. Indeed, this was exactly what was found in a recent study at the University of Berkley California. The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs — including Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit — flowed to working families and individuals with jobs. In some industries, about half the workforce relies on welfare.”

One of the most notorious of these corporations that doesn’t have to pay its workers living wages and is more or less receiving corporate welfare is McDonald’s. Indeed, if we are keeping with these right wing terms, McDonald’s is one enormous welfare queen. It has previously been estimated that fast-food workers, who are on average 29 years old, receive around $7 billion in public assistance, and McDonald’s even has a resource line (McResource) that assists workers in signing up for assistance programs (so it doesn’t have to pay livable wages). This is also true for other massive corporations like Walmart, which is notoriously low-paying and last year made nearly $16 billion in profit. It is always easier to go after the working class poor than massive corporations who make billions in profit and spend millions on lobbying.

Socialism is not about “free stuff,” but cracking down on these corporations that exploit their workers and then rely on the government to make sure they don’t starve. It is not about being lazy and slacking off, but about demanding a fair share and getting paid decently for one’s labor — it is yet another right wing fallacy that people get paid what they’re worth, and that only lazy people are poor. Socialism is about working people, not slackers. It is about fighting capitalist realities like the fact that the top 25 hedge fund managers in America make more money than all of the 157,800 kindergarten teachers combined. Are investors who produce no value really worth that much more than teachers?

Needless to say, the myths and attacks on Sanders and “socialism” will only grow more intense in the months to come. Republican politicians tend to agree with Ayn Rand when it comes to working people, i.e. that they are parasites (although they’d never say such a thing out loud). The Sanders campaign is changing how American people view “socialism,” and hopefully, he is also exposing the GOP as the anti-working class party that it truly is.

Conor Lynch is a writer and journalist living in New York City. His work has appeared on Salon, The Hill, AlterNet, and openDemocracy. Follow him onTwitter.

See:http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bernie-sanders-ayn-rands-worst-nightmare-hes-changing-how-we-view-socialism-and?akid=13560.123424.muLE0V&rd=1&src=newsletter1043763&t=8

Explaining the Republican Crazy Talk: You Don’t Need the Truth to Win in the GOP Primaries

Facts clearly don’t matter if you want to lead in the polls.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Marth Kaplan

Emphasis Mine

Did you make it through Sunday’s lunar eclipse OK?

When the moon turned blood red, I bet you didn’t shake spears at it or beat your dogs to make them bark, as the Incas did to scare away the jaguar that had swallowed the moon. I also bet you didn’t shoot off cannons or bang your pots and drums, as the Chinese did to frighten the dragon that had swallowed the moon. I’m pretty sure you didn’t offer your utensils, rice and weapons to the demon Dhanko, as India’s Munda tribesmen do, to bail the moon out of debtor’s prison, where Dhanko threw it for failing to repay his loan.  And it’s dollars to donuts you didn’t believe that the eclipse announced the end of the world, or buy Pastor John Hagee’s best-selling Four Blood Moons, let alone the Four Blood Moons Companion Study Guide and Journal (Includes Full-Color Foldout Timeline, $11.69 on Amazon).

The reason you didn’t swallow any of those stories is that you know the truth about a lunar eclipse: It happens because the earth comes between the sun and the moon. If truth can protect us from jaguars, dragons, demons and preachers, why can’t it protect us from presidential candidates whose cock-and-bull stories rank right up there with the Incas’ and the Mundas’?

Consider Carly Fiorina. She effortlessly reels off the benchmarks of her success as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, including doubling revenues. But HP’s revenues rose largely because of her disastrous acquisition of Compaq. What counts isn’t revenues, but net earnings, which dropped from $3.1 billion to $2.4 billion. What also counts is the stock price, which lost half of its value over the same period, while the stock price of its competitors, despite the dot-com bust, fell at half that rate (IBM), stayed flat (Dell) or rose (printer-maker Lexmark went up 30 percent).

How will voters decide whether Fiorina is fit for the presidency? It could hinge on if they decide she’s telling the truth about her HP tenure—or about a Planned Parenthood video she said she saw but which no one can produce, or about her Horatio Alger-like rise from secretary to CEO, a claim that the Washington Post’s fact-checker called “bogus.”

Facts turn out not to matter much in American politics. It’s as if the Dhanko myth were to have the same standing as an astronomer’s explanation of a lunar eclipse. Journalists can fact check Fiorina all they want, and political rivals can ding her from dawn to dusk. The public’s trust goes not to the best truth-teller but to the best storyteller. As Brad Whitworth, an 18-year HP veteran and former senior communications and marketing manager, told the Post, “Carly has never let facts get in the way of her being able to tell a story.” We don’t want a commander-in-chief. We want a narrator-in-chief.

(N.B.:See George Lakoff)

In the post-Reagan era, the grand narrative of the Republican Party is unfettered capitalism. Government is the villain. Business is the hero. In this epic there is no place for the misery caused by the deregulated financial sector, or for people who falter through no fault of their own. Tax cuts for the captains of capitalism and spending cuts for public goods like education and infrastructure have made the United States one of the most unequal countries in the world, but that fact gets no narrative traction. No matter how much money the fossil fuel industry spends on a sham counter-narrative that denies climate change, no matter how many thousands of percentage points some hedge fund bro jacks up the price of a life-saving drug, no matter how cravenly General Motors covered up defective and sometimes deadly ignition switches in 2 million vehicles, the story remains the same: Overreach by government regulators is the root of all evil.  

That’s the story Mitt Romney told. If he hadn’t been caught on video writing off 47 percent of the country as freeloading rabble addicted to government handouts, he might have become president. Instead, the Obama counter-narrative gained power. Its heroes are people of modest means who are still paying for the moral hazard of the billionaire class.  This is also the story that Bernie Sanders is telling to huge and enthusiastic crowds. Perhaps because of that, Hillary Clinton has been telling it, too, though her effectiveness as its messenger may be compromised by her dependence on Wall Street money.

This counter-narrative has the facts going for it. Practically every Paul Krugman column is a trove of economic evidence for it. But evidence doesn’t win elections. Is that any way to run a democracy? Jefferson said that the success of our system depends on an educated citizenry. The goal of education is critical thinking, but in one of the most critical decisions we make—the presidential vote—we defer to our inner cave-dweller, spellbound by the saga unfolding around the fire. Why do we accept the primacy of stories over facts?

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains that two systems govern our brains. One of them—System 1, the fast one—is emotional, comes from the gut and is ingenious at turning anything that happens into a pattern, a story. Slow-thinking System 2 is logical, resides in the prefrontal cortex, is wary of facile narratives. Fiorina’s HP fable is catnip to System 1.  Fact-checking is the job of System 2, and by the time it turns up for work, the race is over.

Couple that with the way a pluralistic democracy handles differences. In a secular, multicultural society, truth is just someone’s, or some group’s, point of view. Everything is relative. Under the surface, everything is political. Facts are just opinions backed by the power to enforce them. Objectivity is just oppression dressed up as science. You’ve got your fact-checkers; I’ve got mine.

You can spin Fiorina’s HP record one way, or you can spin it another. Was she a good CEO or a nightmare? It depends on whose tribe you ask, how many members it has and what story they tell—in other words, an election, not an analysis. But imagine putting the meaning of Sunday’s blood moon to a plebiscite. In some parts of the country, judging by the number of books he’s sold, Pastor Hagee’s apocalyptic account might win, beating the scientific explanation (and the odd write-in for a jaguar, dragon or demon).

Voting would of course be an absurd way to pick the truth from a barrel of balderdash. On the other hand, it bears a discomfiting resemblance to the way we pick presidents.    

Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com.

5 Amazing Ways Pope Francis Made Republicans Squirm Yesterday

In his speech to Congress, the pope made one thing very clear: Republicans aren’t acting very Christian.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Patricia Miller

Emphasis Mine

Despite all the talk that Pope Francis’ address to Congress wouldn’t be political or partisan, it turns out it was both. And, as I predicted here in Salon, it definitely leaned to one side of the aisle. In fact, if you were a conservative Republican, Thursday morning in the Congress was not your finest moment, as Pope Francis laid bare all the ways that the Republican agenda counters Catholic social teaching, from its harsh treatment of immigrants to its fossil fuel-burning disdain for the natural world.

And Francis’ call for politicians to work for the common good was an implicit rebuke to the do-nothing, obstructionist GOP agenda that’s in service to their corporatist, Chamber of Commerce overlords. “Your own responsibility as members of Congress is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation. …You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics,” he said.

Here are the five key moments in Francis’ speech that made conservatives squirm more than any others:

The shout-out to Dorothy Day.Francis commended four Americans in particular, whom he held up as examples of pursuing the common good: Abraham Lincoln, for his pursuit of liberty; Martin Luther King Jr., for his commitment to nonviolence and pluralism; Trappist monk Thomas Merton, for his commitment to dialogue and peace; and Dorothy Day, for her “social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed.”

None of them are exactly conservative, but Day in particular is noted as a radical social activist. She founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which took root during the Great Depression, and urged Catholics to form small, autonomous communities to lead simple lives devoted to the gospel and serving the poor. In addition to being a socialist, Day was outspoken in her support of pacifism and labor rights. “I think it was extraordinary that he cited her as one of the most important people in recent American history. This would be one of the very, very few times that somebody as radical as Dorothy Day was mentioned,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told the Washington Post.

The abortion switcheroo. In defiance of the specific guidance not to try to score political points by clapping at partisan applause lines in Francis’ speech, congressional conservatives leapt to their feet the moment Francis delivered the Vatican’s standard coded language about abortion, mentioning “our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.” Imagine their shock when he immediately followed that with, “This conviction had led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty.” Psych.

Catholic social teaching has long put opposition to the death penalty on the same plane as opposition to abortion, most famously with Chicago Archbishop Joseph Bernardin’s “seamless garment” doctrine, which held sway in the mid-1980s as progressive bishops reminded Catholics that opposition to the death penalty and nuclear war was just as important as abortion.

Calling arms deals “money drenched in blood.” Speaking of death, what about all those arms deals the Republicans are so fond of? Francis wanted to know who is selling the bad guys all these weapons and why: “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?” The answer, according to the pontiff, is “money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.” I’m sure the GOP and all the defense contractors who give them money will get right on that.

Reminding the GOP we’re all foreigners. As in his speech at the White House on Tuesday, Francis felt the need to once again remind those who are making intolerance toward immigrants their political stock-in-trade that they, like him, are likely the descendants of immigrant families. “[M]illions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom,” he said, adding, “We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants.”

Catholic social teaching reminds Catholics of their duty to “welcome the stranger.”

In one of the most moving passages of his speech, Francis said, “Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities.”

Confronting the climate naysayers. Francis made it clear that combating climate change, development and technology can coexist. He explicitly rebuked many conservative critics of his climate change encyclical “Laudato si,” who claim that he is anti-commerce and wants to stifle development or reduce the world to subsistence-level farming to stop climate change. “The right use of natural resources, the proper application of technology and the harnessing of the spirit of enterprise are essential elements of an economy which seeks to be modern, inclusive and sustainable,” he said, adding, “In this regard, I am confident that America’s outstanding academic and research institutions can make a vital contribution in the years ahead.”

On the plus for conservatives side, Francis did talk about the need for “the voice of faith to continue to be heard,” but in the case of this particular voice, conservatives probably wish he would just be quiet.

Patricia Miller is the author of “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church.” Her work on politics, sex and religion has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, Huffington Post, and Ms. Magazine.

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/5-amazing-ways-pope-francis-made-republicans-squirm-yesterday?akid=13519.123424.ixFPZ6&rd=1&src=newsletter1043006&t=10

The media’s big Bernie Sanders myth: Here’s how we build the coalition that shatters Clintonism, neoliberalism

Hillary-bots argue that Sanders only appeals to white Iowa & New Hampshire voters. Here’s how he proves that wrong

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Source:Salon.com

Author:Anis Shivani

Emphasis Mine

Bernie Sanders is showing swift-footedness in making all the moves necessary to not only establish but consolidate his new front-runner position in Iowa and New Hampshire. Some in the media may not yet have caught on to the way the momentum continues to shift, but eventually the reality will sink in.

There are three things Sanders needs to do—and has already started doing in a noticeable way—to move clearly and permanently ahead of Hillary Clinton at the national level: a) dramatic emphasis on minority outreach; b) expansion of his economic message to one of social harmony; and c) delegitimization of the negative populism pervasive in the Republican primary.

Already, Cornel West has given a rousing introduction to Sanders in South Carolina. Sanders has been trying to reach out to the Congressional Black Caucus, though not yet with much luck. They might as this message becomes clearer: Sanders is a much better deal for minorities of every stripe—from embattled African-Americans to Hispanics and Asians and others—because of what his policies of economic justice represent compared to the neoliberal repressiveness of Clinton and the establishment Democratic Party.

The Clintons talk a good game when it comes to African-Americans (Bill, after all, was supposed to be our first black president before the real first black president showed up) but the truth is that Clintonian neoliberalism really tightened the screws on African-Americans by legitimizing extreme income inequality as the normal course of things—smashing, in effect, the Democratic Party’s bargain with minorities since the New Deal.

The Clintons ended welfare as we knew it, for example, by delusionally hoping that technology-driven productivity would somehow make poverty cease to exist, or by expanding the surveillance, prosecution and incarceration capacities of the state, building on the war on drugs initiated by Ronald Reagan to impose a stark omnipotence much less forgiving of mistakes made by poor people. Rhetorically—and emptily—the Clintons may align themselves with African-Americans, and claim some sort of honorary status with that community, but their policies have been death—literal death on the streets—for African-Americans.

It is a myth created by the establishment media that Sanders’ appeal is limited to well-educated white coastal liberals, particularly males, and that he has a natural barrier to how far and deep his support can extend. The claim is that South Carolina—and then Nevada with its Hispanic population—will be the firewalls that will break Sanders’ momentum if he wins in mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire.

But the truth is that Sanders’ potential appeal to minorities is unlimited—unlike Clinton’s upper limits due to the nature of her past and present policies and her utter incapacity to enunciate anything real that resonates with people beyond recycled neoliberal micro-platitudes. Therefore, Sanders must go for broke in reaching out to African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians as their natural candidate, and in the process rewrite the whole script for how the Democratic Party courts voters. New, and unprecedented, promises must be made to shatter the silence around issues that neoliberal candidates have zero interest in highlighting.

Secondly, while it has so far been a necessary and indeed winning strategy for Sanders to emphasize a straightforward recital of agenda items—especially single-payer healthcare, free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage (outlined by Jonathan Tasini in “The Essential Bernie Sanders and his Vision for America“)—Sanders needs to open this up to a message of optimism that reaches well beyond the listing of economic policy items. Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn has already shown how to do this.

Of course, these need to continue being hammered into consciousness until they became accepted parts of liberal discourse again (as the necessary antidote to Reaganite social darwinism that we never got from the Democratic Party), but I’m sure that Sanders will also figure out a way to connect these policy prescriptions to a radically expansive vision of the good life, part of which must involve reimagining America as an honest and responsible citizen in the world community.

There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton—like Tony Blair in Britain—has always been utterly incapable of humor. It is not a character flaw, per se, as it wasn’t for Blair, but the fact that neoliberalism demands a pure administrative outlook, managing at the margins with faith in private enterprise as the only salvation, that simply does not allow any glimpse of humor—by which I really mean humanity—to peek through.

Young people everywhere are looking for this streak of humanity in an increasingly robotic, unforgiving, rules-based world. Perhaps Sanders, despite his age, or perhaps because of it, can tap into his bona fide countercultural heritage to establish new norms for millennial liberal discourse, making a rousing case for old-fashioned liberty based in economic justice.

This is the ideal Martin Luther King Jr. and other visionaries at the time were beginning to fashion when we got sidelined, for nearly half a century, by an entirely different vision—Nixonian and ruthless and divisive (Donald Trump is playing from the same script). Neoliberals, it should be noted, will continue to indulge in the false bromides of the culture wars when pressed to the wall; they remain immersed in this methodology of false attack and counterattack, rather than seeking the roots of liberty in economic fairness.

Finally, Trump has gifted almost the perfect platform for Sanders to work against: a dark populism rooted in xenophobia and protectionism, a Machiavellian worldview pitting true Americans versus the racially unacceptable other, setting the stage for Sanders’ authentic populism, rooted in participatory democracy, to make all the more sense. The contrast with Trump is one big reason why Sanders has had so much resonance.

Here, Sanders’ outreach, such as when he spoke at Liberty University and was introduced by Jerry Falwell Jr., is a longer-term investment, and it will be more difficult to gain traction with this voting constituency than with African-Americans and other minorities. But fascistic populism of the talk radio variety needs a strong counterweight, which neoliberalism for the past quarter-century, coinciding with the rise of the Clintons, has refused to provide.

See: http://www.salon.com/2015/09/20/the_medias_big_bernie_sanders_myth_heres_how_we_build_the_coalition_that_shatters_clintonism_neoliberalism/

How the Wall Street Journal’s Attempt to Take Down Bernie Sanders Backfired

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Tom Hartmann

Emphasis Mine

Bernie Sanders is leading Hillary Clinton in early primary states, and he’s gaining on her in national polls. Major media outlets are starting to treat Senator Sanders seriously, but not necessarily with complete honesty. Take for example Laura Meckler’s article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. It was provocatively titled “Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion.”

The article starts off by dismissing Sanders’s campaign as a long-shot, and then goes on to call his proposals “the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history.” 

“In all” Meckler writes, “he backs at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade… a sum that alarms conservatives and gives even many Democrats pause.”

That estimate may give conservatives and corporate Democrats pause, but the whole article should give any reader who can do simple arithmetic pause. One red flag is that the click-bait headline makes it seem like the piece is talking about a one- or maybe two-term estimate of what Bernie’s budgets might look like. Or even more extreme; that just getting his proposals off the ground would take $18 trillion.

But the reality is that we’re only looking at $1.8 trillion a year under Bernie’s sweeping proposals. But that’s just a little editorial sleight of hand to drive traffic to their site right? Well, not quite.

You see, the Wall Street Journal piece cited research by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And there was just one small problem with their interpretation of his research. They blatantly omitted his conclusion.

But in the age of information, major newspapers are rightfully under more scrutiny than ever. Professor Friedman saw the Wall Street Journal’s piece and responded in the Huffington Post with “An Open Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Its Bernie Sanders Hit Piece.”

He writes that the Journal wasn’t completely wrong: the program would involve spending $15 trillion over a decade. But they left out the key detail: it would actually save the country a total $5 trillion over those 10 years. We’d see those savings in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by decreasing the rate of medical inflation.

Because the simple fact is: We, as a people, are going to spend that $15 trillion on health care anyway. The difference is that under the current model, we pay that money to private insurance companies. And those private companies have much higher levels of administrative costs, fraud and general waste than Medicare does. Another difference is that the government would be negotiating drug prices, making drugs more affordable for everyone.

And who would see that $5 trillion in savings? Businesses for one. Along with state and local governments. Because they wouldn’t have to pay for their employees’ insurance — who’d be covered by Medicare for All.

And individuals, like you and me, wouldn’t have to worry about co-payments and deductibles. Or worse, finding that the “affordable plan” that we choose doesn’t cover a necessary procedure.

You see, as Bruh1 points out over at DailyKos, the Wall Street Journal presented government spending in a fundamentally dishonest way. Because what we spend can’t be separated from what we’d save by going with different policies.

Take Bruh1’s example of shopping for a car: “You don’t buy a car by saying ‘well it would cost me 10,000 here, but the same car would cost me 7,000 there, so the price tag on the 7,000 car is too expensive.’ You say ‘it saves me 3,000 to buy from the other guy.”

And that’s the point — it’s not $15 trillion that Bernie’s plan would cost the country, because we as a people will spend that amount, and more, on health-care costs anyway.

It’s $5 trillion that we the people will save with Bernie’s plan — and get back — by adopting an efficient and affordable single-payer health-care for all system. And that would be good for everyone, and the economy as a whole.

Unfortunately the Wall Street Journal’s analysis of Bernie’s proposals isn’t just another routine example of shoddy corporate journalism. It’s an example of how the corporate media tries to discredit and discard anyone who they can’t control. And that’s not just bad news for our political process. It’s also bad news for the Fourth Estate, which really should at least try to be honest in its critique of policy issues.

Thom Hartmann is an author and nationally syndicated daily talk show host. His newest book is “The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America — and What We Can Do to Stop It.“

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-wall-street-journals-attempt-take-down-bernie-sanders-backfired?akid=13505.123424.D73aju&rd=1&src=newsletter1042811&t=8

Sanders Rips Trump For ‘Using Racism’ To Blame Immigrants Instead Of Wall Street

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Source:Occupy Democrats

Author:Omar Rivero

Emphasis Mine

Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders takes aim at his rival across the aisle and calls out Donald Trump for his ham-fisted attempts to blame America’s economic problems on immigrants, when really it was wealthy tycoons like Trump who crippled the world’s economy with their high-risk gambling.

“You would think that an honest political discussion would say, “How do we address those issues?” But what certain candidates like Trump are trying to do is to say to Americans, “We have problems, do you know who the cause of the problems is? It’s all the immigrants.”

Well, to the best of my knowledge, undocumented people did not cause the greed and the illegal behavior on Wall Street, which destroyed this economy. To the best of my knowledge, undocumented people in this country did not cause the fact that we have not raised the minimum wage. … So what they are doing, are using, in this case, Latinos, as simply a whipping boy to deflect attention from the real issues facing America.

We can have a debate in this country about immigration reform, and people can have different points of view, but it is absolutely unacceptable for presidential candidates like Donald Trump to be using racism and demagoguery against a group of people. This is unacceptable. This is the year 2015, and I would have hoped that in this country we would have gone beyond this type of racism.”

Time and time again, Bernie Sanders refuses to stray from his laser-like focus on the important issues that matter to the American middle class. Every Republican presidential campaign is smoke and mirrors, distracting our attention from the real problems with divisive and utterly false social narratives, and we cannot let them pull the blinds over our eyes once again.

See:http://www.occupydemocrats.com/watch-sanders-rips-trump-for-using-racism-to-blame-immigrants-instead-of-wall-street/

 

Bernie Bias: The Mainstream Media Undermines Sanders at Every Turn

The pattern is to ignore, downplay and mischaracterize Sanders’ positions.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Rima Regas

Emphasis Mine

Who knew, when Bernie Sanders announced a run in the Democratic primary, that not only would he meet with hostility from his main opponent’s chief surrogates, but that the media would acquiesce and even collude to such a great degree?

When analyzing the quantity and content of the vast majority of what is said and written about Sanders, his campaign platform, and appearances, one finds a running theme across the so-called liberal media. The New York Times has been called out by more than one analyst, myself included, for its complete lack of serious coverage of Bernie Sanders.

Since joining the staff at the New York Times, Maggie Haberman has written about Sanders on fewer than a handful of occasions, while she has written about the other candidates in the race more often. While it is understandable that Hillary Clinton would be the subject of more numerous articles, it makes no sense for Martin O’Malley to have more articles written about him than Sanders, given the pecking order that emerged right from the start, yet that is what has transpired so far.

In articles that address various aspects of the Democratic side of the primary, Senator Sanders’ ability to succeed is always described in doubtful terms, even as Hillary Clinton’s troubles in the polls are being described. The New York Times has published fewer than a dozen pieces that are Sanders campaign-specific and each is problematic in the way he is portrayed. Most often, Sanders’ age and hair are highlighted, and the incorrect moniker “socialist” is applied. (Socialist and Democratic socialist are not interchangeable terms.)

While the age of a candidate might matter to some when thinking about a candidate’s experience or mental capacity, Bernie Sanders is 73, only six years older than Hillary Clinton. His mental capacity has never been a subject of contention. One can only conclude from the repetition of negative references, that writers are attempting to condition readers into thinking of Sanders as the “unkempt” elderly stereotype.

Most presidential candidates have been older than 60. Think of Ronald Reagan. The distance between 67 to 73, in human years, isn’t that significant from either the experiential or health standpoints. If anything, Sanders’ breakneck schedule, accounting for work in the Senate, crisscrossing the nation to hold rallies, and appearing on cable news shows demonstrates a high level of mental and physical energy.

The most harmful way anti-Sanders media bias has been manifested is by omission. In this respect, the New York Times is joined by the vast majority of the mainstream media in not typically reporting on Sanders, especially on policy. Overall there is  a version of a “wall of silence” built by the media when it comes to serious reporting and analysis of his policies; or when analyzing or reporting on the policies of his opponents, a failure to mention Sanders’ in contrast, especially when his is the more progressive position. This behavior hasn’t gone unnoticed by readers. You can see numerous complaints from readers about the Times organization’s bias toward Sanders. You see it in the New York Times comments section, on the Facebook pages and comments sections of all the major publications, and just about everywhere else. Readers complain about the lack of substantive coverage as well as the bias in what little is published. The Times’ Jason Horowitz’ piece, “Bernie Sanders Draws Big Crowds to His ‘Political Revolution” drew over 1600 comments, double what the most popular columns usually fetch, with most in protest over the obvious bias of the piece and the Times’ egregious lack of coverage of Bernie Sanders news.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign has centered around economic justice and his plans to reform banking, taxation, trade, stimulate the economy, promote manufacturing at home, and institute jobs programs. I’ve yet to see side-by side comparisons of the top two Democratic candidates’ prescriptions for the US economy. Most economists and economic writers chose to publish pieces on the Clinton economic plan before she gave her speech. Few wrote about it after, and with reason: The speech didn’t deliver much in the way of specifics, and was vague about policies that the voting public expects. Sanders’ version of an economic plan has yet to garner serious analysis and discussion. Both Clinton and Sanders base their economic prescriptions on economist Joseph Stiglitz’ most recent work, Rewrite The Rules. Paul Krugman has, on three occasions, talked up Hillary Clinton’s economic platform, specifically on wages, without so much as mentioning Sanders. Clinton favors a minimum wage of $15 per hour in New York City, and $12 an hour nationally. Sanders has called for the minimum wage to be raised to $15 an hour for everyone. The Times had reported, in May, that Stiglitz’ work would likely greatly influence Clinton’s platform. If it has, one wouldn’t know it, judging by subsequent writings.

Plan for Racial Justice

While news outlets were reporting on the disruptions of Sanders by the Black Lives Matter movement, few followed up on the story as Sanders began to respond positively. Sanders gave a major speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on July 27. It received very little attention from the press. And within a week, Sanders delivered his answer to Black Lives Matter, by way of a plan. The New York Times has yet to make mention of Sanders’plan for racial justice, link to the senator’s website, or publish it outright in an article. And the media has ignored the fact that the racial justice plan has received praise among a number of Black Lives Matter leaders, including activist Deray McKesson.

Clarence Page recently wrote about Sanders in an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune. He took a tack that many in the press now use: comparing and contrasting Sanders to Donald Trump. Given the kinds of controversy Trump has kicked up with his racial statements, and the treatment Sanders has received over his racial justice bona fides, it is no surprise that many of Sanders’ supporters are angry. Page begins his op-ed with: “The farther the left and right wings in politics move toward extremes, an old saying goes, the more they resemble each other.”

In any other context, that kind of contrast might have been fair, but not in a piece about Trump and Sanders. In his third paragraph, Page writes: “In recent days we have seen how both Trump, now a seasoned reality TV star, and Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, have faced sharp criticism within their separate political tribes for omitting or offending key constituencies.”

While it is true enough that Trump has been making racially offensive statements about all constituencies that aren’t key to his campaign, that same accusation does not apply to Bernie Sanders, who in stark contrast to his main opponent, has never, in 50 years of documented political activism and public office, uttered a racially offensive statement, or favored policies that are detrimental to minorities.

Page praises Sanders’ plan for racial justice, without any discussion of its points and then goes on to characterize the diversity of Sanders’ supporters: “But his impressively huge crowds have been even less diverse than his 95-percent-white home state of Vermont.” There’s not been a study or poll of the crowds at Sanders events. From what I could see of Sanders’ Los Angeles and New Orleans rallies, the crowds seemed to match the diversity of the locale. Of note is the fact that there hasn’t yet been a large-scale poll of the black community on its support of Sanders following the publication of his plan for racial justice.

Over a month after the publication of Sanders’ plan for racial justice, the media continues to portray him as someone who is racially wounded, when to begin with, that “problem” came into existence the day of the Netroots Nation disruption under the guise of eliciting needed policy from all candidates, even those who are considered friends. As the top Democratic candidate continues to owe such “needed policy,” Hillary Clinton continues to enjoy relative insulation from the perception of having any racial wounds, in spite of a record of promoting policies that have led to the very reasons for the birth of Black Lives Matter.

Over at Vox, coverage of Sanders by everyone but Ezra Klein has mostly been overtly negative. Dara Lind address a portion of the race issues in her interview of comedian Roderick Greer, who came up with the Twitter hashtag BernieSoBlack. But that piece contained much more than an explanation of some funny hashtag, and all of it was slanted in the direction of stripping Sanders of his civil rights achievements, even as the piece was titled to indicate Greer’s frustration at Sanders’ supporters. Attacking Sanders’ supporters and portraying them as racist or borderline racist has been a running theme in the press. Since his record on civil rights cannot be impeached and he has never committed a racial faux-pas, the only way to attack him on race is through his supporters, and that is how in piece after piece, Sanders’ record is being sullied.

The attacks on Sanders began with a curious refusal to give him any credit for taking part in the civil rights movement, and have been followed up by pieces designed to paint him as dispassionate about human rights and racial justice. Few are those who cite Sanders’ longstanding near-perfect rating by the NAACP and ACLU, or mention those, like Senator Cory Booker, who have spoken up in defense of Sanders’ lifelong record with the African-American community.

Since when don’t records matter?

Up until Bernie Sanders, a politician’s record has always been the measure by which evaluations are made. This is of particular import here because Sanders’ main opponent, Hillary Clinton, also has a very long record and it isn’t being scrutinized. When Clinton met with protesters in New Hampshire and she was confronted with policies of hers and Bill Clinton’s that have harmed the black community, little was made of it in the press. All chatter about Clinton’s behavior at that meeting has practically come to an end, and she has yet to publish her own policy proposals for racial justice.

Sanders has focused his tenure as a public official on economic justice. That doesn’t mean he paid no attention to racial justice. His stump speeches, with few exceptions, make mention of the racial disparities in our society. One example that comes to mind is Sanders’ appearance in front of the Council of La Raza, where he spent several minutes addressing racial disparities harming African Americans.

The characterization that Sanders’ position on solving the problems of racial injustice is through addressing economic inequality is patently false. Sanders has long been on record as saying that racial inequality is a separate problem that needs to be addressed in parallel. Almost to a voice, the U.S. mainstream press corps avoids any mention of that in order to cement the perception that Bernie Sanders isn’t serious about redressing America’s original sin.

At a time when economic and racial inequality are at their deepest, we are again at a similar moment in time as when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking out in favor of racial unity to fight poverty and inequality. In one of his last speeches, “The Three Evils of Society,” King described the conditions we find ourselves in today. His prescription came in the form of his Poor People’s Campaign, uniting the nation’s whites and blacks to fight for economic justice. It is painful to hear and read those who are intimately familiar with King’s speeches joining in the same behaviors as the rest of their colleagues in the media in praising Bernie Sanders and putting him down all at once, at times even using the very same Martin Luther King quotes included in Sanders’ plan for racial justice.

To Martin Luther King Jr., racial, educational and economic justice were always inexorably tied. To James Baldwin, racial, educational and economic justice were indivisible from each other. It takes a rare cynic who is well versed in the writings of Baldwin and King to use them as bludgeons against Sanders, all the while withholding salient facts from the public, so it can do its job as described in Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time:

“And here we are at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

In the absence of fair media coverage, how do we create the consciousness of the others? How do we achieve our country? How do we avoid repeating history?

Rima Regas is a Southern California-based writer and commentator with a passion for progressive politics, and social and economic justice. Her career has included stints as a congressional staffer, graphic designer, technical writer and editor. Follow her on Twitter @Rima_Regas and Blog#42

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-bias-mainstream-media-undermines-sanders-every-turn?akid=13436.123424.g8v1mY&rd=1&src=newsletter1041847&t=2

One Disturbing ‘Headline’ Speaks Volumes About Our Economy—and Helps Explain Sanders’ Rise

Bernie Sanders’ rise in popularity is due in large part to his willingness to speak the truth about the real economic struggles.

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Source: AlterNet             see also http://www.cardhub.com/edu/credit-card-debt-study/

Author: Stephen D

Emphasis Mine

You have all seen those click bait titles at the end of some article you’ve read, trying to grab your attention.  The one’s that begin “One weird trick …” have become both a joke and a cliche, and yet people still click through to the link.  Why?  Well, I finished reading an article on a sports site this morning, that was definite click bait material, but in a way that I found profoundly disturbing.  What was the title you ask?  Well here it is:

An Extremely Brilliant Way To Avoid Paying Interest
On Your Credit Card Balance

I’m not going to give you the link.  That isn’t the point.  What that click bait ad title implies, and not so subtlety, is that there are large numbers of people desperately struggling with a large amount of personal debt, whether debt incurred to pay for basic necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing, or debt incurred to pay off past debt back when they had a better job, or any job at all. Or people with large medical debts to pay off, because many do, despite the improvement in the cost of health insurance the ACA has helped bring about for many families, but sadly, not all. Or so many younger (and not so younger people know) with large amounts of student loan debt.

Not to mention the far more worrisome massive increase in personal credit card debt over the last year.

Credit card debt is ballooning, leaving American households with a net increase of $57.1 billion in new credit card debt in 2014, according to a new survey from CardHub. The credit card comparison site said it’s forecasting new credit card debt will rise 5 percent in 2015, reaching $60 billion this year.

While the increased spending could signal that Americans are feeling more sanguine about their prospects and the economy, it’s also a cause for concern given that most workers aren’t seeing the type of wage growth that would support that higher spending. The surge has left the average household credit card balance at almost $7,200, or not far from the $8,300 level that CardHub considers unsustainable. […]

While Americans are carrying more debt, their earnings are barely ahead of where they were a decade ago. Household earnings have increased only 2 percent during the past 10 years, The Pew Charitable Trusts said in a study issued last month.

How can this be happening, if the economy is showing a fall in the unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Well, that number comes from a survey, and the survey on the overall unemployment rate doesn’t account for the types of jobs being created in our stagnant economy, where since 2008, part-time jobs, compared to full time jobs, has grown at a faster rate that pre-recession figures.

Back in 2008, before the Wall Street collapse triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble and the over-reliance by the Banksters on selling derivatives to institutional investors based on securitized residential mortgages, jobs designated as full time positions for all employees 16 years old and older represented 83.1% of the economy before the crash.  Now they represent under 82%, with part time jobs rising from 16.9% of the economy to roughly 17.7%.  That may not seem like much, until you look at the cohort of people 28-54, the group in their prime earning years where the contrast is far starker:

 

As you can see from that chart, the rate of part-time jobs since 2008 has grown and despite recent improvements, still exceeds the rate at which full time positions are being created.  Now this isn’t a result of implementation of the ACA, as some on the right would like to claim.  It’s a clearly a hangover from the economic policies that led to the great Depression.

“With regard to Obamacare and part-time employment, the surge in part-time employment was triggered by the recession, not by the Affordable Care Act…” The statistics show that part time employment is not correlated to any increase in part-time jobs.  In fact part time positions are trending downward since the ACA was enacted and implemented.  Still, growth in low wage jobs, which are more often than not part-time positions, has accounted for roughly 2/5ths of all the new jobs created since “the labor market bottomed out in February, 2010.”

Every month the government heralds the falling unemployment rate as a sign of an improving economy.  However, besides the growth in part time work versus full time positions, what else do the BLS unemployment statistics tell us?  Or more importantly, what are our political leaders and mainstream media not telling you?

The most important thing they fail to say, or speak about in a sotto voce voice, is that a large number of the people who are jobless are not employed, and not counted as unemployed under the official statistics, because they have stopped looking for work. As of July 2015, the BLS estimates that 9.743 million people are not counted in the labor market, because they are not actively seeking work. These are people not counted in the unemployment statistics because, for whatever reason, they have been discouraged from seeking employment or have otherwise dropped out of the labor market.  Percentage wise, that is the lowest rate of participation in the labor force since 1977.

“We are definitely seeing recovery but the extent of it is not as much as you would think from the unemployment rate,” says Nick Bunker, policy analyst at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “There is this long decline of labor force participation due to a variety of factors, mostly demographics. Obviously the unemployment rate has dropped quite a bit the last two years, but that’s hard to look at as a pure indicator of labor market health like people did prior to the recession.”

There are a couple of factors at work that undermine the reliability of the unemployment rate. As the huge Baby Boomer generation ages, the labor force participation rate declines as they either retire or, in cases more extreme than Klein’s, cannot find work at all – even part-time work. This jobs report revealed a labor force participation rate of 62.6 percent, unchanged from last month, the lowest level since 1977.

So who has been talking about this issue consistently both before and after he joined  the race for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination for 2016?  Bernie Sanders, that’s who.

The truth is that real unemployment is not the 5.4 percent you read in newspapers. It is close to 11 percent if you include those workers

who have given up looking for jobs or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is over 17 percent and African-American youth unemployment is much higher than that. Today, shamefully, we have 45 million people living in poverty, many of whom are working at low-wage jobs. These are the people who struggle every day to find the money to feed their kids, to pay their electric bills and to put gas in the car to get to work. This campaign is about those people and our struggling middle class. It is about creating an economy that works for all, and not just the one percent.

Sanders’ rise in popularity is due in large part to his willingness to speak the truth to the American people about the real economic struggles they face, rather than present us with happy talk about how great the unemployment numbers are.  And that truth is that wages are stagnant for most people, there are far more people unemployed or marginally employed than the mainstream media wants to talk about, and as a result, personal household debt is once again on the rise.

You want to know what the one brilliant trick to not having to pay interest on your credit card balance?  Not having such high credit card balances in the first place. And that will require more jobs, and better, higher paying jobs.

And among all the major candidates, Sanders has been the one person most consistent in his focus on improving wage growth (such as his strong support for a $15 an hour minimum wage) and unions, and by creating real employment gains at home by reeling in the large multinational corporations who are sending jobs overseas as well as evading taxes by hiding their profits offshore, as well.

Is there any reason to doubt why Sanders’ popularity is surging despite lack of media coverage he receives compared to other candidates, especially the unparalleled attention given to the odious Donald Trump?

One man is selling himself as the savior of America.  The other is telling the truth about our so-called “economic recovery” that has left millions falling ever further behind, while also offering policies and detailed plans to solve the most pressing problems those people face, policies that offer real hope and change.

Is Sanders a great orator like President Obama?  No.  But maybe we don’t need great speeches right now.  Maybe we just need someone telling the truth about the oligarchic corporate takeover of our government and the real life misery that has created for the 99% of us who aren’t benefiting from corporate control of our government institutions, federal, state and local.  A person committed to effecting change that will benefit the lives of African Americans, White Americans, LGBT Americans, Latino Americans, Disabled Americans, working class and poor Americans, and every other American you can think of other than those few at the top who have been soaking up all the gains from our “recovering economy” while leaving the crumbs for the rest of us.

That’s my opinion, in any case, for what it is worth. Ps.  I am not affiliated in any way with the Sanders’ campaign.  I’m neither a volunteer nor have I made a financial donation to him.  But I’m thinking I should, and soon.

See:http://www.alternet.org/economy/one-disturbing-headline-speaks-volumes-about-our-economy-and-helps-explain-sanders-rise?akid=13422.123424.mYzeFH&rd=1&src=newsletter1041555&t=8