So Bernie, how you doing?

Jimmy Carter reveals he voted for Sanders.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/05/08/carter-i-voted-for-bernie...

Quote:

The vote participation might have been high for North American standards

Quote:

Compared to the U.S. the turnout was enormous

A rare moment of babble agreement!

But it's still interesting to wonder why anyone would be impressed at the turnout if the only way it looks big is to compare it to a different country instead of the same one. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/SenSanders/status/870044272246095872/video/1

..good discussion

Is a National Progressive Broad Front Possible?

Charles Lenchner of People For Bernie and Paul Jay discuss the Peoples Summit and what comes next

Report said that prosecutors "might" be looking into whether he pressured the bank.  Which in itself is not necessarily a violation of the law.  The only thing we know for sure is that his wife is being investigated.

He's out there speaking out on those issues almost everyday.  Maybe if the author wasn't more interested in shielding Russia, he would have found that out.

There is an interesting interview with Sanders about foreign policy on The Intercept. The conclusion:

Mehdi Hasan wrote:

Let’s be clear: On foreign policy, Sanders does not go as far in a left-wing direction as his old friend Noam Chomsky or even his U.K. counterpart Jeremy Corbyn. But his renewed interest in foreign policy and his willingness to break with the established consensus could be among his most radical acts yet.

“Where we’ve got to be radical,” Sanders tells me, “is to understand that we cannot continue with simply using military as a means of addressing foreign policy issues. Where we have got to be radical and forceful, in an unprecedented way, is to force debate and discussion on the causes of international conflict – and certainly, we have not been doing that, and we need more American leadership to do that.”

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/10/28/bernie-sanders-awed-by-canad...

Bernie visited some hosiptals in TO, where were you Horwath.  Liberals were all over the space.

"At Women’s College, Martin and Premier Kathleen Wynne showed Sanders the hospital’s Crossroads Clinic for refugees.

Patient Samira Nafe, a refugee who came to Canada in 2012 from Eritrea, told Sanders she had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.

“She’s getting treatment for free?” Sanders asked to nods of affirmation.

Dr. Meb Rashid, who runs the clinic, said Nafe’s experience shows the benefits of preventative care: “We were able to diagnose something before it became a problem.”

A good article on Sanders visiting Toronto on the subject of public healthcare and both praising the Canadian system and recognizing its shortcomings in terms of teeth, medication, mental health as well as covert privatisation (something his brother in the UK must also be piping up about):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/28/canadas-health-system-serv...

Oh, I thought that was a bit of grandstanding, didn't you? Not only does Sanders live a short trip southeast of Montréal, his older brother (good genes in that family...) lives in the UK and is a member of the Green Party there.

Unity Is a One-Way Street

Ever since the 2016 presidential primary, “unity” has been the watchword of Democratic Party politics. As soon as it became apparent that Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, establishment Democrats warned the party’s grassroots that the stakes were now too high for intraparty bickering. In that spirit, at the Democratic National Convention, a Unity and Reform Commission was established to help bridge the rift between the Sanders and Clinton wings of the party.

Yet, at its meeting last week in Las Vegas, the Democratic establishment, under the leadership of Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Tom Perez, demonstrated yet again that for all its vaunted talk about “unity,” it remains committed to relegating Berniecrats and other progressive Democrats to the margins.

quote:

Outlier Candidates

Perhaps even more importantly, the DNC’s powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee, which determines how party primaries are run, is now heavily weighted against the Sanders wing. It is the Rules and Bylaws Committee that will first consider the recommendations made by the Unity Reform Commission that has been meeting this year, prior to a vote on the recommendations by the whole DNC.

“Not a single person from the Bernie camp is in the new bylaws groups, but five people from the Clinton side are,” said Zogby in Vox.

Indeed, of the thirty names on the Rules and Bylaws Committee, eleven have worked for Clinton in the past, either as staffers or surrogates on her 2016 and 2008 campaigns. Among them is Jeff Berman, a former lobbyist for the Keystone pipeline who was being paid by Clinton’s campaign for work on delegate-counting strategy at the same time he himself was a superdelegate. Also included are veterans of Bill Clinton’s administration, such as Elaine Kamarck and longtime Clinton operative Harold Ickes.

Bernie Sanders Hits on Winning Message He Avoided in 2016   -   by David Swanson

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/15/bernie-sanders-hits-on-winning-m...

"...I hope that Sanders actually declares himself in favor of a serious transfer of resources from militarism to human and environmental needs. As soon as he does, I'll start advocating for all of us to work for his election. He can keep promoting the Russiagate nonsense that was primarily invented to distract from the story of the DNC cheating him. He can publicly commit to allowing the DNC to cheat him again. He can ask Saudi Arabia again to kill even more people. But if he comes out against the military budget, that's the big one. He will deserve the support he could have had last time."

Bernie Sanders is introducing bill to let workers unionize via card check, ban “right to work,” legalize secondary boycotts, & expand labor law definition of employee

https://twitter.com/josheidelson/status/994243591097802753

Et Tu, Bernie?   -   by Chris Hedges

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/et-tu-bernie-3/

"There are two versions of Bernie Sanders. There is the old Bernie Sanders, who mounted a quixotic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination as a democratic socialist who refused corporate cash and excoriated corporate Democrats.

And there is the new Bernie Sanders, who dutifully plays by the party's rules, courts billionaires, refused to speak out in support of the lawsuit brought against the DNC for rigging the primaries against him, and endorses Democratic candidates who espouse the economic and political positions he once denounced..."

Last night Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28 year old Bernie supporter, won a huge victory in the Democratic primary for the 14th congressional district of New York which encompasses parts of the Eastern Bronx and Northern Queens. She defeated 7 term incumbent Joe Crowley, who was considered a likely successor to Nancy Pelosi as leader of the Dems in the House. He out-raised and out-spent her by more than a factor of 10, yet she beat him 57.5% to 42.5%. What was her secret?

Are you kidding? This is an absolutely safe Dem seat. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will be Representative Ocasio-Cortez come next January, and you can take that to the bank.

I hope so too, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Establishment Dem Freakout Has Begun

https://twitter.com/RaniaKhalek/status/1012249486104485888

"Nancy Pelosi says socialism is not ascendant in the Democratic Party."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the leading Democrat on climate change

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning primary victory over powerful U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley in the working-class New York district stretching from the Bronx to Queens is likely to propel her avowedly left-wing platform into the Democratic mainstream as the 2018 midterm elections heat up.

But her detailed proposals to deal with climate change could prove among the most influential at a time when the Democrats have failed to rally around any policy that could feasibly reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically enough to make a difference.

Ocasio-Cortez outlined plans to transition the United States to a 100 per cent renewable energy system by 2035. It’s a goal hailed by environmentalists as the last best hope of staving off the most catastrophic effects of human-caused planetary warming, and it’s one already adopted by a coalition of mayors representing 42 per cent of U.S. electricity use and representing major cities such as Atlanta and St. Louis.

What sets Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal apart is her plan to meet the target by implementing what she called a “Green New Deal,” a federal plan to spur “the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs.” Though the slogan harks back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal program of infrastructure spending and labor reforms, she compared the program she envisions to the tens of billions of dollars spent on armaments manufacturing and the rebuilding of Europe after World War II.

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she told HuffPost by email last week. “We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”....

Michael Moriarity wrote:

progressive17 wrote:

Michael Moriarity wrote:

Are you kidding? This is an absolutely safe Dem seat. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will be Representative Ocasio-Cortez come next January, and you can take that to the bank.

Yes, an absolutely safe Democratic seat for an absolutely safe Democratic candidate. She is not in any respect a safe Democratic candidate.

In America, Libertarianism is Left, Objectivism is Centre, and Fascism is Right. Americans want a Night Watchman government, as that is what their constitution provides for.

There is no place for socialists on that kind of political spectrum. She will be outspent by the Republican Party 1000-1. The electorate will be programmed to see her as an enemy of Israel, which will affect her in a very traditional New York Democratic community. As she already used racial politics against white people in her primary competition, there are few white people who are going to vote for her. 

It would be like thinking the CPC-ML could win a seat anywhere.

This is an extremely warped view, from what appears to be an extremely warped speaker.

By attacking me personally I see that you have conceded the argument. Thank you Mr. Moriarty! Americans will not vote for socialism. Just as Canadians never do. The only way the NDP can get votes is to distinctly say they are not socialist. And you think America is more left wing than Canada?

Look at the miniscule turnout for the primary. As you said, the constituency is Democratic. Not socialist. Democratic is not socialist. They will squash her like a bug. Even the Democratic organization will help the Republicans to block her. She has not costed out her platform. And people know what that means, in the most tax-averse country in the world.

What the New York Primary Victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Means

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/28/pers-j28.html

"...The defeat of Crowley demonstrates the peoples hostility towards the Democratic Party establishment. Despite the repudiation of Crowley, however, the politics of Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA offer no way forward for the working class. There is not a hint of socialism in her program (the word itself does not appear on her website), and both the candidate and the DSA have sought to downplay their connection. Anyone who suggests that her victory marks a shift to the left by the Democratic Party should be told, in no uncertain terms: Curb your enthusiasm!

The DSA is not fighting for socialism but to strengthen the Democratic Party, one of the two main capitalist parties in the United States, which shares responsibility with the Republican Party for all the crimes committed by American imperialism around the world and against the working class at home..."

If anything, she will be used, as Bernie was, as a political sheepdog to lead and steer Democratic 'lefties' back into the straight and narrow.