Bernie will take away your healthcare plans - Union Leaders (Mulgrew, Randi) Need to Answer for Opposition to Medicare for All as layoffs and loss of health care mount

As even those with good health care plans are laid off and lose

them, there is a lot to answer for opposing and even mocking Bernie Sanders' single payer ideas that would have protected all those with much loved health plans (Not). As for how he would have paid for it -- where's your God now, Moses?

Remember those much loved health care plans union leaders were defending in their attacks on Bernie? Remember the "how will you pay for that?" arguments by anti-Bernie Dems and union leaders and even some of my friends? Bernie's answer was that in his plan it doesn't make a difference where you work and if fired or laid off or if changing jobs, you still were covered. As for how we would have paid for Single payer --- Triple LOL. Joe Biden's comments about expanding Obamacare are double, triple LOL. And how about paying for Corona virus treatment? And how about the insane world of profit in the healthcare industry which Bernie attacked at every opportunity.

Now we see a cone of silence with the only words that Bernie should drop out, not that he was so correct. And in the midst of this Biden says he still would veto a Single payer bill but Bernie is expected to drop out.

And also in the midst of this are attacks on Bernie supporters who might

not rush to Biden, people forgetting that the very reason Bernie attracted so many young people is precisely because of his medicare for all plan. So fagetaboutit - Like there is no burden on Biden to move in their direction - that this is only about Trump.

As for our own union leaders who defended the current system of health care, they may think UFT members are fairly well protected in terms of health care. Well let's think of the massive budget cuts and layoffs coming in the fall and how many UFT members will lose their much loved health plans whereas they would still be covered under Bernie programs.

Hey, you anti-Bernies - you have a lot of splainin to do.

Instead of calling for Bernie to drop out you should hide your faces in shame.

Listen - I do believe Bernie's rhetoric and refusal to vary his argument and be more nimble in his responses. His self-branding himself as a democratic socialist is not even accurate. I heard Noam Chomsky call him an Eisenhower era Republican and Chomsky asked "why would you use the word "socialist" in this country  when at most you are an FDR traditional Democrat?

Jacobin:

There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now

John Oliver Destroyed Every Argument against Medicare for All

The current system, as Oliver put it, is a “shit sandwich”, while “Medicare for all who want it” is “still a shit sandwich, only with avocado on it because the same shit still remains.”.... John Oliver

While this John Oliver video is great we still need a direct attack on the union arguments we see coming out of the UFT and the culinary workers in Nevada about "losing" their wonderful plans which were negotiated with employers which took a chunk out of our salaries in exchange.

And one of the sidelights - or lowlights - of the union attack on Bernie  was claiming they would lose their current plan while in presenting the more favorable - to them - Warren plan as "replacing" it. Subtle but not so subtle. I've seen Randi or her surrogates do attacks on Bernie (less preferable to them than Bloomberg - or Trump.

(Randi trashed Bernie supporters for their attacks -- I must recall some of the vicious Unity crap when we ran against Randi - like the 2007 red-baiting attack on Kit Wainer for being  - horrors - a socialist.)

You know what? I bet there is some level of benefit to the unions from private insurance plans - look at our own welfare fund administered by the UFT - and how much control that give the leadership. Do you think there's some patronage that would go away under Bernie's plan?

Imagine our unions using the fave argument of the charter industry which is attacking teachers, public schools and our unions - CHOICE.

As John Oliver says -- the American health care system gives you so many choices - on how to get fucked.

The point purposely left out with plans to give people a choice is that it maintains the massive health care private bureaucracy at enormous cost. Thus funding the private and public option is so enormous there is little chance for it to succeed - which is exactly the point of their attacks on single payer -- a hell of a lot of people no longer get to profit -- and I'm thinking that includes some very big institutionalized unions.

Don't forget how in recent contract negotiations we have to help the city save lots of money in our health plans - and there has been some erosion. So wow - what a hit that we no longer have to negotiate on health but ACTUALLY TALK ABOUT - SAY - REDUCING CLASS SIZE?

UPDATE: 

Under Assault: teaching in NYC

American healthcare — so many ways you can choose to get fucked - I was wondering when John Oliver would get around to explaining Medicare for All, and here he is

https://youtu.be/7Z2XRg3dy9k

Here is the Daily Kos report:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/16/1919769/-John-Oliver-DESTROYED-every-argument-against-M4A-tonight?detail=emaildkre

Darth Stateworker

I just finished watching Last Week Tonight, and in my opinion, tonight's main story about M4A should be required viewing for anyone on the subject.

Oliver, in his usual brilliant style, systematically destroyed every argument against M4A:

• Nobody knows what it will actually cost.  Anyone saying otherwise is full of shit.
• Most cost estimates come in at or below our nations current public and private sector combined health care spending, and even if it doesn’t end up that way, it’s worth it.
• The idea of “choice” is an illusion.  Most people have one choice:  Whatever their employer offers them.
• People often have no choice at all in emergencies but to go out-of-network — often even when they’ve gone out of their way to try to stay in network.
• Under M4A, every provider is in network.
• The “wait time” argument about other nations with nationalized healthcare that is currently a favorite of those opposed to M4A is basically bogus and based on non-emergency or elective procedures.
• People wait ridiculous amounts of time *now* because they simply cannot afford the co-pays and deductibles needed to be met to get said procedures.
• A system where people have to choose between one life saving medication or another due to cost is inherently unjust.
• Yes, people in the health care bureaucracy will need new jobs, but that can be handled and is part of the plans offered by both Sanders and Warren.
• The current system, as Oliver put it, is a “shit sandwich”, while “Medicare for all who want it” is “still a shit sandwich, only with avocado on it because the same shit still remains.”

And finally, the most succinct point:

• If you’re arguing against M4A, you’re arguing for all of the flaws and unfairness inherent in our current system and you need to own that.

 

Shocking: Ross Douthat makes The Case for Bernie - NYT

Bernie depends intensely on the young. But his polling also shows an interesting better-than-you-expect pattern, given stereotypes about his support. He does better-than-you-expect with minorities despite having struggled with them in 2016, with moderate voters and $100K-plus earners despite being famously left-wing, and with young women despite all the BernieBro business.

This pattern explains why, in early-state polling, Sanders shows the most strength in very different environments — leading Warren everywhere in the latest FiveThirtyEight average, beating Biden in Iowa and challenging him in more-diverse Nevada, matching Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire and leading him easily in South Carolina and California.... ... Ross Douthat, NY Times, The Case for Bernie.

I rarely agree with NY Times right wing columnist Ross Douthat, but this is a remarkably honest article which compared to the liberal media, actually delves into the Bernie demographic support and points out the irony of his least level of support coming from people over 65. Let me hazzard two theories as to why: First, the already have medicare but more importantly, baby boomers lived through the anti-communist cold war with all the propaganda and distortions about socialists.

If you are a wavering Democrat concerned about both party unity and ultimate electability, about exciting all the diverse factions of your base while also competing for the disaffected, both the relative breadth of Bernie’s primary coalition and his decent polling among non-voters and Obama-Trump voters are reasons to give him another look. That decent polling, I suspect, reflects a sense among voters drawn to populism that Bernie is different from not only the more centrist candidates — latecomers Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick especially, but Buttigieg as well — but also from his fellow left-winger, Warren, who has fully embraced the culture-war breadth of the new progressivism while Sanders remains, fundamentally, an economic-policy monomaniac.

The latter point is crucial - Bernie puts things in economic terms and downplays identity politics, which was a reason he struggled with Black people but seems to have found a better formula as he plays cross-race class politics - consistent working class identity unites people if done right. But he also gets support from the over 100G crowd. Interesting. And Douthat doesn't mention union support from certain quarters. He also doesn't get into a vast grassroots army out there that no other candidate can match.

In my personal discussions with people, even with right wing Trumpists on Thanksgiving, I find Bernie gets the least scorn and some kudos for fighting the system so consistently over decades. And note how he is second to Biden in getting black support.

Of course there is the hatred the Obama/Clinton wing along with the Dem Party pros seems to have for Bernie, the major obstacle to his nomination. Many of us think they'd rather see Trump than Bernie. And there are so many ideologues on the left, I can't see them going for a centrist even if Trump would win. So there is a standoff of sorts which really helps Trump. But then again, I think that no matter which Dem would win, the Republicans will still have enough power to wreck and blame any one of them - and if they regain control of the House - say in 2022, they will impeach whomever for wearing the wrong color suit.

Here is the article.

The Case for Bernie
The Democrats need a unifier. It could be the Vermont Socialist.

By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist

The Democratic Party needs a nominee, but right now it has a train wreck instead. The front-runner seems too old for the job and is poised to lose the first two primary season contests. The woman who was supposed to become the front-runner on the basis of her policy chops is sliding in the polls after thoroughly botching her health care strategy. The candidate rising in her place is a 37-year-old mayor of a tiny, not-obviously-thriving city.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/opinion/sunday/bernie-sanders.html

NY Times Pulls Race Card in Report on Charters While The Guardian Exposes Sham Astroturf Protests

Recently a crowd of protesters disrupted a speech by Elizabeth Warren. The activists might have seemed grassroots, but they weren’t... The Guardian, Billionaire-funded protest is rearing its head in America
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/27/billionare-funded-protests-america

But the NY Times (intentionally) fell for it as evidenced by this biased front page article in the Nov. 27, 2019 edition of the Times: Minority Voters Chafe as Democratic Candidates Abandon Charter Schools. 
The NYT doesn't raise the issue: Why is there a charter school industrial complex designed to make a lot of money for a lot of people using kids as a device.

[Addendum since publication - Ravitch on the same subject: Robert Kuttner (and I) Challenge the New York Times Slant on Charter Schools By dianeravitch November 29, 2019]

Contrast the reports from the Times and the Guardian:

NYT:

Outside the Atlanta studio where the candidates were assembling for Wednesday’s debate, more than 300 people chanted “Our children, our choice” to the drumbeats of a marching band from a KIPP school. The next day, black and Latino charter school parents shouted the same refrain at Ms. Warren as she tried to start a speech about race in Atlanta. .... Since 2016, public polling has shown a widening divide on charter schools between white Democrats and their black and Latino peers. White Democrats’ approval of charter schools dropped to 27 percent from 43 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to a poll conducted by Education Next, a journal based at Harvard that is generally supportive of charters. Black and Latino approval for the schools remained basically steady at about 47 percent for each group.

Hmmmm - does this mean the majority of parents of color do not approve and why is that downplayed - note how misleading the NYT headline is: Minority Voters Chafe as Democratic Candidates Abandon Charter Schools

I don't expect anything less from NYT reporter Eliza Shapiro who shows bias in her reporting since she was at Politico - When she moderated a debate on charters I attended with Carol Burris as one of the participants challenging charters, I saw clear evidence of bias so I never trust her ed reporting --- at times Trump is right about NYT fake news -- NYC education activists have known that for decades.

Guardian:

Last week, Elizabeth Warren went to Atlanta to give a major speech about issues of concern to black women. Her speech touched on knotty, existential topics such as the legacy of slavery, institutional racism, voter suppression, mass incarceration and reparations. But the next day’s headlines overwhelmingly focused on the fact that the speech was interrupted by a loud group of pro-charter school protesters.
We were supposed to be talking about challenging centuries of institutional racism, but now we’re talking about charter schools. How did that happen? If you suspect that some sort of nefarious action that can be traced back to plutocratic billionaires is involved – well, of course.

The protesters themselves were, by all accounts and appearances, a group of concerned people who passionately oppose Warren’s plan to bolster public education and crack down on the charter school industry. But they did not all materialize in the crowd together in matching shirts by chance. Their existence was orchestrated by pro-charter school groups that are funded by an array of billionaires, including Netflix founder Reed Hastings, art and philanthropy titan Eli Broad and, most prominently, the Walton Foundation, controlled by the staggeringly wealthy family that owns Walmart. Thus we are all forced to deal with the spectacle of classic tactics of grassroots protest being coopted and fueled by a tiny group of the very sort of people that such tactics were developed to target in the first place.

NYT: their [charters] waiting lists swelling into the hundreds of thousands. ​
What bullshit about waiting lists - charter propaganda. The reporters should ask to see these lists. We know there are empty charter seats in Eva schools here in NY.

And are there also massive waiting lists for some public schools?

Why White Parents Were at the Front of the Line for the School ...

https://www.nytimes.com › nyregion › beacon-high-school-admissions-nyc

Nov 15, 2019 - 

One more bit from the Guardian to highlight how easy the charter lobby can distract from real issues:

One of the emotional backbones of Warren’s speech was the story of the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike – a relatively little known incident in labor history that she was no doubt inspired to cite by the union leader Sara Nelson’s recent speech on the same topic in front of the Democratic Socialists of America convention. Yet what should be a shining example of radical ideas rising to mainstream prominence in a presidential campaign has been pushed to the bottom of most news stories in favor of the charter school ruckus. This points to the fact that astroturf campaigns don’t have to be very sophisticated, or even very secret; they just need to make enough noise to weasel their way into a 30-second TV hit to get the job done.

 Oh, and Howard Fuller is one of the biggest pieces of crap and indicative of the slime the charter industry attracts.

Read both articles in full below.

======

Billionaire-funded protest is rearing its head in America

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/27/billionare-funded-protests-america

The UFT, Biden, Bernie, Warren and Labor 4 Bernie

Biden's speech was meh and didn't elicit much enthusiasm ---- an audience member at Teacher Union Recognition Day, Oct. 20, 2019

We were clear that because Biden was available it no way means we are endorsing him. This in no way means we don’t

want others to come. As soon as we can get them here, we will. ... Leroy Barr at UFT Ex Bd

Right. Biden just happened to have a day free. When I saw that Joe Biden was going to address a thousand teachers (most of them from Unity Caucus) at Union Recognition Day, I felt that was clearly sending a message to the members. If the UFT had Bernie at an event like this I would be shocked. I believe the UFT/AFT would fundamentally sit the election out rather than support Bernie Sanders because of its long history of anti-leftism going back to its founding.

The AFT/UFT will be putting up some bogus "democratic" process, unlike last time when they endorsed Hillary before anyone could breathe and took some heat for it. I know how they operate. Randi will make the choice again and then work backwards to make it look democratic. 

Is there any doubt that Bernie has consistently been the most pro-union politician while the Democrats caved on union support for decades?

School Scope: The Debates: On Busing, Capitalism, and Socialism

Submitted to The WAVE for publication, July 5, 2019

School Scope:  The Debates: On Busing, Capitalism, and Socialism

By Norm Scott

The initial debates, while shallow in terms of drilling down, touched on a number of essential issues, at times raising more questions than answers. Headlines stressed the Biden/Harris confrontation on race and busing. I remember the contentious battles over busing back in the 60s and 70s and the consequential racial divides. Biden, as he often does, danced and obfuscated a bit by saying he opposed forced busing imposed by the federal government and we should leave it to the local communities. Harris pushed back about local communities run by people who are anti-segregation. We know there is a history of federal involvement in forcing integration in the schools from both parties – you know, when the Republicans were still a rational party – Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock and Kennedy to Alabama and Mississippi.

I found Harris’ raising the issue, while legitimate, somewhat artificial – especially when those tee-shirts of her as a little girl started appearing the next morning. I would like to have all candidates raise their hands if they support busing as a solution to segregation today. I wonder if Harris would have raised her hand. When Bernie was asked specifically about the issue on Sunday, he gave a rational response that we rarely see from politicians: Is it a good idea to put kids on buses takes them out of their neighborhood for up to an hour ride each way? It is a surface tool that should ideally only be used when absolutely necessary. Real solutions call for housing and economic reforms. By the way, look at the streets on school days and count the buses.

The debate also focused open attacks on Bernie for being a socialist, with loaded questions from the NBC panel  - the right always points to them as liberals but they are as opposed to socialist oriented ideas as is the right. Hickenlooper who apparently sees Bernie’s ideas as a real threat, never missed an opportunity to attack Bernie indirectly by talking about socialism. (The July 1 New Yorker has an article: John Hickenlooper’s War on Socialism.)

 I was disappointed in some of Bernie’s responses which were stock and repetitive, but he did hammer the point that many of our problems are due to outrageous profits on health care. Yes, he said we would raise taxes but at the same time cut the costs of health care which is also a tax of sorts. Get rid of insurance companies and the cost of their profit disappears. He pointed to our high costs compared to universal health care nations with much lower costs (see Germany).

Bernie’s policies align with social democratic parties in capitalist Europe, many of whom have run the governments at times. Not to be confused with Democratic Socialists (DSA) who are closer to traditional anti-capitalist ideologies. DSA is a broad socialist tent and the majority seem to believe that socialism can be achieved by democratic means. But there are also people who do not support liberal democratic norms, like a multi-party system. Confusion around these terms should be cleaned up

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, a voice representing a vision of left-leaning economic analysis, was often ignored – until the 2008 crash and the crisis it created within capitalism and its structure. He has a new book, People, Power, And Profits which makes a case not for socialism but for progressive capitalism, sort of where Elizabeth Warren is coming from. He argues that we don’t have really free markets, a faux bedrock of capitalism, but an economic system concentrated in the hands of the few who in turn exercise control over the political system, thus leading to an increasing economic gap which has spurred populism on the right and the left. I know revolutionary socialists who believe in overthrowing capitalism who are cheered by this news since they feel it is pretty much what Marx predicted would happen. What he didn’t predict was that the right populists could defeat the left, as it did in Germany under Hitler.

A closing note on free markets. Trump Dept of Ed. appointee Betsy DeVos’s has rolled back Obama-era regulations, intended to protect students against predatory for-profit colleges, which trap students into high debt they can never repay, guaranteed by the federal government which funnels money into their hands. People who ask when Bernie of Warren talk about free college how are we paying for it don’t ask the same question about those tax payer funded profits.

Norm blogs for no profit at ednotesonline.com.

Comment from a parent activist:

A good article on busing by Matthew Delmont. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/kamala-harris-and-busing-debate/593047/

"Buses had long been used in the South—as well as in New York, Boston, and many other northern cities—to maintain segregation. This form of transportation was not controversial for white parents. Put more starkly, school buses were fine for the majority of white families; busing was not."

Plenty of parents are willing to make their kids travel out of their neighborhood to attend G&T programs.  

 

-->

Bernie is right on charter schools - Carol Burris, Diane Ravitch

Bernie is right on charter schools

By Carol Burris  and Diane Ravitch

| New York Daily News |

Jun 07, 2019 | 10:55 AM

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks to the crowd during a rally at Central Piedmont Community College on the lawn of Overcash Center in Charlotte, N.C. on May 17. (David T. Foster III / Associated Press)

Late last month, 11 people connected to California charter schools were indicted on criminal charges of grand theft, conspiracy, personal use of public money and financial conflict of interest. According to the Washington Post, over $50 million in total was stolen; the L.A. Times reports that $8.18 million went into the bank accounts and charitable trusts of the charter management company’s leaders, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock. The pair allegedly inflated enrollment numbers and cheated the kids who attended the schools they used as piggy banks.

This story is far from unique. During the month of May alone, we identified more than 40 newspaper stories from across the country documenting charter mismanagement, failure and outright fraud.

There was the May 29 story of the Tennessee charter CEO who was running a side business out of his charter school while its teachers were not being paid. and the May 25 story about the former charter board member who is seeking to make a real-estate killing based on knowledge he gained while on the Monument, Colo., charter school board. There was the May 6 story of a former school board member in Milwaukee who was bribed by a Philadelphia-based charter school company to operate three schools in Wisconsin.

Charter corruption, which now occurs every day, was one of several reasons why the NAACP called for a moratorium on new charter schools. Yet these daily instances of mismanagement, failure and fraud have not been enough to persuade charter advocates to address the concerns of our nation’s most prominent civil rights organization.

It is equally inexplicable that when Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders publicly supported that moratorium, he was subjected to a racialized attack — not only by The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools but here in the Daily News. It is long past time to set the record straight.

The majority of black and Latino families choose public schools, even when charters are an available option. Charter schools drain funds from public schools, and for the kids who choose the local public school, they and their schools have less. Sanders’ plan includes a tripling of Title I funding, whose greatest beneficiaries would be disadvantaged kids, both in public schools and in charters.

For those students who are already enrolled in charters, Sanders does not call for their schools to be shut down. Rather he calls for a moratorium, a pause, on the opening of new charters until charter schools clean up their act.

He is right. The lack of transparency that leads to scandal and the ability to profit and self-deal does not promote innovation or serve the interests of children of color. When charter schools shut down (one third of all charters close in less than 10 years), students, who are more often than not disadvantaged, are left scrambling for a school. There is nothing progressive about showing up to school, sometimes mid-school-year, to find the doors are shuttered and locked. But that is the reality that some kids face.

Why don’t charter advocacy organizations like the Progressive Policy Institute call for charter reform? Perhaps they don’t want to offend the billionaires like the Walton family who fund charter schools.

The claim that for-profit charter schools, which Sanders’ plan would ban, are rare is flatly wrong. Nearly every state with charter schools allows for-profit management companies to run them. In the state of Florida, about 45% of all charter schools are run by for-profit management companies.

From real estate leases, to tax breaks, to exorbitant salaries, self-dealing and sweetheart deals, lots of folks have, like McManus and Schrock, figured out how to get rich off taxpayers and disadvantaged kids.

Unfortunately, the charter industry is now overrun with scoundrels profiteering from people of color. Thank you, Bernie Sanders, for standing up and being willing to expose the scams that the charter establishment refuses to acknowledge or fix.

Burris is the executive director of the Network for Public Education. She served as principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre for 15 years. Ravitch is president of the Network for Public Education and a research professor of the history of education at New York University. She is the author of numerous books on public education, including “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.”

AOC: Backlash from the Middle While Dem Neo-liberal Makes Case for Left

The policies [DeLong] supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift..... Bernie Sanders news: a Clinton-era Democrat makes the case for the left - VOX
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sanders-left-brad-delong

When a politician -- or, really, anyone -- becomes a star overnight, there's an inevitable backlash that grows in opposition to the rise. And less than three months into her first term in Congress, the AOC backlash has begun in earnest.

The spark came last week when, in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez warned colleagues that if they continued to vote with Republicans on procedural motions in the chamber they could wind up "on a list" of incumbents ripe for a liberal primary challenge.....The AOC backlash begins - CNNPolitics

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-democratic-party-ideology/index.html

Two interesting and contrasting articles.

I get so many great articles on the listserves. (By the way, MORE has killed most of its listserves or is moderating them to keep evil thoughts out of the hands of its members.) Abby, my buddy from Newark sends a great trove of stuff. Here are two articles from counter points of view.

First a neo-liberal, market-based Democrat makes some interesting points about why the left needs to take over the main theme of the party. Why? Because Dem neo-liberals like Obama and Clinton require some level of cooperation from the liberal wing of the other party - and that wing of the Republicans has been decimated.

And then the backlash from Democrats against AOC. And though I like a lot about her, I am finding it a bit too much at times. A long-time leftist friend of mine is convinced she is flying too close to the sun and ego will triumph and lead to crash and burn which will ultimately harm the movement. I can see it in some of the comments from liberal and left friends -- older women in many cases who are annoyed at what they see a level of arrogance.

People compare AOC and Bernie - Bernie doesn't attack people. He tries to win them over. The threats to primary people who are in areas where they are hanging by a thread is a threat to getting rid of Republicans. Even if the party tacks left, if it becomes a tea party type of party and pushes out center Dems, we will see a possible center new party -- neo-liberal with social justice themes -- sort of like the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s -- anti-slavery, pro-business.

I see a major difference between AOC and Bernie in their approach. Lumping them together is missing some level of differentiation.

Read both articles.

Bernie Sanders attacks 'greedy' Nissan for waging anti-union campaign - Where are Other Dems?

Vermont senator, writing in the Guardian, says: ‘The truth is Nissan is an all-too-familiar story of how greedy corporations divide and conquer working people’... The Guardian.

Where are the other Democrats? Most don't want to support unions even with a 10 foot pole.

Bernie Sanders has attacked Nissan for doing “everything it can” to stop workers from unionizing at its Mississippi plant despite making “obscene” profits.

Nissan dispute could go down as most vicious anti-union crusade in decades

Bernie Sanders

Read more

In an editorial for the Guardian, the former presidential hopeful weighs in as Nissan workers prepare to vote on joining the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
Echoing union officials and their supporters, Sanders says Nissan’s campaign “could go down as one of the most vicious, and illegal, anti-union crusades in decades”.
Nissan is being investigated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the independent US government agency responsible for enforcing US labor law, after warning workers they could lose wages and benefits if they back the union vote.
Other workers have been told they will receive increased benefits and pay if they vote against unionising. “Workers should never have to endure this type of threatening campaign or walk through a minefield just to vote for a union,” Sanders writes. “The truth is Nissan is an all-too-familiar story of how greedy corporations divide and conquer working people.”
The Nissan vote is the latest in a series of attempts by unions to grow membership in America’s south, where many manufacturers have moved to take advantage of low wages and non-union workforces. Unions have faced similarly hard-fought battles to gain recognition at plants run by Boeing and Volkswagen – and lost.
Sanders, the actor Danny Glover and leading labor officials have all campaigned in support of the UAW’s attempts to unionise the 800-strong plant.

Mississippi Nissan workers hope for historic win in 14-year fight to unionize

Read more

Nissan has union representation in 42 of 45 of its plants throughout the world, writes Sanders. “But the company does not want unions in the US south, because unions mean higher wages, safer working conditions, decent healthcare, and a secure retirement.
“Corporations like Nissan know that if they stop workers in Mississippi from forming a union, wages will continue to be abysmally low in this state.”
Sanders says Nissan made $6.6bn in profits last year and paid its chief executive officer, Carlos Ghosn, more than $9.5m last year.
“Those kinds of obscene profits are a direct result of corporations’ decades-long assault on workers and their unions,” he writes. “The American middle class, once the envy of the world, is disappearing while income and wealth inequality is soaring. We have got to turn that around.”

Bernie Sanders Nailed It On Identity Politics and Inequality, and the Media Completely Missed the Point

What makes the attacks on Sanders so disingenuous is that they are so clearly partisan and unprincipled. Contrast Sanders statements on class and race with Clinton’s.

Following up on my recent post of the NY Mag piece - What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About Identity Politics...  I'm still looking to post pieces on what is going on in the Democratic Party struggles. This article shows that the Sanders/Clinton battle is still being played out. I don't hold out much hope for the Dems moving in Bernie's direction given there are so few people we can name who would line up with him. The struggle will play out locally, not just nationally. Watch how things go here in NY state where Cuomo will try to play the left while being a centrist. The UFT will almost always play against the left. They were not only against Bernie due to Clinton but philosophically the UFT/AFT complex is always against using class and I believe they even charged MORE at some point with playing the class card.

In this piece Katie Halper also exposes how the media misinterpreted what Bernie was saying about identity politics, race, class and economics.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/12/bernie-sanders-nailed-it-on-identity-politics-and.html

Bernie Sanders Nailed It On Identity Politics and Inequality, and the Media Completely Missed the Point

By Katie Halper  |  December 7, 2016  |  9:43am

For over a year, critics within and around the established wing of the Democratic Party have painted Bernie Sanders as a misogynistic, racist, heteronormative, cis, male, pseudo-anti-establishment, actually-totally establishment politician motivated by a humongous ego and a desire to thwart progress and the election of the first female president in US history. And then there were the less moderate critics.

I kid, but only slightly.

And as we saw in a recent episode of anti-Sanders outrage, this narrative is still extant. On Sunday November 20, during a talk at Berklee College in Boston, Sanders said something nuanced about race, ethnicity, gender and class, and the same media that supported Clinton during the campaign distorted his remarks to fit this narrative.

Though the election is over, the battle over the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, which was personified and defined by Clinton v. Sanders, is in full swing. While Clinton and her supporters represent a centrist neoliberal wing of the party, Sanders and his supporters represent the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” as the late Senator Paul Wellstone put it. In fact, the fight for the DNC chair is part of this same struggle. Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), who had endorsed Sanders and whom Sanders appointed to the Democratic Platform committee, is seeking to be DNC chair. The ADL’s vicious and embarrassing smear campaign against him as being an anti-semite—which he’s not—demonstrates how much is at stake.

So, it makes sense that the official Clinton campaign, as well as the David Brock run smear PR empire, continues to push the narrative which they worked so hard to develop and embed during the campaign to delegitimize Sanders and his critiques.

According to this narrative, Clinton and her supporters understand the unique but overlapping challenges faced by women, LGBT, people of color and immigrants. This tendency, to see the intersections of issues of class and race and gender and etc. is called “intersectionality,” a term and concept developed by Kimberle Crenshaw. Sanders, they argue, is a single issue candidate, a vulgar class reductionist, only interested in fighting for the interests of the white working class.

The problem is, for many of the so called intersectionalists who support Clinton and reject Sanders, intersectionality and identity politics include everything except for class. They are so tone deaf about class that they hear the “working class” as a white monolith, as if working class people of color or LGBT people or immigrants don’t exist. Yes, Sanders has spoken about the unique challenges of reaching the white working class, something that would make sense to any intersectionalist who thinks that white supremacy is a real thing. But his use of the word white in this specific context is just more proof that his use of working class without “white,” includes people of all backgrounds. Sanders; critique of inequality, and his attack on the one percent, is one that champions the rights of people from all backgrounds. At the same time, Sanders acknowledges the singular struggles and double (or triple, or quadruple) burdens faced by different people, and how the economic inequality is compounded by racism and sexism. For example, the NAACP gives him a rating of 97% on his positions on affirmative action. They give Clinton a rating of 96%.

What Sanders Actually Said
Let’s look at what Sanders said that got him in so much trouble. After his Nov. 20 talk, the moderator opened the Q&A by reading one of the audience questions. Rebecca, who considers Sanders and Elizabeth Warren her heros, had written, “I want to be the second Latina senator in U.S. history. Any tips?”

Sanders responded:

“It goes without saying that as we fight to end all forms of discrimination, as we fight to bring more and more women into the political process, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans — all of that is enormously important, and count me in as somebody who wants to see that happen.”

What Sanders was clearly saying, and actually did say, is that discrimination is real and a problem, that diversity and representation of underrepresented people is “enormously important,” and something he “wants to see…happen.”

He went even further than that, though, saying:

“Right now, we’ve made some progress in getting women into politics — I think we got 20 women in the Senate now. We need 50 women in the Senate. We need more African Americans.”

Not only is diversity critical but there is still more work to be done. There has been some improvement but not enough.

But then he uses the “but” word:

“But it’s not good enough to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country, and is going to take on big money interests.”

Okay, so what does his “but” do? Here, it does not contradict but complicates. It builds on his other statements about diversity in government. Diversity is absolutely necessary but it’s not sufficient. We have to know where those candidates stand in terms representing the people’s interests, not merely their demography (which again, IS important, but not enough!)

He expands:

“One of the struggles that we’re going to have right now, we lay on the table of the Democratic Party, is it’s not good enough to me to say, “Okay, well we’ve got X number of African Americans over here, we’ve got Y number of Latinos, we have Z number of women. We are a diverse party, a diverse nation....”

And then come more “buts” as he delves deeper into the conflicts of between policies for the people and policies for the financial elites.

“But, but here is my point, and this is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.”

And here’s where Sanders brings up identity politics. Ready? Brace yourselves!

“In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.”

Identity politics is a term used for the addressing of the issues and injustices of particular groups in the political process. This is the only time Sanders ever mentions identity politics. “Go beyond identity politics. ” For the mainstream media, that was the gotcha moment, and the focus of attention. Yes, “go beyond” can mean different things. It can mean to go “farther” or “go further” as when directions tell us to “go beyond” a certain intersection, or a counselor advises us to “go beyond” our comfort zone. At worst, “to go beyond” can have a dismissive and discounting connotation—though “get beyond” or “get over” would be a better choice if the idea was to dismiss.

At any rate, the fact that Sanders emphasized how important identity politics are shows he was clearly not eschewing them. In addition to what was already quoted, Sanders followed his sentence on identity politics by saying, “I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American head or CEO of some major corporation.” And in case you missed the message, he finished his speech with, “We need candidates — black and white and Latino and gay and male — we need all of those candidates and public officials to have the guts to stand up to the oligarchy.”

He couldn’t have been clearer in presenting economic policies and representational diversity as being complementary, and not mutually exclusive.

How the Media Responded
It looks like the first major publication to pick up the story was Talking Points Memo, (TPM) which had written the following headline by Monday Morning: “Sanders Urges Supporters: Ditch Identity Politics And Embrace The Working Class.”


The headline and opening sentence, which use the words “ditch” and “move away from” clearly distort what Sanders was saying. They also miss that he was talking to people running for office and the Democrats, not his supporters, though what did I expect after the headline? The headline also reads like a translation from 1930s Pravda. You can almost hear the Internationale crescendo in the background as a caricature of an old and archaic Sanders spouts dated disproven ideas about the working class, forsaking the progress of women and people of color.

Either emboldened by TPM’s lax (mis)reporting or too lazy to review the comments on their own, several other outlets incorporated “ditch” or its synonyms into their articles’ headlines or paragraphs.

At Vox, not surprisingly, Matt Yglesias, chided that Democrats neither can nor should ditch “identity politics”:

Not everyone put the headline in its headline. Some put it into the body of their articles.

Rebecca Traister linked and quoted the TPM headline in a piece she wrote for The Cut, lamenting that Sanders was “recommending that Democrats embrace the working class and “Ditch Identity Politics,” according to one headline.” In the very next sentence, She clarified that:

In fact, the headline was overblown: Sanders did not say we should dump identity politics, and affirmatively noted that “we should bring more and more women into the political process” and that “we need 50 women in the Senate!”

Bustle did a cute move in copy and pasting the TPM headline into its opening paragraph.


On Wednesday night, the TPM talking point, if you will, made it’s TV debut. Speaking on All in with Chris Hayes, Clinton supporter and Slate writer Michelle Goldberg complained that Sanders was saying the Democrats need to ditch identity politics.” To be fair, though Goldberg did repeat “ditch,” she did get the target of Sanders’ message right, noting it was for the Democratic Party and not his supporters. That’s neither here no there, except, perhaps, to show that Goldberg had taken enough time to go over what Sanders had said and deliberately chose to not update or correct the verb.

Host Chris Hayes, who was with Goldberg in the studio, interjected (though barely audibly), that Sanders, “didn’t quite say that.” Nina Turner, former Ohio State Senator and Sanders surrogate, who was speaking from a remote studio, also clarified, that Sanders, “didn`t say it that way. He didn`t mean it that way.” But Goldberg ignored the correction, continuing as if nothing had been said: “I think that there is a fear among some people that in this move, that kind of a purely class-based politics will throw women and people of color under the bus in this attempt to win back the culturally conservative white working class.” Goldberg, a white female Clinton supporter, speaking past Turner, a Black woman, to explain how the Vermont Senator who Turner had chosen to support was espousing an ideology that would throw women of color under the bus, was “problematic,” to use a word so frequently invoked by Sanders critics.

Politico swapped it out for “slam.”

On the Right, The Blaze went with “quit.”

The Observer chose “grow out of.”

Others definitely went to great lengths to distort what Sanders said, and it’s hard to believe they were innocent.
As for opinion pieces and tweets, this one stands out as being utterly unrelated to reality.

What makes the attacks on Sanders so disingenuous is that they are so clearly partisan and unprincipled. Contrast Sanders statements on class and race with Clinton’s.

What Clinton Said
Back in February, Clinton delivered a speech in the suburbs of Las Vegas where she explicitly pitted economic policies against “progress” for women, immigrants, people of color, and LGBT. In an obvious dig at Sanders, who the Clinton campaign was deriding as a “single issue candidate,” Clinton asked, rhetorically, “Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?” When the audience responded “No!” Clinton took the call and response and really ran with it, asking “Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight? Would that solve our problem with voting rights, and Republicans who are trying to strip them away from people of color, the elderly, and the young?”

The audience responded to each of these questions with… “No!”
Clinton gets a lot out of this call-and-response jam session. She makes the strawman argument that Sanders thinks or has ever suggested that breaking up the banks will end racism, sexism, homophobia, voter disenfranchisement and xenophobia etc. She is certain that taking on the banks is insufficient. But she goes further by saying that it may not even be necessary. She vows that she will do something about the banks, “if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk.” Clinton is agnostic on whether the banks deserve any kind of regulation or are a risk. And Clinton paints breaking up banks and fighting against structural racism as two discrete and unrelated projects.

The truth is that the foreclosure crisis was one of the most stunning and disturbing examples of institutionalized racism. As Nathalie Baptiste writes in the American Prospect:

“Across the nation, black homeowners were disproportionately affected by the foreclosure crisis, with more than 240,000 blacks losing homes they had owned. Black homeowners in the D.C. region were 20 percent more likely to lose their homes compared to whites with similar incomes and lifestyles. The foreclosure crisis also affected blacks of all income brackets; high-earning blacks were 80 percent more likely to lose their homes than their white counterparts, making the homeowners of Prince George’s County prime targets.”

Clinton wraps up her speech by calling herself “the only candidate who’ll take on every barrier to progress.” Of course, her ignoring the systemic risks already posed by the banks and de facto racist policies already practiced by the banks, makes it hard to believe that she is at all equipped to do this.

People who care about identity politics should have been in an uproar. They may not particularly care that she oversimplified and distorted Sanders’ analysis. But how could Clinton have ignored the racist nature of the subprime loan scandal? Also, how could she present economic justice and other forms of justice as so unrelated?

And yet there was no outcry.

Clinton’s statements were nowhere near as nuanced as Sanders. Sanders doesn’t make one more important than the other. Clinton does. Had Clinton spoken about class and identity politics with the same intersectionality and nuance as Sanders, her statements would have been very different. She would have taken the very sensible position that while bank reform is a good and necessary thing, it alone will not end racism or sexism. She would have emphasized the need for attacking the overlapping issues.

But she didn’t and Sanders did. Not that you’d know.

Katie Halper hosts the Katie Halper Show. You can listen to her latest episode, featuring Matt Stoller and Leslie Lee, below.