Brianna Luster loved what Sen. Bernie Sanders had to say from the moment she heard him speak about social injustice.
On Friday, the Madison native and University of Wisconsin-Green Bay student got to “Feel the Bern” in person. She said she was happy to support a candidate crusading for women, minorities, working class families and other marginalized Americans.
“A lot of times, I don’t think people realize the struggles of the black, Latino or Native American communities,” Luster said. “Not that they necessarily don’t want to see it, but they’re maybe unknowingly blind to it. I think it’s a big problem that Bernie can fix.”
During an hour-long speech in front of about 2,000 people at the Kress Events Center on the UW-Green Bay campus Friday night, Sanders attributed his campaign’s momentum to the broad coalition behind him. He told them if they stay energetic and engaged, he can defeat Hillary Clinton in the April 5 Wisconsin primary and continue battling for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“With your help, we’re going to win Wisconsin,” Sanders said. “We cannot go forward as a nation unless we have the courage to put the real issues out there on the table, dissect them, solve them and go forward.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders didn't mince too many words during a campaign stop in Sheboygan, Wisconsin on Friday afternoon. Midway through his typical stump speech railing against the millionaires and billionaires, he broke off to explicitly contrast himself with Hillary Clinton for taking money from fossil fuel interests and giving highly paid speeches to financial firms, among other topics.
"As many of you may know, Secretary Clinton has given speeches on Wall Street for $225,000 per speech," Sanders said to boos from his crowd. "You know what I think? If you're going to give a speech for $225,000 it must be a really fantastic speech, don't you think? Why else would you get $225,000? It must be written in Shakespearean prose. It must be a speech that solves most, if not all the problems facing humanity." Clearly pleased with his quips, Sanders then called for Clinton to share the speech transcripts with the rest of the world.
Sanders ticked off a number of other points of disagreement, lingering after the punchiest statements to allow his supporters time to boo his opponent. Sanders faulted Clinton for associating with a super PAC, and supporting trade deals that he said harmed Wisconsin manufacturing. He said she couldn't be trusted on foreign policy, since "she voted for the war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in the modern history of America." Nor could she be trusted on the environment. "Secretary Clinton and I disagree on the issue of fracking. It may not seem like a sexy issue, but it is an enormously important issue," Sanders said, pointing to her record pushing shale gas extraction abroad when she led the State Department.
But his most pointed criticism came when Sanders discussed the hubbub over fossil fuel donations that has enveloped the campaign over the past day. At a campaign event in New York on Thursday, a Greenpeace activist asked Clinton if she'd reject donations from those industries in light of her stance on climate change. "I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me. I'm sick of it," Clinton responded, visibly angry as she jabbed her finger at the activist and argued that garnering support from individuals who work for fossil fuel companies isn't the same as being supported by gas and oil companies.
The back and forth between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton regarding campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry has reached a fever pitch.
Speaking to a packed house eastern Wisconsin, Sanders twice said Clinton owed his campaign an apology.
“We were not lying, we were telling the truth,” the presidential hopeful said after bringing up an incident yesterday in which an activist asked Clinton if she would stop taking money from the fossil fuel industry. Clinton responded aggressively and accused the Sanders' campaign of lying.
“The truth is that Secretary Clinton has relied heavily on funds from lobbyists working for the oil, gas and coal industry, according to an analysis done by Greenpeace,” the senator continued this evening.
A report from the environmental organization found 57 registered K-street oil, gas and coal industry lobbyists contributed to Clinton's campaign and claims over 43 of them contributed the maximum dollar amount allowed for the primary. The report also found several large contributors related to the industry had given more than $3.5 million to one of Clinton’s super PACs.
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Yesterday, the Clinton campaign pointed to additional documents, which show that employees from oil and gas companies have given to both campaigns. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees of oil and gas companies have contributed $307,000 to Clinton’s campaign, but also have given $54,000 to Sanders’ campaign.
Sanders seemed to respond to this as he pointed out in his remarks that the contributors with ties to oil and gas cited in the Greenpeace report were “not just workers in the fossil fuel industry, these are paid registered lobbyists.”
As Peguero’s history teacher Melissa Cohen put it, “No one ever comes to the South Bronx.”
It wasn’t the first time I heard that sentiment on Thursday night as 18,500 Sanders supporters gathered in St. Mary’s Park, waiting for him to take the stage. “Things like this don’t happen in the Bronx, and I was born and raised here,” said Pablo Muriel, another teacher from nearby Alfred E. Smith High School, who brought several dozen students out to the event.
“He’s making us visible again,” said Dhalimu Robinson, a South Bronx small business owner with an “I Heart Bernie” pin affixed to his lapel. “He’s here during the primary season. He’s not just saying I’ll get to them later, and then forgetting about us like every other candidate usually does.”
It’s true. While primary season may seem long to the rest of us, it’s still not long enough for candidates to touch every corner of the United States. So, they tend to visit the places where they believe they’ll have the most impact—that is, areas with high voter turnout rates or big communities of wealthy donors.
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In places that have neither, like the South Bronx, they’ve been relying on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other digital channels to communicate with voters. In many ways, these platforms have been revelatory, giving candidates the ability to campaign everywhere by delivering targeted messages to hard-to-reach voters.
But while social media may give candidates the ability to campaign everywhere in the country from anywhere in the country, Sanders’ event in the Bronx this week proves that in an often overlooked neighborhood like the South Bronx, there’s no digital substitute to just showing up.
“No other candidate has come to the Bronx to express himself,” said Kenny Flores, 17, one of Muriel’s students. “That’s what it’s about, coming to the Bronx and showing you want to change the world.”
Drawing supporters from all over New York and as far as Hollywood, Team Bernie Sanders hosted a roundtable conversation for women in Harlem on Friday. At the Row House on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, EBONY editor-in-chief Kierna Mayo moderated a discussion between Rosario Dawson, actress and activist, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, Tessa Thompson, Creed star, and Donna Hylton, a criminal justice advocate, about the issues at stake—especially for women of color—in this election.
"Women of color have always throughout our history played critical roles in building the revolutions that have helped to win our freedom," Alexander said. "At this particular moment, I just couldn't be more thrilled to see so many brilliant, beautiful, bold, tenacious women coming together to say that we are committed to this political revolution—a revolution that will begin with Bernie Sanders and certainly won't end with him."
Over and over, Alexander, and Dawson, too, stressed how vital it is for women to stand up not only for the "kitchen table" issues, but for a broader suite of policies that research shows impact women in different ways than they do men.
"Women's issues have become this side note—as if we can talk about them out of relation to foreign policy, out of relation to health care," Dawson said. It is, Dawson maintained, narrow-minded to have a conversation about climate or mass incarceration or the student loan crisis and not talk about how they especially hold women back.
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When the time came for the audience to participate, women told stories of house foreclosures and friends in prison. They talked about racism, and social justice, and what rising rents have done to their neighborhoods. They wanted to know—what does Bernie Sanders have to say about this? What will he do? Does he realize how hard it has been for us?
Buoyed by the excitement in the room, Alexander reminded the women that such enormous problems will not be solved at the ballot box. "Real democracy" and an end to structural violence is going to demand "a movement that extends well beyond the election season." "I hope that women of color, the folks in this room, the people who have been doing brilliant, beautiful, bold, courageous work on behalf of Bernie Sanders' campaign, the people who have been involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, the DREAMers, the trans folks, the LGBT folks—that all of these folks commit themselves to building a long-term movement that will sustain the political revolution well beyond this election."
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Friday issued a scathing condemnation of draft legislation in the House of Representatives that aims to provide Puerto Rico with financial relief, taking a harder stance than his congressional colleagues in what has otherwise been an amicable legislative process.
Like many Democrats, the presidential hopeful singled out a provision that would establish a Washington-based federal oversight board to institute financial reforms in Puerto Rico. The island owes creditors $70 billion, and the bill says creating this board is a prerequisite for restructuring some of this debt and giving the territory access to other assistance.
But by calling for the bill’s outright defeat, Sanders appears to distinguish himself as a populist advocate of the territory’s suffering residents.
“Establishing an unelected oversight board that would be given the power to inflict even more economic pain on the 3.5 million American citizens in Puerto Rico would be a move in exactly the wrong direction,” Sanders said in a statement sent via his campaign. “It must be defeated.”
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The major national media are interested mainly in personalities and in the money behind the personalities. Political reporting is dominated by stories about the quirks and foibles of the candidates, and about the people and resources behind them.
Within this frame of reference, it seems nonsensical that a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont, originally from Brooklyn, who calls himself a Democratic socialist, who’s not a Democratic insider and wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party until recently, who has never been a fixture in the Washington or Manhattan circles of power and influence, and who has no major backers among the political or corporate or Wall Street elites of America, could possibly win the nomination.
But precisely because the major media are habituated to paying attention to personalities, they haven’t been attending to Bernie’s message — or to its resonance among Democratic and independent voters (as well as many Republicans).
The major media don’t know how to report on political movements that emerge from the hopes and frustrations of millions of Americans. Movements don’t fit into the normal political story about which candidate is up and who’s down.
The major media have come to see much of America through the eyes of the establishment. That’s not surprising. After all, they depend on establishment corporations for advertising revenues, their reporters and columnists rely on the establishment for news and access, their top media personalities socialize with the rich and powerful and are themselves rich and powerful, and their publishers and senior executives are themselves part of the establishment.
So it’s understandable that the major media haven’t noticed how determined Americans are to reverse the increasing concentration of wealth and political power that have been eroding our economy and democracy. And it’s understandable, even if unjustifiable, that they continue to marginalize Bernie Sanders.
UNITE HERE Local 54, the union that represents casino workers in Atlantic City, has endorsed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for president of the United States.
Local 54 is the largest industry union in New Jersey and has been in the middle of a back and forth battle with the Tropicana and Trump Taj Mahal over benefits. Last month, the union picketed outside the Taj for the first time since it was acquired by Carl Ichan.
“It is an honor to receive UNITE HERE Local 54's endorsement,” Sanders said in a statement. “This campaign is building a movement of millions of Americans who are demanding that our economy works for everyone, not just the top one percent. The hard-working men and women of New Jersey's hospitality industry are a vital part of our movement which is spreading to every corner of our country.”
Jane Sanders will host town hall meetings in Casper and Cheyenne on Monday and Tuesday.
The events are being held ahead of Wyoming Democratic county conventions and caucuses on April 9.
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Jane Sanders will travel to Wyoming with progressive activist Jim Hightower. Both events are open to the public.
In Casper, Jane Sanders will hold a town hall meeting at 8 p.m. Monday at the Wolcott Galleria, 136 S. Wolcott Street. In Cheyenne, she will hold a meeting 1 p.m. at the Cheyenne Depot Museum, 121 W. 15th Street.
People can RSVP for both the Casper and Cheyenne events at Bernie Sanders’ website.
Jane Sanders has a doctorate degree and was the president of Burlington College, a small, alternative school in Vermont, according to Bloomberg. She stepped down in 2011.
“She has her own career and experience in social justice movements,” said Aimee Van Cleave, executive director of the Wyoming Democratic Party.
So, Sanders’ candidacy is hardly buoyed up by the press. Still, he remains the single most electable of the presidential candidates. Why?
I will submit that his electability is related to the issues upon which he is campaigning. Let’s just consider a few of his most visible positions. He has argued that college must be made affordable for all, and has advocated that tuition-free public college education is a fundamental right. The basis for this position is that higher education is to the modern world what high-school education was to the world of 1930 or 1950. A college education is now the main entryway to the middle class.
Polls indicate support for the broad outlines of Sanders’ plan. An Atlantic Monthly poll from early March indicated that most Americans understand that they might be better positioned for economic success with greater education. At the same time, they are frustrated by “a thicket of obstacles centered on money and time that prevents them from obtaining more credentials.” Bernie Sanders would trim that thicket. Indeed, his plan would help to level the playing field between the affluent few who have access to education and opportunity, and the many families that are struggling in today’s economy.
And in truth, Sanders’ plan would simply be a return to the policies that proved so successful in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Some of America’s greatest state university systems of that era — the University of California system and the University of Wisconsin — charged zero or nominal tuition and educated a generation of Americans. Indeed, it is not far-fetched to say that the affordable college programs of the 1950’s and 1960’s contributed substantially to the American prosperity of the latter twentieth century.
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Bernie Sanders has pledged to do something about the septic tank of American campaign finance. One of his most important promises has been to name to the Supreme Court only justices pledged to reverse the Citizens United line of cases.
Why is Bernie Sanders the most electable presidential candidate in America? It might be that he is not only right on the issues, but in tune with the mood of the American public.
The presidential race fever appears to be catching on in Bakersfield, if at least for a moment. Around 200 people rallied and marched at a Bernie Sanders event as the turn out appeared to surprise Sanders' supporters.
"The purpose of the rally is to gather attention to the people of Bakersfield that we're here that there's progressives here, it's not just a conservative county," said John Hendrickson who attended the event at the Liberty Bell.
An ethnically diverse crowd cheered as short speeches were given extolling the virtues of Sanders, who is vying to be the nominee of the Democratic party for president. Sanders currently trials rival Hillary Clinton in the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination.
But supporters were in high spirits as they chanted slogans and began a march from the Liberty Bell on Truxtun and Chester Avenues and headed toward the First Friday event being held nearby. At Truxtun and Eye Street, they were met by 8 people with signs protesting against Sanders. The protesters were part of College Republicans of CSUB. A press release sent by the group said they were there to protest against Sanders and to support Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich.
When the two groups encountered each other, Sanders' supporters gave flowers and hugs to the College Republicans.
Bernie Sanders' campaign announced Friday that it had raised $44 million in March, a new high for the Vermont senator's White House bid.
The campaign's previous fundraising record was in February, when it raised $43.5 million. The campaign has received more than 6.5 million contributions from 2 million individual donors.
The March numbers come as a bit of a surprise after the roller-coaster month the senator had in the primary elections. Though he pulled off a coup in Michigan when he edged out Hillary Clinton, he suffered a string of losses in Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, and Arizona, all states the senator hoped to win.
The campaign pointed to a strong finish last Saturday in Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska that also helped bump its fundraising totals before the month ended.
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Do you know what the average contribution is?" he asked rally attendees in the Bronx on Thursday.
"Twenty-seven dollars!" the crowd yelled back.