U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders brought his populist message to the steps of the Indiana Statehouse on Friday, pledging to hundreds of union workers and supporters that he will fight to stop corporate greed from “destroying the middle class in America.”
The Democratic presidential hopeful was just the latest candidate to visit Indianapolis with promises of reviving manufacturing in Indiana, holding up Carrier Corp.’s decision to lay off 1,400 workers here as an example of what’s wrong with the U.S. economy.
But Sanders is the only one to do so with the endorsement of the workers themselves.
Speaking at a United Steelworkers Local 1999 rally and march — organized to protest Carrier's plans to outsource its manufacturing operations to Mexico — Sanders reiterated his call for trade policies that won't force Americans "to compete with desperate people all over the world" in a race for the lowest wages.
Sanders also railed against Carrier's parent company, United Technologies Corp., for spending lavishly on executive pay while refusing to pay American workers a living wage. Former CEO Geraud Darnis, who retired in January, made $14.4 million in total compensation in 2015, while Louis Chenevert, another former CEO, was given a $172 million retirement package when he left the company in 2014.
"They have no shame," Sanders said. "... Stop the greed. Stop destroying the middle class in America."
He talked about the effect of NAFTA on Indiana jobs, saying the state has lost over 110,000 manufacturing jobs due to the trade agreement enacted in the 1990s.
"We need a new set of trade policies designed to protect working families and the middle class, not just the CEOs of large corporations," Sanders said.
"It is not acceptable to me that today the top one tenth of one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent," he said, linking the loss of manufacturing jobs to rising poverty rates.
"We are going to create an economy that works for all of us, not just CEOs of large corporations," Sanders said.
In addition to reforming what he called the disastrous policy of NAFTA and other agreements, he said, "If you work 40 or 50 hours a week in America, you should not be living in poverty. We're gonna raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Fifteen bucks an hour."
He also addressed the gender pay gap, as well as rebuilding the American infrastructure, vowing to use American, not Chinese, steel.
"The American middle class will grow and not decline when the trade union movement in this country grows. That is why we must expand collective bargaining rights for public sector and private sector workers. We need to make it easier for workers to join unions, not harder," said Sanders.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said Friday that the Democratic race in Indiana is tight, and he thinks he can pull off a win if voter turnout is high.
A win in the Hoosier state is important to securing the delegates necessary to narrow the lead of front-runner Hillary Clinton, Sanders said in an interview with IndyStar. A victory in Indiana also would send a message — a message Sanders argued that’s powered by anger over the “greed” of corporations, such as Carrier's plans to eliminate 1,400 jobs in Indianapolis and move them to Mexico.
“I think symbolically here you have a Midwest manufacturing state that has prepared to stand up and fight for a political revolution,” Sanders said.
Indiana polls show Sanders in striking distance of Clinton, holding on to as thin as a 3-point lead.
Asked whether Indiana was make-or-break for his campaign’s future, Sanders said he’d been asked that question in every single state since the first contest in Iowa.
“We’re in this until California and beyond, and we think we got a shot here in Indiana,” he said.
“Our job is to win here in Indiana … we are going to fight for every single vote that we can get,” Sanders said. “We have a narrow path for victory, and we’re going to try to seize it.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced his presidential candidacy a year ago today. And over the past 12 months, his campaign has followed an almost poetic arch: taking the country by storm (and surprise), amassing a staff of over 1,000 people, breaking fundraising records and drawing some of the largest and most energetic crowds of this election cycle.
Here’s a look back at some of the highlights of Sanders’ run:
Bernie Sanders’ First Campaign Announcement on Capitol Hill -- April 30, 2015
The longest-serving independent congressman held a makeshift news conference on the Senate lawn to inform reporters that he was challenging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the nomination. "How do we create an economy that works for all of our people, rather than a small number of billionaires?” he said, his words almost identical to those delivered in every one of his speeches over the next year.
The Vermont senator was noticeably in a rush that day, almost uncomfortable or dismissive of the event. With his now infamous messy hair blowing in the wind and the far-from-thought-out shot for the cameras, it’s easy to see why many people were a little dismissive of the announcement, especially those unfamiliar with his significant social media presence.
Bernie Sanders’ Rally in Los Angeles Featuring Sarah Silverman -- Aug. 10, 2015
The hallmark of the Sanders’ campaign quickly became his huge rallies. From city to city, college campus to college campus, the senator surprised everyone (reporters, party leaders, his opponents and even himself) with his ability to bring out tens of thousands of people to hear him speak. His first rally in Los Angeles, pictured here, featured some Hollywood star-power and signaled to the country and the Democratic Party that a “movement” was building.
For purposes of analysis, and to offer a hint to Team Clinton about the respect that should be shown to Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and his supporters between now and the Democratic convention, my bet would be that a ticket combining Sanders with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) would leave any Republican ticket with Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) ticket in the distant dust and win a landslide victory for Democrats in November.
No, I will not be placing a wager on a Sanders-Warren ticket, though the chances that probable Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would run with Warren are certainly real, if not probable. The fact that Sanders runs 15 percentage points ahead of Trump in the RealClearPolitics summary of polling is the most important single fact of American public opinion in the presidential campaign. I write about the possibility of a Sanders-Warren ticket to make a very big point about the political state of the nation and the wisest direction Clinton and Democrats should chart.
The combination of the two leading progressive populists in national politics — Sanders and Warren — on a presidential ticket would be an unbeatable combination with appeal to voters who want economic fairness, a pro-American trade policy, a truly universal healthcare system, an end to banks that remain too big to fail and a social justice in the spirit of Pope Francis.
By comparison to Sanders, Warren and Clinton, the two leading GOP candidates for president are parading around the country calling each other liars. Former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) went so far as to call Cruz "Lucifer in the flesh." Since his running mate Carly Fiorina famously laid off nearly 30,000 workers during her failed tenure at Hewlett-Packard, perhaps that ticket could be called "Lucifer and layoffs"!
There is a progressive populist wave in America, which is why Sanders does indeed perform far better in polls, day after day, than Trump and far better than Clinton, day after day, in match-up polls against Trump.
The issues that Sanders and Warren champion, from breaking up banks to establishing truly universal healthcare to raising Social Security benefits — among many others — are highly popular and the right positions, whether lobbyists or old-style campaign consultants get it or not.
The battle between the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee over the use of the D.N.C.’s voter data officially ended Friday, with the campaign withdrawing its lawsuit against the party.
The fight between the committee and the Vermont senator’s campaign began in December when several members of Mr. Sanders’s data operation were found to have gained access to, searched and stored proprietary information from Hillary Clinton’s team because of a software glitch with the voter database. The party quickly denied the Sanders campaign future access to its 50-state voter file, which contains information about millions of Democrats and holds daily value for campaigns.
In response, the Sanders campaign sued the D.N.C. and accused it of actively trying to help Mrs. Clinton. Eventually, the party and the Sanders campaign agreed to restore access to the voter file while the party continued to investigate the breach.
On Friday, the committee said the investigation had found that four Sanders staffers gained access to the database for an hour and did 25 searches using proprietary Clinton data from 11 states. The statement said all of the search results were saved in a computer system except in one instance, when a Sanders staffer exported information using Clinton data for New Hampshire.
In statement released Friday, the Sanders campaign said that an investigation of their computers could not locate the exported file, and that no one in the Sanders campaign had ever seen it. The campaign said that it had fired the staffers involved, and that no one else in the campaign “accessed the Hillary for America’s scoring models or had knowledge that the activity was taking place until well after the incident was over.”
Four months ago, in an impulsive overreaction and at a critical point in the campaign just weeks before the closest Iowa caucus results in history, the DNC shut down the Sanders campaign’s access to its own voter file data, only restoring access after the campaign filed a lawsuit in Federal court.
Now, four months later, an independent investigation of the firewall failures in the DNC’s shared voter file database has definitively confirmed that the original claims by the DNC and the Clinton campaign were wholly inaccurate – the Sanders campaign never “stole” any voter file data; the Sanders campaign never “exported” any unauthorized voter file data; and the Sanders campaign certainly never had access to the Clinton campaign’s “strategic road map.”
In fact, the independent investigation has confirmed what the Sanders campaign said from the start:
- The DNC’s security failures allowed four Sanders campaign staffers – three junior-level staffers led by a manager who had been hired at the recommendation of the DNC and who was immediately terminated after the incident – to have extremely short-lived access for one hour to Hillary for America’s scoring models, but not to any of Hillary for America’s proprietary voter data.
- No one else in the Sanders campaign, outside these four staffers, accessed the Hillary for America’s scoring models or had knowledge that the activity was taking place until well after the incident was over.
- With one exception, all unauthorized access took place within the DNC’s own system. While there is evidence that the terminated staffer may have exported a summary data table, the independent investigation of Sanders campaign computers could not locate that file and no one in the Sanders campaign has ever seen that file.
With the investigation behind us, the campaign has withdrawn its lawsuit against the DNC today but continues to implore the DNC to address the systemic instability that remains in its voter file system. It is imperative that the DNC make it a top priority to prevent future data security failures in the voter file system, failures that only serve as unnecessary distractions to the democratic process.
2016 is the most volatile political year since 1968. And the responses of the parties to it will define not just political organizations but the politics of this year and the years to come.
So what Bernie Sanders is talking about matters. It does not mean that he will get what he wants at the convention. It does not mean that Hillary Clinton, who has her own vision and her own strategies, should accept every proposal that Sanders or broader movements make. There are no guarantees that the Democratic Party can or will run in 2016 on “the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen.”
But no one should buy into the fantasy that this discussion is inconsequential. Platform debates always matter. That’s why the candidates (front-runners and challengers) always take them seriously; that’s why key players in political parties (governor, mayors, legislators, union leaders) participate in them; that’s why interest groups try so hard to influence them.
Platforms define parties, not just for the purposes of a campaign but for the future. It mattered when the Democratic Party embraced civil rights in a meaningful way in 1948, and in a more meaningful way in 1960 and 1964. It mattered in the 1980s when the Democratic Party moved (at the behest of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his “Rainbow Coalition” campaigns) toward more aggressive opposition to South African apartheid, and when it moved (at the behest of the Jackson and Gary Hart campaigns of 1984) toward an embrace of the principle that the United States should work with allies rather than engage in unilateral military action. It mattered when the Democratic Party began to embrace LGBTQ rights in a meaningful way in its 1980 platform, and when it embraced marriage equality in 2012.
And it matters, now, that Sanders is talking about “put[ting] together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen.”
In 1975, the year I was born, First Lady Betty Ford supported the Equal Rights Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that states could no longer exclude women from jury duty, and the National Organization for Women led a “Mother’s Day of Outrage” demonstration at the Apostolic Delegation to the U.S. in Washington, D.C. While all of that was going on, I was learning to crawl.
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In 2008, I was a foreign woman living in a country that had some antiquated beliefs about gender relations. I was shocked to discover aspects of myself that had until then been hidden from me.
After several weeks of feeling acutely aware of being a woman first and an individual second, I gravitated toward a few other expatriate women living in the city. We all banded together by the simple fact of our shared chromosomes. I wonder now if we would have become friends in another context. Maybe it was due to the fact that we felt safer and more empowered in the company of each other in a culture that was unfamiliar to us and at times in direct contrast to our experiences as women in our own cultures.
What I gained from that experience was a better understanding of why many first-wave feminists like Steinem and Albright feel so strongly about women supporting other women. There’s nothing wrong with offering support to women. However, I take issue with strident attacks of young women voters who sincerely believe that Bernie Sanders is the candidate that best represents their ideals.
On many feminist issues like health care, education, equal pay and the environment, Sanders is the best candidate to address them. Here’s why: On education, Sanders’s policies will reduce student debt and increase access to public colleges. He’s consistently fought to protect women’s health care and their right to choose. His health-care plan will help control generic drug prices and increase the availability of affordable medical and mental health care. Finally, Sanders backs GMO labeling legislation and is opposed to fracking, offshore drilling and Keystone XL — all-important issues to environmentalists.
Feminism has many definitions, but my message to women voters is vote on the issues and how you think each candidate will effectively address those issues.
The most important message from this year’s tumultuous presidential primaries may be that millions of voters in both parties have grown sufficiently disenchanted with conventional political options to vote for candidates who not long ago would have been considered beyond the pale of viable choices.
20 or even 10 years ago, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders might have struggled to advance beyond the margins of their parties. Yet after this week’s five primaries, Trump has drawn just over 10 million votes and Sanders 9.3 million. Both have built followings that are not only large but also more impassioned than those attracted by their more traditional rivals, from Ted Cruz to Hillary Clinton.
But whether or not either man ultimately claims the White House, their rise still signals a searing vote of no-confidence in the results produced by the nation’s political leadership. Though they embody very different political impulses, Trump and Sanders have been propelled by a common torrent of discontent that more conventional leaders will ignore at their peril. “People feel like the way things have been running for the last couple of years, if not decades, has not been working out for them,” the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson said. “They have been using traditional remedies to address an illness and it’s not really working so all of a sudden the experimental treatment with all the crazy side effects starts looking a lot more appealing.”
That’s particularly true among the groups central to each man’s coalition: working-class whites for Trump, and members of the Millennial generation for Sanders. Trump has now won whites without a college education in 21 of the 25 states with exit polls, often by imposing margins.
Sanders has also shown a surprising appeal to the smaller number of blue-collar whites who still participate in Democratic primaries. But his coalition is centered on the massive Millennial generation, which this year will roughly equal the baby boom as a share of eligible voters. In 23 of the 25 exit-polled states, Sanders has carried voters younger than 30. One cumulative analysis of all exit polls found that through the New York primary he had won 70 percent of those younger voters, a substantially higher percentage than even President Obama carried against Clinton in 2008.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign is opening an office in North Oakland on Saturday, his campaign announced this week.
The Sanders' campaign at 10 a.m. will christen the office, located at 5616 College Ave., near Rockridge BART.
He opened his first California office in Los Angeles earlier this month, according to a news release from his campaign.
California's presidential primary election is June 7. Voters must be registered by May 23 to participate.
New York’s primary has indeed harmed Bernie Sanders’ campaign, as it has broken a sequence of victories, and deflated supporters’ enthusiasm before the next round of 5 state primaries the following Tuesday. The media keeps reporting that a Bernie victory is all but impossible at this point, which sounds convincing but not quite true. The California primary at the very end of the cycle packs 475 pledged delegates. Right now Hillary leads Bernie 1666 to 1359 among pledged (elected) delegates, which means a gap of 307 delegates.
Assuming the rest of the races between now and the California primary are split evenly, or close to evenly, between Hillary and Bernie, a win of 65% in the CA primary would make up the gap! It has been reported Clinton’s campaign has cut back and is not airing any ads in the smaller states at the moment as their fundraising is dwindling. If Sander’s campaign focuses almost entirely on CA, it is likely he could see such results. Anyone who would claim that this is not a possible scenario is either ignorant, or intentionally misleading.
Nevertheless, it is important for the Sanders campaign to redraw the focus to emphasize the building of the progressive movement and increasing its impact and influence, rather than just electing Bernie for president, in order to counter sagging enthusiasm due to voters’ perceived inevitability of a Clinton victory. The results of such focus change may not only be the continuation of the most vigorous political campaign in presidential primary history, but a possible win for Bernie in the primaries by June, as a byproduct.
Our goal has not changed at all. We are still working on changing the political system to eradicate unaccounted big money in politics. This has been at the very root of all other political battles. As an environmental and political activist I have come to realize that each such battle, around each issue, is an uphill battle against the odds, due to the politician’s reliance on campaign finance fundraising from the corporate world and the wealthy.
Be it a battle on Fracking, Social Security, Environmental pollution regulations, meat production regulation and standards, or minimum wage, each is countered by powerful money laden lobbies, dwarfing any influence from the general citizenry, thus significantly tilting the scale in their favor. As long as that remains unchanged, no major dramatic changes can be expected in any of these directions. Currently the battles are about the periphery, and about tweaks and incremental improvements to the existing status quo. That type of change, when we are facing a potentially cataclysmic Global Climate Change, is simply not a luxury we can afford ourselves any longer.
So, the goal is still to bring on a political revolution. This best case scenario is to start it right now by electing Bernie as president, but even if that eludes us, we still have the power to effect change by voting in the primary, and not just giving away our voice to the front runner.
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So, put on your Social Media helmet, and your canvassing shoes, or take out your wallet, and let’s keep fighting this battle! There is nothing more essential than this as far as American politics is concerned right now.