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Bernie Backs Big Bank Breakups:
Bernie Sanders is backing a bill to break up big banks after advisers to presidential rival Hillary Clinton made clear earlier this week she will not support reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act.
Noting that he’s long supported reimposing a firewall between investment and commercial banks, the Vermont senator said he’s officially rejoining an effort led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to break up the big banks, saying, “If we are truly serious about ending too big to fail, we have got to break up the largest financial institutions in this country.”
“Allowing commercial banks to merge with investment banks and insurance companies in 1999 was a huge mistake. It precipitated the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world. It caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, homes, life savings and ability to send their kids to college,” said Sanders, who said that change in the financial world “substantially increased wealth and income inequality.”
Earlier this week, a Clinton campaign adviser told Reuters that “you’re not going to see Glass-Steagall.” Clinton was also interrupted by a heckler on Monday who challenged her to revive the depression-era policy, though she did not answer the question.
Some real talk from Sanders:
A self-described democratic socialist who has a lot of ideas and a brash demeanor, Sanders can make some interesting statements. We've collected a few of his most intriguing and most provocative words on a wide range of issues, including marijuana and income inequality.
Here are some of the most notable things Sanders has said since announcing his White House run:
"We’ve got to demilitarize the police -- we don’t need tanks, you don’t need heavy military equipment in the communities of the United States. We gotta pay attention to the African-American communities, to poverty so these kids get the education and job training they need," Sanders told Yahoo.
Turning Crowds Into Volunteers:
The walls in Bernie Sanders's brand-new Des Moines headquarters—nestled between a Hy-Vee supermarket, a liquor store, and a Vietnamese restaurant—are full of the standard field-office fare: district maps of the state, quotes from the candidate, and campaign signs in the window.
But when it comes to Sanders's chances here in Iowa, it's the details that are important: posters on the wall implore supporters to "Sign up to host an organizer," "Sign up to phone bank," and "sign up to canvass."
At an office-opening event Thursday night, the space was humming with activity as about 100 supporters filed into the room, grabbing snacks from a table of hodgepodge items and sitting down in chairs arranged in a circle in the center of the room. Each supporter was asked to fill out a small card with his or her name and contact information and to check boxes about how to "take action" ("Support Bernie," "Recruit 5 Friends to Caucus for Bernie," "Be a Precinct Captain for Bernie … let's meet!"). Around the walls were the names of neighborhoods or towns—Urbandale ("Bernie-dale," as it was dubbed), Altoona, Waukee—and activists were encouraged to sit near their hometown. Staffers in light blue "Bernie" shirts walked around with clipboards, making sure everyone's information was taken down.
"Bernie's drawing big crowds," Sanders's Iowa director, Robert Becker, told the crowd to applause. "Now it's time to organize … this is about building an army."
July 29th is the most important day of the campaign so far:
As a crush of millennials crowded into a brewery near Nationals Park on Thursday night, a young man setting up a loudspeaker for Sen. Bernie Sanders took the microphone. “Testing. One. Two. Three. The political revolution is here.”
The septuagenarian socialist who is disrupting the Democratic presidential race soon arrived and refined the message. The revolution is still coming, Sanders (I-Vt.) said. Hopefully on July 29.
On that Wednesday night, six months before the Iowa caucus, Sanders will livestream his case for the presidency to more than 1,500 simultaneous gatherings planned in bars, coffee shops and living rooms nationwide. The candidate’s address will be followed by an organizational meeting for anyone who wants to stay online and discuss joining his campaign.
Bernie believes Goldman Sachs wants undue influence in government:
As all five Democratic presidential candidates descended on Cedar Rapids, Iowa to share a stage for the first time, Senator Bernie Sanders cited his rival Hillary Clinton's support from Goldman Sachs as one of the factors that distinguish them.
In the city's Veterans Memorial building where he held a press conference the senator, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Veterans Affairs committee, talked about care for retired members of the military. But reporters focused on Clinton.
Asked about the $50,000 Clinton received from Goldman Sachs employees. “Obviously I didn’t get any money from Goldman Sachs," said the Vermont socialist, who has been campaigning against the "billionaire class."
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I don’t take corporate PAC money, never have, don’t want it," Sanders added.
Asked what he thought Goldman Sachs expected to gain by donating to Clinton, Sanders said: “Obviously what Goldman Sachs wants, what corporate America wants, what the Koch brothers want, is undue influence over the political process.”
Question: should she give the money back?
“You ask her.”
Sanders -on Veterans:
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said he’s well aware of the nation’s large deficit and growing national debt. But he said those financial realities are no excuse for ignoring the nation’s military veterans.
“But I also know of a deeper debt,” he said, “and that is to stand by the men and women who stood by us for the rest of their lives.”
In a press conference today, Sanders doubled down on his commitment to caring for veterans prior to speaking at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame Celebration Friday evening — an event that is slated to attract all five Democratic candidates for president.
The Killer Mike endorsement keeps
generating headlines:
Polls are ever-changing, but Americans will never long for a king or queen. When Run the Jewels rapper Killer Mike tweeted "I cannot support another Clinton or bush ever," he echoed the sentiments of Americans throughout the country tired of entrenched political factions in Washington. As for why political dynasties are ruinous to any democracy, the Atlanta rapper says, "I am beginning to see American political families like monarchs and I have no affection for monarchs." This sentiment, in addition to the reasons Killer Mike has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, can't be accurately assessed by opinion polls or political wonks.
In fact, it could spell trouble for the Clinton campaign and Democratic strategists enamored with poll driven forecasts. When a recent analysis says that Bernie Sanders is popular primarily among "white liberals," the aggregate data used to make such a claim ignores the fact that black children face a 38% poverty rate and African-Americans as a group face a 27% poverty rate. This analysis questioning Sanders's appeal to minority voters also ignores a finding from Pew Research that states, "In 2011, the typical white household had a net worth of $91,405, compared with $6,446 for black households."
In terms of wealth inequality, one candidate in 2016 has been referred to by POLITICO as "Wall Street Republicans' dark secret," while the other "Goes Biblical" on income inequality. As for tackling Wall Street and income equality, Hillary Clinton for some reason hasn't endorsed a renewed Glass-Steagall Act, while Bernie Sanders has long supported a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. Therefore, it's safe to say that voters experiencing the injustice of economic disenfranchisement might side with Killer Mike's choice of candidates in the long run; especially when more people become aware of the differences in economic policy between Clinton and Sanders.
In some ways Sanders is winning the money game:
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton won the fundraising competition, but rival Bernie Sanders snagged the award for running the more frugal operation, campaign finance reports filed this week show.
Sen. Sanders of Vermont has been waging a campaign with a fraction of Mrs. Clinton’s overhead.
The Clinton campaign payroll dwarfed that of Mr. Sanders, who is running second in the Democratic field. Mrs. Clinton spent nearly $3.7 million on campaign salaries; Mr. Sanders, $112,000.
Her campaign spent more than $900,000 on polling in the quarter that ended June 30; Mr. Sanders, $0.
And on it goes.
The Clinton campaign, headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., spent about $464,000 on rent – more than 10 times what the Burlington, Vt.-based Sanders campaign laid out in rent payments.
Niall Stanage @ The Hill:
Bernie Sanders is making a push for support from black and Hispanic voters as he seeks to intensify his challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, has made a number of comments recently aimed at rebutting the suggestion that his backing will be limited to white progressives.
“As a nation, we have got to apologize for slavery,” he said during an appearance on a black-oriented Sirius XM radio show hosted by Joe Madison last week. In an interview published this month in The Nation, he described police brutality against African-Americans as “a huge issue,” adding, “How do you have police departments in this country that are part of their communities, not oppressors in their communities?”
Speaking to the Hispanic organization La Raza on Monday, he noted that “racism has plagued this country for centuries” and drew on his own experiences as the child of an immigrant who “came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 without a nickel in his pocket.”
Sanders’ embrace of minority concerns and sensibilities can hardly be called opportunistic. His involvement with civil rights stretches back to his youth, when he attended the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his most famous speech, organized financial support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was arrested for protesting segregation.
Big Turnouts In Red States:
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has a message that is so popular that he was forced to move a rally in Texas to a larger venue to accommodate the growing crowd.
The Sanders campaign announced the change in venue for the Democratic candidate’s Houston, TX rally on July 19, “With turnout projections mounting, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign has shifted the location of Sunday’s town meeting in Houston, Texas, to the Hofheinz Pavilion.”
These events were intended to be town hall meetings, but demand is so high that format has been getting changed to a campaign rally. I anticipate that the Houston event will also be more of a rally than a town hall.
Demand has also forced the campaign to move a Saturday rally in Phoenix to a larger venue, as the big crowds are showing no signs of diminishing for Bernie Sanders.
Republicans should be terrified of Bernie Sanders’ popularity because Texas is the heart of the Republican Party. The state is demographically changing, but the reason Republicans should be worried about Sanders is that he is demonstrating the power of a liberal populist economic message in red states.
Sanders calls for a revolution in Iowa:
On Friday, Bernie Sanders may have been the first sitting United States Senator to call for “political revolution” at a rubber chicken dinner.
In front of a crowd of 1,300 Democrats at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame dinner in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Sanders gave an unapologetically left-wing speech to a crowd of Democratic activists.
Sanders went out of his way to establish his progressive bona fides on issue after issue as a cheering contingent of supporters yelled, hollered and clinked silverware on glasses to indicate their support for his campaign.
The Vermont senator, who is a self-identified socialist, railed against “the powers that be in Washington, DC” and warned that “the billionaire class” is so powerful “that nothing will get done unless millions of people stand up and loudly proclaim that enough is enough”.
Sanders warned “America now has more wealth and income inequality than any country today” and said this was the great moral issue of our time.
He went on to hit the full panoply of liberal issues. Sanders pledged to make overturning Citizens United a litmus test for any Supreme Court justice he might appoint and warned the decision was pushing the United States towards “an oligarchic form of society”.
Where Bernie is King:
Thousands of liberal Democrats are descending on this desert city this weekend. But not Hillary Clinton.
Clinton's absence from the Netroots Nation conference, an annual gathering of nearly 3,000 progressive activists, is another sign of the uphill battle she faces in connecting with the most liberal wing of her party. And the rise of Bernie Sanders, her liberal challenger, is on full display.
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n her absence, these activists are devoting energy to Sanders, a lawmaker with one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, who they embrace as a true believer.
"There's no doubt about his authenticity," Democracy for America spokesman Neil Stroka told CNN. "After eight years of feeling that we're part of the way, we really know we're going to need a fighter and a champion to get us the next steps."
Obama Donors Flock To Sanders:
Bernie Sanders is drawing more of Barack Obama's 2012 campaign donors than Hillary Clinton.
And Marco Rubio is scoring the biggest share of Mitt Romney's contributors thus far.
These are the findings of Crowdpac, a San Francisco-based political data-mining firm which analyzed the July presidential campaign finance reports.
The Vermont senator has already received contributions from 24,582 of Obama's donors; whereas Clinton has only tapped just over 9,000 of them. Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, has grabbed 383 Obama donors.
That means Sanders has nabbed 72 percent of the 34,340 Obama donors who have given to a candidate in 2016, according to Crowdpac.
14 Things Sanders Has Said About Socialism:
Here, then, are 14 things Sanders has said about socialism since the ‘80s:
1. In the summer 1986 issue of a now-defunct magazine called Vermont Affairs: “All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small ‘d.’ I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure. One has to be an idiot to believe that the average working person who’s making $10,000 or $12,000 a year is equal in political power to somebody who is the head of a large bank or corporation. So if you believe in political democracy, if you believe in equality, you have to believe in economic democracy as well.”