Bernie Sanders is the kind of Democrat we used to have more of.

[Octafish]

People unafraid of trying -- and doing -- what's never been done before.



New Dealer. Liberal. Progressive. Kind Hearted. Unafraid of Hard Work or the Good Fight.

A citizen with integrity, Bernie Sanders stands for the Constitution and believes ALL people are equal under the law and ALL are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not just those who can afford it.

What's more: He isn't afraid of a fight to do what's necessary to make this a better country for ALL. And he wants to use the power of government to make that happen.

A Democrat.

[gyroscope]

1. Bernie Sanders type politician is normal in Europe

Clinton would be considered far right over there.

[Octafish]

10. Reagan and his ilk made ''Liberal'' into a perjorative.

Shows the power of the media.

Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda

The Attack on Democracy

The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.

John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.

Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.

This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.

SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html

http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3

Helps explain how we got here and what we need to do to move forward, starting with putting the "Public" into Airwaves again.

[gyroscope]

22. And Obama says Reagan is his hero

Obama is ashamed to be identified as a liberal, calls himself a centrist. We certainly know he is no liberal.

[FarPoint]

76. Mr Sanders is still a Democratic Freshman.

He adjusted his Party affiliation in April 2015....

[hifiguy]

2. Yup.

Franklin Roosevelt
Harry Truman
John Kennedy
Hubert Humphrey
Lyndon Johnson (domestic policy)
Robert Kennedy
George McGovern
Ted Kennedy
Paul Wellstone

Y'know, the DEMOCRATIC wing of the Democratic Party. The kind of people who STAND for the PEOPLE and not for the billionaires.

[Octafish]

11. THEM!

Thank you, hifiguy! THOSE Democrats. I'd add the late Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) who warned us in 1975:

Frank Church was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.

The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, of course, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.

And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:

In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.

SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1

From GWU's National Security Archives:

"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.

Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era

Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted – September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr

Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 – During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).

SNIP...

Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]

SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/

I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT) also got the treatment from NSA? He was a Republican from back in the day when they could be Liberal and honest people of integrity.

“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.” — Senator Richard Schweiker on “Face the Nation” in 1976.

Lost to History NOT

Old news to you, hifiguy. A real shocker to 99-percent of America.

[hifiguy]

13. I knew I was forgetting someone I had a lot of admiration for.

Followed the Church Committee like a bloodhound back in the day when all there was were newspapers and a couple of liberal political journals. I remember New Times being a great magazine.

[Feeling the Bern]

38. Allard Lowenstein

Bella Abzug
Fritz Mondale
Adlai Stevenson
Jimmy Carter

This is where it needs to be with Democrats.

No more Blue Dogs. No more DLC. No more Third Way.

[MohRokTah]

3. Sanders is Democrat In Name Ony

He'll keep the label until after the election to maintain appearances after losing the primaries, but he'll still drop it.

He's always HATED the Democratic Party.

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

5. He told you that personally, did he?

Or did you just pull that out of your ass?

[MohRokTah]

9. Since he is currently raising money for an independent run for re-election as Senator,...

it's a safe bet he'll at least wait until after the election before resuming his status as an independent. Otherwise he'll experience horrid backlash from his colleagues in the Senate.

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

12. OK, so,

Explain to me how you get from a possible 2018 Senate run as an independent to "He's always HATED the Democratic Party"?

[MohRokTah]

15. Go look at what he has said about the Democratic Party over his career.

I am not going to go gather a list of all the nasty things he has said. They are too numerous.

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

23. That's what I thought.

Criticism of the Democratic party or Democratic politicians is equivalent to hating the Democratic party in your mind then.

[Feeling the Bern]

40. Dissent is disloyalty. Party before principles.

[Jenny_92808]

32. +1

[Octafish]

17. You should know more, then. Here: Bernie Sanders’s New Deal Socialism

Bernie Sanders’s New Deal Socialism

by Jedediah Purdy
The New Yorker, NOVEMBER 20, 2015

We finally know what Bernie Sanders means by “democratic socialism.” Speaking on his political philosophy at Georgetown yesterday, the Vermont senator and Democratic Presidential candidate opened with a long invocation of Franklin Roosevelt and the social protections that the New Deal created: minimum wages, retirement benefits, banking regulation, the forty-hour workweek. Roosevelt’s opponents attacked all these good things as “socialism,” Sanders reminded his listeners.

SNIP...

A decade before the Wall fell, the United States saw the quieter but also momentous collapse of the pro-government consensus that dominated the middle of the twentieth century. The Eisenhower paradox—that he was a big-government, welfarist conservative—is no paradox at all: he led the center-right at a time when the center was deeply welfarist and big-government. American politics after the Second World War was founded on the core idea of the earlier Progressive movement, which both F.D.R. and his cousin Theodore championed: the old ideals of personal liberty, economic opportunity, and civic equality could not survive in a laissez-faire industrial economy. Values once associated with small government now needed big government—the regulatory state—to preserve them. So, in 1937, F.D.R. urged that government should “solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization,” and, in 1965, L.B.J. echoed him, warning that “change and growth seem to tower beyond the control and even the judgment of men.” Strong government was the answer: a counter-power to wealth and to economic crisis. Their world was also Dwight Eisenhower’s.

Ronald Reagan’s declaration, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” announced a new era. Government did not in fact shrink, thanks largely to military spending and retirement benefits, but the willingness to say that it could provide what F.D.R. had called “a permanently safe order of things,” let alone F.D.R.’s economic “Second Bill of Rights,” was almost forgotten. The market was the new all-purpose solution, even before the Soviet collapse and the subsequent elevation of disruption, innovation, and self-branding as the language of emancipation.

SNIP...

That is the lost world to which Sanders’s “socialism” points back. The return of the label, though, doesn’t mean that anyone knows how to get more radical than tacking toward Scandinavian social democracy, with its socialized health care and higher education and generous family leave. Sanders isn’t much of a socialist compared to F.D.R., either. At the heart of Roosevelt’s program was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which greatly strengthened the hand of unions, essential parts of every welfare-capitalist order in the twentieth century, from Scandinavia to Canada. Sanders, astonishingly, didn’t once mention unions in his Georgetown speech. Roosevelt proposed a maximum income of twenty-five thousand dollars (the equivalent of about four hundred thousand dollars today), which we won’t be hearing from Sanders. Sanders’s socialism is a national living wage, free higher education, increased taxes on the wealthy, campaign-finance reform, and strong environmental and racial-justice policies.

This is not a program for a different kind of economy, based on coöperation and deepened democracy— what socialism used to stand for, which powered it as both a threat and a hope. The heart of Sanders’s program, like F.D.R.’s, is economic security: like F.D.R., he argues that “true freedom does not occur” without it. In the same way, he sees a strong government as protecting individualism from an economy that bats people around like the gods in Greek dramas. Calling this once mainstream idea socialism is a way of saying how far it feels from where we find ourselves now, how radical a step it would be to get back to it.

SOURCE: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/bernie-sanderss-new-deal-socialism

[MohRokTah]

18. I don't read anything you post. eom

[malokvale77]

25. But yet here you are in his thread. nt

[MohRokTah]

28. I never claimed to have read the OP. eom

[Javaman]

36. I get it, rant instead of being informed with, you know, facts.

now I know not to read anything you post.

including your reply to my post.

[MohRokTah]

41. Facts?

[Octafish]

35. Let me know if ignorance is bliss.

Going by your word selection, it's hard to tell.

[nadinbrzezinski]

43. So why are you even a participant in this thread?

Honest question.

There are some on this board that I hardly consider more than white noise. I only read them for comedic relief at this point... but hardly answer or post in their threads.

That is the adult thing to do. by the way.

Oh and you are in the white noise category as well, but on this one, you need to be called on it.

[MohRokTah]

44. Read the subject line, opened the thread, saw who posted it, made my response.

I can't see who posts a thread on my iPad mini until I open the thread.

[nadinbrzezinski]

47. So after you opened the thread you knew who posted it

close it, trash it, whatever and move on.

And with that, have a good day

[MohRokTah]

49. Nope, I post in it. eom

[nadinbrzezinski]

50. And the rest of us get a good laugh

I suppose your other calling is comedy. If that is the goal, well thanks for the raucous laugh.

[MohRokTah]

51. I merely posted the truth.

How you take the truth is up to you.

[nadinbrzezinski]

52. Let's be precise, what you believe to be the truth

the rest of us do not need to agree with you, and on this thread, many of don't.

[MohRokTah]

53. No, it is abslutely the factual truth.

Sanders is a Democrat in name only.

That cannot be denied by anybody. The man has been a Socialist his entire political career until he conveniently decided to run as a Democrat.

If the nearly impossible happens and the man is nominated, it won't be the first Democrat In Name Only I held my nose to avoid the stench while voting for them.

[nadinbrzezinski]

55. The party leadership said he was a democrat and welcomed to run as such

by the party leadership. You might want to take that up with them. That is actually the factual truth.

So if the party said he is a democrat, guess what skippy. he is.

This is one more stale recycled talking point that is at this point a horse turned to pulp, but funny pulp nonetheless.

[Agschmid]

65. Jury results.

AUTOMATED MESSAGE: Results of your Jury Service
On Fri Feb 19, 2016, 12:28 PM an alert was sent on the following post:

No, it is abslutely the factual truth.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1269747

REASON FOR ALERT

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate.

ALERTER'S COMMENTS

Calling a Democratic candidate candidate for president, Sanders, a Democrat in name only. He has caucused with and is running as a Democrat so as not to split the vote between a 3rd party.

You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Fri Feb 19, 2016, 12:37 PM, and the Jury voted 1-6 to LEAVE IT.

Juror #1 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: Philosophy, not labels, should win the day. Plenty of time for the poster to appreciate that reality.
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: Sanders is an Independent. Poster does not indicate he will avoid voting for party nominee. Alterter needs to be more objective in the future and avoid confusing accuracy with insults.
Juror #4 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: Nothing against the TOS. No hide.
Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: I disagree with the statement, it's simply wrong. And demands for tribal purity don't help anybody on either side either. That said, I don't see a violation here. Ignore and move on.
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: He is no more of a DINO than the Clintons (who are Republicans pretending to be Democrats), but I vote to leave this alone because I support freedom of speech.
Juror #7 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: OMG this is nothing.

Thank you very much for participating in our Jury system, and we hope you will be able to participate again in the future.

[MohRokTah]

66. Every post I make is alerted on.

I know that. There's no way to stop it either.

[whatchamacallit]

19. The party is a corrupt turd

[MohRokTah]

20. Thanks for outting your true self. eom

[whatchamacallit]

24. My true self is

a dyed in the wool liberal.

[MohRokTah]

27. Yeah. Gotcha.

[whatchamacallit]

34. Haha...

I invite you to peruse my long history of posts for any signs to the contrary. You know, with all the war lovin, pro-corporate democrats infesting the party these days, it shouldn't be a surprise actual liberals no longer want to have any part of it. But carry on with your righteous crusade EstablishmentPartyMan.

[Bohemianwriter]

59. He's been caucusing with the liberal parts...

of the Democratic party.

The fraction that Bill And Hillary drove into exile with their dirty money, and RW talking points. If anything, it's Hilary who are a democrat in name only. Every action she has done since she got into power positions is to impose republican policies. Both foreign and domestic.

[dragonfly301]

4. I think I'd put Hubert Humphrey's pic there instead of JFK

I think HHH would be very excited that Bernie was running.

[hifiguy]

14. Speaking as a Minnesotan of a certain age

they certainly do sound alike on policy. I hear a lot of Wellstone in there, too!

[tokenlib]

29. Remind Al Franken of that....

Implying Wellstone would endorse Hillary. Kind of offensive when he did that in my view...

[hifiguy]

30. Oy. If Wellstone were alive it might have been him in Bernie's place.

Not a chance in hell. Very disappointed in Franken about that. Barbara Boxer, too.

[Mnpaul]

57. Franken has been friends with the Clintons going way back

I think it is more of a friendship thing than a policy endorsement.

[Octafish]

37. Humphrey was a great Democrat, ruined by LBJ

The sad story of Humphrey's role at 1964 Democratic convention

By Eric Black
MinnPost | 05/27/11

The saga of the Humphrey vice presidency is not a happy one. Humphrey, one of the greatest senators in history, sold great chunks of his political soul for the honor of serving under LBJ, a man who liked to say of those whom he similarly dominated: “I’ve got his pecker in my pocket.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard not to believe that HHH would have been better off — and would have been more likely to achieve his dream of the presidency — if he had stayed in the Senate and held onto his freedom of conscience, of expression and of political movement rather than plighting his troth to such a demanding groom.

LBJ’s astonishing legislative accomplishments as president entitle him to a place in the liberal pantheon. But where his political ambitions were concerned, he was a force of nature, and I don’t mean a rainbow.

Nathanson mentioned that while Humphrey was angling for veep gig, LBJ assigned him to take care of the potential disruption of the 1964 Dem convention over two competing delegations from Mississippi. Humphrey, with the help of his protégé, Walter Mondale, got it done, thus leaping over the last hurdle LBJ had established before Humphrey could be placed on the ticket. As Humphrey would later write about his attitude toward LBJ’s demands: “Whatever Lyndon Johnson wanted, Johnson would get."

As Nathanson wrote: “And so, at Humphrey’s behest, Mondale was able to arrange at least a tenuous settlement of the dispute that gave the [Mississippi] Freedom Democrats some symbolic seats at the convention.”

CONTINUED...

https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2011/05/sad-story-humphreys-role-1964-democratic-convention

How different this nation would be had HHH won in 1968.

[tclambert]

46. I sometimes imagine how different our world might be if Robert Kennedy had lived.

"Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." Robert Kennedy often made that statement, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw. I think if he had gone on to win the presidency, we would have colonies on Mars by now.

[brooklynite]

48. So, dynasties are OK as long as you like the family?

[Octafish]

56. Yeah. Seeing how the Kennedy brothers worked to advance Democracy and Peace.

For instance, JFK worked to keep the nation out of World War III when all around him counseled war several times:

Even though they knew their invasion plans were compromised, the CIA and Pentagon tried to force Kennedy to make war over the Bay of Pigs.

While an attack on Soviet missile bases in Cuba and on ships at sea would escalate to nuclear war, the Pentagon and most of the Cabinet tried to force Kennedy to make war, nuclear if necessary -- the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Pentagon and the Hawks in Congress and his Cabinet recommended war in Vietnam and southeast Asia to stop the spread of Communism, Kennedy sent volunteers -- which he ordered out by the end of 1964 -- but said he would never commit U.S. draftees to fight in another country's civil war, Vietnam.

Most troublesome to me, seeing how the Hawks lied America into invading Iraq twice in the last 22 years, DCI Allen Dulles and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer counseled Kennedy to order an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in Fall of 1963 -- the optimal time for a successful pre-emptive war.

When I have more time, I'll post about the domestic policy was geared toward Democracy and Prosperity for ALL.

[tclambert]

60. No, family based dynasties generally don't work out for long. But I wouldn't object to a guy

just because he's related to a past leader, especially if that previous leader achieved good results. I wouldn't object to or support Hillary just because her husband was once a pretty good president. I wish she would fight for more ambitious policies, though. Now, Jeb Bush makes me worry because his brother was such a terrible president yet Jeb sometimes says he thinks W did a good job. Those family connections sometimes give us a clue as to how a candidate might perform on the job.

Still, in the Roman empire they had a string of emperors they called the "five good emperors," none of whom rose to power due to blood lineage. When they broke that string and the title passed to a natural born son, well, that was Commodus inheriting the title from Marcus Aurelius and the movie Gladiator wasn't entirely fiction. Commodus began the decline of the empire. On the other hand (I may be up to three hands by now), Caesar Augustus, considered by many the very best emperor of Rome, was Julius Caesar's biological grandnephew.

[earthside]

6. And Hillary is the kind of Republican we used to have more of.

It is my observation from growing up in the 1960s that Hillary sounds like the Republicans back then.

It all shows the rightward tilt of the nation. Sanders is much more like the classical, traditional labor New Deal Democrat.

Hillary is much more like the Republican tradition she grew up in ... literally ... Goldwater, Rockefeller, et al.

It is too bad that there aren't more moderate Republicans like Hillary Clinton instead of the looney-toons Tea Party types prevalent now.

[hifiguy]

16. Seriously, she'd make a good nominee of the former, adult Republican party.

And I am not snarking. I remember when there were sane, responsible grown-ups in the Republican party with whom one could disagree in a spirit of civility.

[Octafish]

54. Hillary Clinton's Ghosts: A Legacy of Pushing the Democratic Party to the Right

By Michael Corcoran
Truthout | News Analysis, Dec. 2, 2015

A discussion about how the Democrats could be compromised by their relationship with the financial institutions that fund their campaigns was unthinkable in past presidential debates. Such a discussion falls way outside the narrow parameters of debate that have dominated political discourse in the mainstream media for decades. But at the Democratic debate in Iowa this November, this issue was front and center: Hillary Clinton was forced to defend her financial relationship with Wall Street numerous times on network television.

SNIP...

But the party's latest generation of "New Democrats" - self-described "moderates" who are funded by Wall Street and are aggressively trying to steer the party to the right - have noticed this trend and are now fighting back. Third Way, a "centrist" think tank that serves as the hub for contemporary New Democrats, has recently published a sizable policy paper, "Ready for the New Economy," urging the Democratic Party to avoid focusing on economic inequality. Former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley, a Third Way trustee, recently argued that Sanders' influence on the primary "is a recipe for disaster" for Democrats.

This "ideological gulf" inside the party, as The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus describes it, is not a new phenomenon. Before there was Third Way, there was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). And before there was Bill Daley, there was Hillary Clinton - a key member of the DLC's leadership team during her entire tenure in the US Senate (2000-2008). As Clinton seeks progressive support, it is important to consider her role in the influential movement to, as The American Prospect describes it, "reinvent the [Democratic] party as one pledged to fiscal restraint, less government, and a pro-business, pro-free market outlook." This fairly recent history is an important part of Clinton's record, and she owes it to primary voters to answer for it.

SNIP...

Many of these "centrist" ideas lack popular support these days. But New Democrats were never really about popular support; they were about bringing together big business and the Democrats. The group's board of trustees is almost entirely made up of Wall Street executives. Further, in the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, these same moneyed interests have more influence over the political process than ever before.

"These organizations now are basically just corporate lobbyists today," Schmitt said.

So while the DLC may be a dirty word among many progressives, this didn't stop Obama from appointing New Democrats to key posts in his White House. The same Bill Daley who works for a hedge fund and is on the board of trustees for Third Way was also President Obama's White House chief of staff. And, as was noted above, he is now actively trying to influence the Democratic Party's direction in the 2016 election.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33869-hillary-clinton-s-ghosts-a-legacy-of-pushing-the-democratic-party-to-the-right

PS: Absolutely, earthside. It'd be great if the GOP were actually sane, fiscal conservatives. In opposition, my Democratic Party should be working to use the power of government to make life better for ALL, not just the wealthy.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[Octafish]

58. Austerity is UNDEMOCRATIC: Consider President Clinton and the Chilean Model

Did you see this, Uncle Joe?

The author was a Chicago Boy helping implement the privatization scam for Pinochet, ITT and the globalist crowd. It seems its "success" made certain, more, eh, centrist Democrats want to adapt the Chilean Piratization Model:

President Clinton and the Chilean Model.

By José Piñera

Midnight at the House of Good and Evil

"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.

That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.

Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:

Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.

Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).

I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.

“The mother of all reforms”

While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.

So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”

But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.

[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm

Democratic solutions work because they are Democratic, not capitalist. Democrats put PEOPLE ahead of PROFIT. Then, again, you know that Uncle Joe!

[libtodeath]

8. Bernie is the heir to FDR not the heir to corporate oligarchs.

[Octafish]

61. Government by Goldman Sachs

Former SEC regulator Carmen Segarra taped the top federal regulator at Goldman say certain laws don't apply to the rich.



Those interested in justice may want to download a copy before they're gone:

The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra

From This American Life:

An unprecedented look inside one of the most powerful, secretive institutions in the country. The NY Federal Reserve is supposed to monitor big banks. But when Carmen Segarra was hired, what she witnessed inside the Fed was so alarming that she got a tiny recorder and started secretly taping.

SOURCE: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/536/the-secret-recordings-of-carmen-segarra

What another economist noted before he got fired and then won the Nobel Prize:

Larry Summers: Goldman Sacked

Monday, September 16, 2013
By Greg Palast for Reader Supported News

Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, "What would Goldman think of that?"

Huh?

Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think? A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he'd turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on "what Goldman thought." As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.

Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-goldman-sacked/

Then there's Goldman Sach's legendary generosity, not limited to the Executive and Legislative branches.

Here's The REAL Connection Elena Kagan Has To Goldman: Three Days Of Easy Work

Newly nominated Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's supposed connection to Goldman Sachs is much ado about nothing.

Reports are flying around that she "worked for Goldman," when she straight up did not.

She was one of many on a council that spent three days (one day each year from 2005-2008) advising on the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute. Kagan was paid $10,000.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler explains in HuffPo, "They met once a year for a day-long conference organized around public policy matters. The group was not involved in making any investment decisions for the company."

SOURCE: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-real-connection-elena-kagan-has-to-goldman-three-days-of-easy-work-2010-5

Nice people, all, I'm sure, even if Tony Scalia's friend Elena Kagan sided with Karl Rove over Gov. Don Siegelman and 100 former state attorneys general. The thing is, people without money don't get much help from government these days.

[UglyGreed]

21. Yes I've always said

Bernie is what I recall Democrats being. Not Third Way New Democrats.....

[Octafish]

62. Seems Bernie understands New Deal economics.

Meet the Man Who Says Bernie Sanders Can Deliver 5.3% Economic Growth

His analysis is causing a stir in the economics community.

by Chris Matthews
Fortune, FEBRUARY 18, 2016, 10:57 AM EST

On Wednesday, four economists who worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations penned an open letter to the Bernie Sanders campaign and the University of Massachusetts economist Gerald Friedman, attacking them for promoting the idea that Sanders’ proposals could bring spectacular economic benefits, among them 5.3% annual real GDP growth.

They called the claims “extreme,” and argued that the Democratic Party would suffer if its candidates and surrogates exaggerated the benefits of their policy proposals.

Fortune reached out to Friedman to get his side of the story. The following transcript of the conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Fortune: What is your response to the open letter?

Gerald Friedman: First of all, I don’t know if they read my report. There’s nothing in my letter that indicates that they read my report. For what it’s worth, I only just put it up on the web yesterday (February 16), and so there’s nothing that indicates they read it. And none of them ever contacted me for a copy.

Since I’ve known three of the four of them, they could have. I’m totally open about this.

As far as the actual mechanics of it, what I did was completely conventional. I take the multipliers that the Congressional Budget Office uses. I actually assume a reduction in the value of the multiplier over time as the economy expands, and I apply those multipliers to the spending program minus the taxes of the Sanders plan.

I do things with the minimum wage. I make assumptions about how many jobs will be lost. But these are fairly standard assumptions. I get more in terms of GDP, I get a bit of bang out of the healthcare program, because what you are doing is turning premiums paid by working people and turning it into taxes paid by upper-income people. That gives you a boost, especially in the early years.

Somebody could question, as I have a lot, some of my assumptions, but there’s nothing unusual about my methods or the results.

The idea of 5.3% GDP growth seems spectacular.

It is higher than it’s been lately. But I’m afraid we’ve gotten used to poor economic performance as the norm. We’ve been stagnating for eight years, and at this point, seven years into the recovery, we have an employment rate of 59%, which reverses 25 years of employment growth.

We have 10 million fewer jobs than we would have than if we had the employment rate of 2006. We have a lot of underutilized capacity.

CONTINUED...

http://fortune.com/2016/02/18/bernie-sanders-economic-growth/

[amborin]

26. Bernie represents the principles and integrity of the New Deal; policies and programs that made the

middle class strong and brought us prosperity and democracy

[Octafish]

63. A Fair Deal between Capital and Labor.

Where's the Middle Class going in the age of Globalization?

5 Charts That Show How the Middle Class Is Disappearing

by Katie Rose Quandt
Bill Moyers and Company, January 26, 2015

Already the richest country in the world, the United States reached its highest cumulative wealth ever in 2013. It ranked fourth in the world in wealth per person, with $348,000 for every American adult.

But the average American wouldn’t know it. Thanks to economic policies that favor the super-rich and fuel inequality, the typical US adult’s total wealth is $31,688 — not even close to $348,000. And things aren’t poised to change: The median household brought in $51,939 in 2013, a real dollar increase of just $180 from 2012. This recent income stagnation came in the wake of a steep drop from 2007-2011 (mouse over the graph to see data):

SNIP with much interactive data...

From 1979-2012, the 1 Percent's Incomes Grew by 181 Percent

In the same period, the rest of the country saw an increase of just 2.6 percent.

CONTINUED w/links, charts, sources, details and a whole lot more we don't see on the tee vee...

http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/

[amborin]

75. this should be its own OP

[Punkingal]

31. I really long for those days. Sigh.

[Jenny_92808]

33. Me too

but there was no internet then

[Rosa Luxemburg]

39. We did

now we have blue dogs

[Octafish]

71. The way it happened was sickening.

The press did all it could to destroy Jimmy Carter, yet his wisdom and leadership was just what the nation needed.

Instead, they played up Ronald Reagan idiocy for solving the energy crisis: "I'd repeal the 55 mph speed limit."

Had we gone down the green road, developing solar, geothermal, wind, and other renewable sources of clean energy we wouldn't be grinding the long slogs of wars without end for oil.

Who knows where we would be today? I don't believe we would be facing the nightmare of trying to store the nuclear waste that no one knows what to do with -- but the US taxpayer is on the tab for.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

74. Jimmy Carter

He is my favorite president

[tclambert]

42. On Jeopardy they just said that Kennedy's campaign used "High Hopes" as the campaign theme song.

Actually, Frank Sinatra performed a version with special lyrics for the Kennedy campaign:

In case you don't remember the original:

Back then, we as a nation dared to have high hopes. This would make a good campaign theme for Bernie, too. He dares to dream big. It kind of highlights the difference in his approach from Hillary's "dream little" approach. If Bernie gets half what he wants, it would be great. If Hillary gets everything she wants, it would be kinda okay, better than the disaster any of those Republicans would pull down on us, but just not great.

[Octafish]

69. JFK Continued the New Deal as the New Frontier

The peaceful exploration of space was the best thing to happen to jobs in history. At its peak, 400,000 Americans were employed in the Apollo Project.



Imagine if President Kennedy had lived, where the nation would be today? I believe, if we could figure out how to the moon and back, we could face any problem on earth and solve it -- from ending hunger, poverty and ignorance to creating a lasting peace.

The incremental bit where the billionaires let us fight over the scraps isn't going to cut it. Problems today's GOP considers intractable (see Poppy Bush inaugural "More will than Wallet&quot such as joblessness, poverty, crime, would be tackled, instead of ignored, like they've done with public education. And the treasures accumulated since would be used to make life better for everybody on earth instead of sitting in a secret Swiss bank account.

But, no. The conservatives killed the New Deal after LBJ and the Great Society. For the space program, it started with Nixon. Instead, they gave the store away to War Inc, who sank the national treasure into the "Money trumps peace" crowd.

Thank you for the Sinatra and thank you for putting it into words, tclambert. We need to "Dream Big" to solve the problems we face and to leave the world a better place for those who follow.

[tclambert]

73. Thanks. I wish we had more Kennedy democrats like you and Bernie.

On a science fiction note, we used to look to the future of Star Trek. Now we look to the future of Terminators and Elysium and The Walking Dead.

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. The more I read into income inequality and poverty

the more I tend to agree with what you just posted. I fear there will be a meta piece on what this race is about... and it is about that... which is what is driving the third way (and the repubs as well) nuts.

Two parties are now being challenged and the anger is real. The answers are different, that is all.

By the way, add FDR to the list.

[Octafish]

68. From 2013: The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

by Paul Buchheit
Published on Monday, December 30, 2013 by Common Dreams

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn't seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family's net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main - perhaps only - beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

1. $5 Million to Each of the 1%, and $1 Million to Each of the Next 4%

From the end of 2008 to the middle of 2013 total U.S. wealth increased from $47 trillion to $72 trillion. About $16 trillion of that is financial gain (stocks and other financial instruments).

The richest 1% own about 38 percent of stocks, and half of non-stock financial assets. So they've gained at least $6.1 trillion (38 percent of $16 trillion). That's over $5 million for each of 1.2 million households.

The next richest 4%, based on similar calculations, gained about $5.1 trillion. That's over a million dollars for each of their 4.8 million households.

The least wealthy 90% in our country own only 11 percent of all stocks excluding pensions (which are fast disappearing). The frantic recent surge in the stock market has largely bypassed these families.

2. Evidence of Our Growing Wealth Inequality

This first fact is nearly ungraspable: In 2009 the average wealth for almost half of American families was ZERO (their debt exceeded their assets).

In 1983 the families in America's poorer half owned an average of about $15,000. But from 1983 to 1989 median wealth fell from over $70,000 to about $60,000. From 1998 to 2009, fully 80% of American families LOST wealth. They had to borrow to stay afloat.

It seems the disparity couldn't get much worse, but after the recession it did. According to a Pew Research Center study, in the first two years of recovery the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%. And then, from 2011 to 2013, the stock market grew by almost 50 percent, with again the great majority of that gain going to the richest 5%.

Today our wealth gap is worse than that of the third world. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

3. Congress' Solution: Take from the Poor

Congress has responded by cutting unemployment benefits and food stamps, along with other 'sequester' targets like Meals on Wheels for seniors and Head Start for preschoolers. The more the super-rich make, the more they seem to believe in the cruel fantasy that the poor are to blame for their own struggles.

President Obama recently proclaimed that inequality "drives everything I do in this office." Indeed it may, but in the wrong direction.

FORUM HOSTS, PLEASE NOTE: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at [e-mail].

Original Article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/30-0

Buchheit has an excellent website with the latest on income inequality: http://inequality.org/author/paul-buchheit/

[nadinbrzezinski]

70. Among many other pieces

some of the pieces I have read should anger Americans.

And a lot is about trade and all that. People know the system IS rigged

[Octafish]

72. People do know the system is rigged.

When it comes to trade, income inequality, work and retirement: They know who's zooming who with rhetoric versus reality.

[boston bean]

64. Bernie said John F. Kennedy made him sick.

Bernie Sanders Despised Democrats In 1980s, Said A JFK Speech Once Made Him Sick

“Kennedy was young and appealing and ostensibly liberal, but I think at that point, seeing through Kennedy, and what liberalism was, was probably a significant step for me to understand that conventional politics or liberalism was not what was relevant.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ilanbenmeir/bernie-sanders-despised-democrats-in-1980s-said-a-jfk-speech#.yqoRYl6aR

[Octafish]

67. Thanks! That's not the whole story, though.

Here's from your article:

Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders once said that he was “physically nauseated” by a speech made by President John F. Kennedy when Sanders was a young man, because Kennedy’s “hatred for the Cuban Revolution […] was so strong.”

Bernie didn't know then what we've learned since:

Just before his assassination, President Kennedy ordered secret peace talks with Castro

Others in government worked against him.



The National Security Archive at George Washington University has the story:

Kennedy Sought Dialogue with Cuba

INITIATIVE WITH CASTRO ABORTED BY ASSASSINATION,
DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS SHOW

Oval Office Tape Reveals Strategy to hold clandestine Meeting in Havana; Documents record role of ABC News correspondent Lisa Howard as secret intermediary in Rapprochement effort

Washington D.C. - On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the eve of the broadcast of a new documentary film on Kennedy and Castro, the National Security Archive today posted an audio tape of the President and his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, discussing the possibility of a secret meeting in Havana with Castro. The tape, dated only seventeen days before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, records a briefing from Bundy on Castro's invitation to a U.S. official at the United Nations, William Attwood, to come to Havana for secret talks on improving relations with Washington. The tape captures President Kennedy's approval if official U.S. involvement could be plausibly denied.

The possibility of a meeting in Havana evolved from a shift in the President's thinking on the possibility of what declassified White House records called "an accommodation with Castro" in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Proposals from Bundy's office in the spring of 1963 called for pursuing "the sweet approach…enticing Castro over to us," as a potentially more successful policy than CIA covert efforts to overthrow his regime. Top Secret White House memos record Kennedy's position that "we should start thinking along more flexible lines" and that "the president, himself, is very interested in (the prospect for negotiations)." Castro, too, appeared interested. In a May 1963 ABC News special on Cuba, Castro told correspondent Lisa Howard that he considered a rapprochement with Washington "possible if the United States government wishes it. In that case," he said, "we would be agreed to seek and find a basis" for improved relations.

The untold story of the Kennedy-Castro effort to seek an accommodation is the subject of a new documentary film, KENNEDY AND CASTRO: THE SECRET HISTORY, broadcast on the Discovery/Times cable channel on November 25 at 8pm. The documentary film, which focuses on Ms. Howard's role as a secret intermediary in the effort toward dialogue, was based on an article -- "JFK and Castro: The Secret Quest for Accommodation" -- written by Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh in the magazine, Cigar Aficionado. Kornbluh served as consulting producer and provided key declassified documents that are highlighted in the film. "The documents show that JFK clearly wanted to change the framework of hostile U.S. relations with Cuba," according to Kornbluh. "His assassination, at the very moment this initiative was coming to fruition, leaves a major 'what if' in the ensuing history of the U.S. conflict with Cuba."

CONTINUED with links, resources...

This is a story I don't see mentioned very often online, rarely in print, and never on television. I believe it's a good thing for Democrats to know, as well as all people who are interested in making peace and building a better world, including Sen. Bernie Sanders.

DU3 thread from 2012: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002170232

[HooptieWagon]

77. The great liberal Democrats from the NE and Midwest used to be the majority.

The conservative Southern Democrats were the minority faction of the party. The liberal Democrats gave us workers rights, civil rights, Social Security, healthcare, and education that built the middle class and gave us a strong economy. For the last 30 years the DLC has worked alongside Republicans in eroding the middle class and funneling the wealth to the top.

[BlueMTexpat]

78. It is interesting that the article would use

JFK's picture when Bernie didn't think much of JFK.

JFK is one of my heroes. I joined the Peace Corps in 1964 because of him. My entire professional career (now retired for the most part) was in public service one way or another, also because of him and others like him who inspired me.

SBS supporters consider me "lame, "pathetic" and "patronizing" - among the nicest comments I have received - simply because I prefer Hillary.

That is neither liberal nor is it progressive. It is shameful.