JDPriestly
JDPriestly's JournalForrgive me for paraphrasing your statement in post #15.
"It's easy to have a record like Sanders" if you have a brilliant mind and can enjoy the luxury of thinking independently BECAUSE YOU DON'T ACCEPT HUGE DONATIONS FROM BILLIONAIRE DONORS.
It's also easy to have a record like Sanders if your lifestyle is not lavish and is close to that of the average person and therefore you don't have to make $200,000 speeches to the very banksters that are pinching pennies out of the pension funds of the people you claim you want to represent.
Bernie is simply the smartest guy in the room.
No matter the label he carries or that the media attaches to him.
See this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251555615
That links you to an article discussing Bernie's uncanny ability to foresee disasters before they occur.
The must-read article on his track record of prescience:
http://stupidpartymathvmyth.com/1/post/2015/06/bernard-bernie-sanders-the-political-foresight-champion.html
Bernie warning about entering into the Iraq War.
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/video/flashback-rep-bernie-sanders-opposes-iraq-war
Proven right.
Bernie warning about the gambling on Wall Street and the crisis it would and did lead to:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4537613/bernie-sanders-predicts-wall-st-collapse
Note that this c-span video is dated 1998!
A couple of times in a century, we get the opportunity to elect a true leader, one who has the judgment and wisdom to excite us with new vision and guide us with wise caution. Bernie is that opportunity.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the country was divided. As I understand it, although he did not favor slavery, he never intended to force slave states to abolish it. The argument was about the ability of slaveholders to pursue and capture slaves in the North. That is my understanding.
But the remarkable thing about Lincoln was that he had the moral courage and the intuition and the foresight to see that protecting the Union was our foremost priority and that slavery as an institution was too great a danger to our Union and to the rights of man and of the slaves to tolerate.
He was a leader, a wise man, a courageous man.
But to much of the country, his ideas were horrifying. To be an abolitionist was in the South akin to being a Communist in the US.
Bernie is not a Communist. He is a Democratic Socialist. There is a huge difference. Western Europe even when conservatives are in charge as in Germany, still provide free college tuition and single-payer healthcare to their people. They do not entangle their military in crazy adventures without thinking about how they will govern the countries after they have ventured into them.
Sanders is that kind of cautious Democratic Socialist. A lot of Americans will like his ideas.
He is 73 years old, an age at which even Jeb Bush thinks he is entitled to retire and enjoy his life. But he is willing to go on and serve his country and the American people. He has great wisdom, years of experience and a powerful bunch of courage and energy, and I sure do hope for the sake of our country, that we elect him in 2016.
He is the first and only presidential candidate who has inspired me to this degree in my life, and I myself am 72. I have never seen a candidate of the quality of Bernie Sanders.
We will be so lucky if we can elect him.
He is fiscally somewhat conservative in my view. He has served on the Budget Committee. He may be the ranking member. He said in his speech to the DLC that one of his first goals will be to order an audit of the military.
If you have ever talked with someone who handled military contracts or did military work, you will understand why that is a good idea. The process encourages spendthrift use of tax money. It is very likely that we can have the same or a better defense than we now have for less money. Bernie is not a spendthrift foolish person.
I think that electing him is the chance of the century for America.
In 1998 Bernie Sanders predicted the economic collapse that the gambling on Wall Street
would lead to.
America did not listen then. Will we listen now?
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4537613/bernie-sanders-predicts-wall-st-collapse
Rarely, maybe once or twice in a century, does our country have the opportunity to elect a man with Bernie's intellect, judgment and foresight. He asks the right questions. He has proved that over and over.
Will we miss this opportunity?
I hope not.
http://stupidpartymathvmyth.com/1/post/2015/06/bernard-bernie-sanders-the-political-foresight-champion.html
Thanks to peacebird who posted this on DU here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251555615
Feel the Bern!
Wrong. Brown v. Board of Education and the Supreme Court decisions
that supported the rights of people of color were decided by courts of 9 justices, 8 white and one lone Black.
Those white justices were relatively liberal and were appointed by relatively liberal presidents including the Republican, Dwight Eisenhower. It was Eisenhower, a white president and not ultra-liberal president, who enforced Brown v. Board of Education in Little Rock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
True, Black people, supported by white activists, demonstrated non-violently but persistently for civil rights under the direction of Martin Luther King, supported by a lot of liberals including Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson. But their movement would have failed had it not been for the fact that we had a liberal majority in Congress that was elected thanks to the liberal ECONOMIC POLICIES of FDR and subsequent presidents prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act.
The Civil Rights Act was passed by a majority including many white members of Congress with no support to speak of from white Southerners. It took a president who was liberal on both social and economic issues, Lyndon B. Johnson, to sign the Civil Rights Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
All of these decisions and laws were decided or passed by relatively safe Democratic majorities in the Supreme Court and Congress that were won in a nation that had a strong industrial base, strong unions and an liberal economic policiies.
The tide against liberal majorities in Congress and the Supreme Court date back to the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Viet Nam War. Following the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Goldwater won five states in the South in the presidential election.
n 1968, Nixon ran on the Southern Strategy,, which was opposed to Black equality at the most elementary level. He won the South, and the South which had prior to the Civil Rights Act voted Democratic thanks in great part to FDR's economic policies.
Since the 1968 election of Nixon, we have elected only three Democratic presidents, two of whom were from the South. The third was a Black president. Thanks to our failure to elect sufficient numbers of liberal Democrats, regardless of race, to Congress, we are unable to pass legislation either on important economic issues, voting rights or justice for Black people on the streets, in their contact with the police and in general. Really vital law enforcement reform as well as the passage of environmental legislation, the repeal of damaging trade agreements and the passage of trade agreements that support the rights of humans and not corporations, as well as domestic economic reform will only be possible when we have both a very liberal president AND VERY A VERY LIBERAL MAJORITY IN CONGRESS AND ON THE SUPREME COURT.
So, no, we don't get to vote for just whomever we want to vote for if we want to change our country. Certainly, Obama's administration is proof of that. I like Obama very much, but he has not been able to make the changes he probably wants to make because he has not had the support of a liberal Congress. To get a liberal Congress, voters have to think strategically. You have to choose candidates who are very liberal but who know how to appeal to a very broad base of voters and to attract new voters to the polls. Describes Bernie Sanders to a tee.
. . . .
It was FDR's economic policies that improved the lives of white and Black Americans, white Americans more than Black Americans, but ultimately, all Americans that made it possible to have a majority in Congress that would pass the Civil Rights Act, and other legislation that was necessary to improve the lives of Black people.
Today, minorities are potentially a larger portion of the electorate in the past, but in spite of the urgency and importance of Black issues including Black Lives Matter, judging from the past, especially our losses in 2014, we Democrats cannot expect to elect a majority in the Congress unless we all work together.
To gain votes and to get out the votes of all Democrats in the US we have to focus on both equality and justice issues and above all environmental issues, because there will be very little for any of us to argue about if we continue to destroy our environment at the current rate: economic equality and justice, racial equality and justice, gender equality and justice, environmental equality and justice. All of these issues.
We will not succeed in one area without succeeding in all of them.
We cannot win elections if we focus only or overwhelmingly on racial and gender issues and do not focus also on economic and environmental issues. The majority, thus far, is just not there if we narrow our focus.
It is not a choice between these issues. We have to choose all of them.
If Black people want to continue the current situation in which the federal government does not have the legal authority to do much about the police brutality at the local level, they cannot make the mistake that the union members made in 1980. They need to support the truest, strongest progressives in the country. In the presidential elections, that means voting for Bernie Sanders.
If Black people or union members vote for right-wing or our middle-of-the-road, slow-to-move-toward justice candidate, Hillary Clinton, we will lose in the general election.
It's our failure to emphasize and explain the need for economic justice that ended the Democratic majority in Congress. We need to return to emphasis on economic issues if we are to have a strategy that will elect enough truly liberal Democrats to Congress to make progress on environmental and most of all on racial issues.
We are nearing a time when people of color will have a majority. I think we may already be there in California. That's great. But we aren't there in many states including mid-western states. The political reality is that we need liberal members of Congress from many states including Southern states. We can't wait until people of color are in the majority in enough states to elect a strongly Democratic Congress.
BLM is absolutely right on their issues, but from what I can tell, they are wrong on electoral strategy. They have to work with white liberals to get what they want. Politics is a matter of mutual support,, of coalitions. I know that Black DUers don't like to hear this, but we have to work together, and we need to support liberal Democrats who will go further on justice issues, racial, economic and especially environmental than the Carter, the Clintons and Obama have gone.
That's the reality. It may not be fair, but it is the reality. Think about it.
Until we get a strong, strong liberal majority in Congress, the racial injustice in police departments and neighborhoods is in the control of local authorities. The president can't do much about it.
So the strategy to achieve racial justice and to stop the killings of Black people by law enforcement has to be to elect a strongly liberal, a truly liberal majority to Congress as well as a truly liberal president.
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