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Bernie Sanders Lights a Fire under Pennsylvania Democrats at Keystone Progress’s Annual Summit in Harrisburg; Carl Davidson; Progressive Democrats of America – PA 12th CD Chapter; February 10, 2015.
You can learn more about BCR’s leftster management here. “Leftster” is the combination of leftist and gangster, inspired by the left-originated “bankster.”
“Feb 8, 2015, Harrisburg, PA. If the vote were taken for the Democratic presidential candidate at the Harrisburg Hilton on Saturday, Feb. 7, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, would likely have won by a landslide.”
[RWC] “Independent” Sen. Sanders is really a self-described “democratic socialist.” You won’t find that mentioned in this piece.
Messrs. Sanders and Davidson have an issue with telling the truth. See here and here. As I recommend for everything you read, including my pieces, please check cited facts with authoritative sources. Activists and politicians are not authoritative sources.
“That was the spirit in the hotel ballroom as Sanders addressed the 800 people gathered for the PA Progressive Summit. The annual meeting, sponsored by Keystone Progress, brought together progressive activists—community and trade union organizers, women’s right and civil rights groups, hopeful candidates and door knockers—all of whom made up the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, from all across the Keystone State.”
[RWC] Note the comment about “the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” Did you know “the Wall Street wing” is another Democrat party wing? You won’t find that mentioned in this piece, even as Mr. Sanders rails against “Wall Street.”
“‘I’m going to try something a little different this morning,’ said Sanders to start things rolling, ‘I’m going to tell you the truth.’ He got a wave of laughter and cheers from people who often got something else from politicians.”
[RWC] As you will read, Mr. Sanders apparently lied “to start things rolling.” Mr. Sanders has a record of lying. That’s probably why “He got a wave of laughter and cheers from people.”
“Sanders started off with the ‘Citizen [sic] United’ Supreme Court decision taking limits off the superrich in funding elections and candidates. ‘It will go down is [sic] history as one of the worse [sic] ever made in modern times’ Sanders said by way of description. ‘By a five-to-four vote, it undermined the very foundations of democracy. I know you think the situation is bad, believe me, it’s worse than you think it is.’ Billionaires are not satisfied with owning the economy, he explained. They were buying government as well.’”
[RWC] Messrs. Sanders and Davidson misrepresented Citizens United and failed to note labor unions also benefit from “Citizen [sic] United.” Citizens United v. FEC was about the ability of anyone (including groups of people) to take out their own ads, commercials, etc. expressing their position regarding candidates and issues. Sounds like a free-speech issue to me. As groups of people, the ruling applies to both corporations and labor union management. Direct contributions to federal candidates remain illegal for corporations and labor unions.
“The Koch Brothers, with 85 billion in wealth, were taken as the case in point. Sanders explained that they alone intended to spend over 900 million dollars on the 2016 election—more than the combined total of Obama and Romney in 2012. This meant these ‘counter-revolutionaries with a far right agenda’ would wield more power than both political parties in the recent past.”
[RWC] Messrs. Sanders and Davidson are lying again. First, according to the NY Times, the $889 million (not “over 900 million dollars”) would not come from the Kochs “alone.” “It would require a significant financial commitment from the Kochs and roughly 300 other donors they have recruited over the years, and covers both the presidential and congressional races.”
Second, during the 2012 election, the Obama ($684 million) and Romney ($433) campaigns spent $1.1 billion. That’s more than “900 million dollars.”
During the 2012 election, each party raised about $806 million.
You’ll note lefties never mention their own billionaire contributors like George Soros and Tom Steyer.
If you didn’t know before, you probably have guessed by now the Koch (pronounced “coke”) brothers are boogeymen to the left because they are wealthy and make their ideological/political contributions primarily to conservative and libertarian candidates and causes. If the Koch brothers contributed primarily to lefty candidates and causes, as do wealthy lefties like Peter Lewis (Progressive Insurance), George Soros (Wall Street hedge-fund manager), Tom Steyer (Wall Street hedge-fund manager), et al, they would be lefty heroes. For example, USW CEO Leo Gerard (a foreign national) once wrote of “Democratic benefactor George Soros.” The Kochs are primary owners (84%) and operators of Koch Industries ($115 billion in annual revenue and about 60,000 employees as of July 2013). Here’s a summary of charitable donations made by the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation. Lefties are so deranged about the Kochs they (1199 SEIU, New York State Nurses Association, NAACP …”) actually staged a protest (3/8/14) at the site of the future David H. Koch Center, a new ambulatory care center at New York – Presbyterian Hospital in NYC to which Mr. Koch donated $100 million! When the Kochs donated $25 million to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), lefties went even more nuts than usual. Some prominent leftists and leftist groups wanted the UNCF to return the donation, including AFSCME (a large public employee union) management who cut its ties with the UNCF and encouraged other leftist organizations to do the same.
“Turning to the economy, Sanders said while the economy was clearly in better shape than when Obama, first took office, it was still clearly in bad shape. He explained the different meanings of official unemployment figures, with 5.8 percent being the most common number cited, but double that, near 12%, was more accurate.”
[RWC] Mr. Sanders failed to mention policies he and Mr. Obama support were at the center of what wrecked the economy.
“Then he broke it down further: ‘We talk a lot about Ferguson, as we should. But we also need to talk more about Black youth unemployment, which is 30 percent. Nobody should be satisfied with where we are today. We have 45 million people living in poverty, another word we need to talk more about today.’”
[RWC] Ferguson is just another opportunity for these people to lie.
“For those worried about deficits, Sanders noted that they had been reduced under Obama. But he also insisted that if they were truly concerned about deficits, they would have stood up against the Iraq war. This remark got wild cheers and everyone out of their seats.”
[RWC] Does this mean those “truly concerned about deficits” should have stood up against entering WWII? Though Mr. Sanders “noted that [deficits] had been reduced under Obama,” you’ll note Mr. Sanders didn’t cite the allegedly-responsible Obama policies.
“Unfair Impact of Technological Change
“Sanders went on to examine ‘the explosion in technology,’ not only i-Phones and i-Pads, but robotics in factories. ‘All of this has led to a tremendous growth in productivity on the part of American workers.’ Such changes logically might suggest workers were paid more or worked shorter hours, he added, ‘but all of you know, tens of millions of Americans today are working longer hours for less pay.’
“This meant anger and stress among workers—impacting both men and women, even if in slightly different ways—needed discussion as a national issue. There was a time, ‘ancient history’ said Sanders, when one worker could work 40 hours and support a family reasonably well. Now women were working along with men, sometimes at two or three jobs, at long hours and low pay, to hobble together enough to support a family. ‘This causes a lot of anger, and often it’s being angry at the wrong people for the wrong reasons,’ he added. ‘The average male worker, right in the center of the economy, now makes $800 a year less in inflation adjusted dollars than he did 40 years ago. The average female worker in the center makes $1300 a year, even less. They have a lot to be angry about. They want to know why, and our job is to explain it to them.’”
[RWC] I don’t buy this, but did you notice Mr. Sanders didn’t say how he would fix it?
“Outrageous Inequality as a Key Issue
“Sanders then asked the crowd to look at another side of today’s reality: ‘The people at the top have never had it so good, and corporate profits are at an all time high. Today we have more inequality than at any time since 1929, and you all know what happened then. Today, the top one tenth of one percent holds more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The Waltons of Wal-Mart, one family alone, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent. And since the crash of 2008, 99% of all the new income generated has gone to the top 1%.’”
[RWC] “Inequality” is simply the fixed pie lie. Though they tend not to use these words, lefties push the proposition that the economy is a “fixed pie” or a zero-sum game. The implication is one person’s (the “oppressor” in leftyspeak) success comes only at the expense of someone else (the “oppressed”). That is, Bob has a mansion and you have a hut because Bob unfairly took your slice of the pie. This position also manifests itself in complaints about the income/wealth gap between “the rich” (the “oppressors”) and the average family. This line of thinking is how some activists and politicians try to sell government redistribution of income/wealth from the hands of “a few” (the “oppressors”) to their constituents (the “oppressed”) via regressive taxation policies, subsidies, and outright handouts. Note: “Progressive tax policy” is leftyspeak for regressive tax policy. There’s more about this in my Economics paper.
If the U.S. economy were a fixed pie, we should be in abject poverty. Why? Our population in 1790 (our first census) was just under four million and our current population is about 320 million. That means we would have 80 times as many people sharing the pie today as in 1790.
“‘The inequality is the greatest moral issue, the greatest economic issue, the greatest political issue of our time,’ said Sanders forcefully, driving this point home. It brought the room to its feet in a standing ovation.
“‘Do we want to be a nation where so few have so much while so many have so little?’ That was the ‘moral dynamic’ with which Sanders said the crowd there as well as the country had to come to terms. Otherwise, the country would remain in the hands of the ‘criminal bankers’ on Wall St would had a never-ending addiction to unbounded wealth. ‘You would think $85 billion would be enough, but with these guys, there’s never enough.’
“Why an economic issue? ‘My Republican colleagues,’ Sanders stated, ‘like to go on about how the wealthy are ‘job creators.’ Well they are dead wrong. You are the job creators, the working families of American are the job creators.’ Why? Because increased consumer demand, rooted in families having more income to spend of things they need to survive and live a decent life, he explained, are what compels businesses to hire more workers—and when the income of hundred [sic] of millions of workers shrinks, the jobs will too.
“Why a political issue? Sanders returned again to the Koch brothers. ‘What do they want?’ he asked, and answered by reflecting on a major political change of the past 40 years. ‘The Republican party has changed from being a right-center party to being a rightwing extremist party.’ Likewise, he explained, the Democrats have shifted from a center-left party, including a large role for labor, to more of a centrist party. ‘Both have shifted to the right.’”
[RWC] Does this mean those “truly concerned about deficits” should have stood up against entering WWII?
Note Mr. Sanders didn’t itemize the policies that make the Republican Party “a rightwing extremist party.”
“Both [parties] have shifted to the right?” Wow! On which planet? This says more about Mr. Sanders than the Democrat and Republican parties. JFK – no conservative – would be booed off the stage as a righty at the 2016 Democrat party convention.
“From Center-Right to Far Right
“But back to the Koch’s [sic]. ‘In 1980, David Koch ran for Vice-President on the Libertarian Party and got only one percent of the vote on the platform that was ‘kind of kooky, kind of fringy, kind of crazy. And the frightening thing now is what was considered crazy back then is now the main stream of the GOP’.”
[RWC] If you care about Mr. Koch’s positions, both in 1980 and now, I suggest you do some research and not accept Mr. Sanders’ representation. Other than the Koch brothers tend to lean conservative/libertarian, I’m not familiar with the details of their positions on individual issues.
“Koch’s platform in 1980, Sanders explained, started with abolishing campaign spending laws and the ‘despotic’ FEC, and went of [sic] to call for the abolition of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the US Postal Services, and the repeal of minimum wage laws and welfare programs. ‘When they talk about freedom, they want to repeal all legislation and programs over the last 80 years then have benefited working people, and the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.’
“They haven’t changed in 40 years, Sanders concluded. ‘Every day in Washington DC, we see their dream, their vision of America, come closer and closer to reality. ‘They want a situation where we have no rights to anything, and we are simply dependent on their good wishes. The rich own it all.’
“In order to defeat the GOP agenda, Sanders ended his speech with a brief summary of a progressive agenda, noting that point by point, a majority of Americans were in agreement, even if they were voting in conflicted ways.”
[RWC] Yeah, that explains why – outside of the presidential race – voters have been increasingly electing Republicans over Democrats at all levels of government.
“His cornerstone was his own new bill calling for $1 Trillion for investment in new infrastructure and to replace crumbling infrastructure. There were 13 million new well-paying jobs to be created in building bridges, highways, ports, high speed rail and renewable energy.”
[RWC] Here is my quick analysis of the Rebuild America Act (RAA) of 2015 (S.268). It’s $2 trillion of new debt and taxes, not “$1 Trillion.” Nowhere in the RAA does it mention “13 million new well-paying jobs to be created.” In fact, the RAA provides no estimate of additional employment, not even a typical made-up figure. Also, in what had to be an oversight given comrade Sanders’ ideology, the RAA directs no spending to “renewable energy.”
“‘We also have to raise minimum wage to a living wage,’ he declared, along with insisting on pay equity, opposing unfair trade deals, making college affordable if not free, break up the ‘huge institutions’ on Wall St , and last but not least, a single payer health care system that covered everyone.”
[RWC] Please read my paper “The Minimum Wage.”
Regarding “making college affordable if not free,” do I have to write it? NOTHING IS FREE! As P.J. O’Rourke (an American satirist) once said, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” The same is true for education. The more money we throw at anything – education and medical care are examples – the more expensive it gets. As I noted in a previous critique, college tuition increases leave the consumer price index (CPI) in the dust. The quickest way to drive up prices is to subsidize the activity.
Regarding “pay equity,” it’s another made-up issue. Pieces covering this issue are here and here.
Regarding “a single payer health care system,” comrade Sanders needs to start in his home state, Vermont. According to the NY Times, in December 2014 Vermont (a completely blue state at the federal and state levels) killed its plans for “a single payer health care system” because “no one could come up with a plan to offer quality coverage at an affordable cost.” Please read my paper “Healthcare.”
“The key organizers for Sanders appearance in Harrisburg were the Progressive Democrats of America, especially its 12 CD chapter in Western PA. They organized a morning fundraising breakfast where Sanders also spoke, attended by more than 150 people and raising over $10,000 on the spot.
“‘We need progressives like Sanders, who support working families, running for President, for Senate, and for Congress wherever possible,’ said Randy Shannon, convener of the Sanders for President PA Exploratory Committee. ‘A Democratic victory in 2016 with a bigger progressive caucus can tax Wall Street, end austerity and discrimination, and put the nation to work building the solar infrastructure we desperately need.’”
[RWC] You can learn more about Mr. Shannon here and here.
“PDA also ran a table, with a dozen volunteers, that set as its aim recruiting people from all across the state to sign up to form Sanders campaign committees in their areas, and they were quite successful in doing so.
“‘I would love to be able to take Bernie’s 12 Point Plan for an Economic Recovery door-to-door in the primary election,’ concluded Tina Shannon, president of the 12th CD’s Progressive Democrats of America. ‘It’s just what people are looking for.’”
[RWC] You can learn more about Mrs. Shannon here.
“[Inquiries can be sent to the Sanders for President PA Exploratory Committee, PO Box 31, Ambridge, PA 15003.]”
[RWC] In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity. <g>
© 2004-2015 Robert W. Cox, all rights reserved.