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In 8 short months, Americans have gone from trusting their press 44% of the time, to trusting them 17% of the time.
Undoubtedly their coverage of this election cycle is responsible. There has never been an election in recent living people’s memory where the entire press corp has focused on supporting one candidate, who then drops out, then focused on another, who then drops out, etc. Jeb Bush was the favorite until people actually started voting. It was him and Hillary said all the pundits… Jeb Bush is gone, gone, gone… Then it was Marco Rubio… He was the one all voters would elect in the end… Gone, gone, gone… And so now… it is Hillary…
Which means that Bernie is about to be smeared no doubt…
First this is a good thing… Why? Because it is better than being ignored which what has happened for so long. For when a candidate gets smeared, he gets elevated in prominence and people pay attention to him…
Usually that is bad for a candidate, such as with Chris Christie, who once he put himself in the limelight of New Hampshire, couldn’t pass muster. But when you have a prophetically good candidate who gets smeared, people look closer at that candidate and if they like what they see, they say, “wow, I didn’t know all these details about him. Why was no one telling us all these great things?”
Then it becomes the smearers who are the ones who look bad… How many people today still have a good positive opinions regarding the Sanhedrin during the time of Pontius Pilate?
So today I saw a headline that Sanders Concedes Defeat.... Intrigued, I looked to see, since with Bernie having earned more campaign money than Hillary across the last three months in a row, I knew that was nothing close to the truth. Upon reading the article, the headlines premised false. The article quoted no one who said Sanders was done. Instead, it was twisted from the articles we have already seen about how Sanders didn’t attack Hillary strong on her emails and her Wall Street paid speeches… To be honest, most of us normal people see that as a good saintly thing in Sanders’ character: choosing to base his campaign strictly on our needs and not on whether he by primary day stands a micro-inch taller than his opponent so he gets a “win”.
So I went to the comments on the social media sight (It was “recommended” for me, not a real friend’s posting I later found out) and added to the hundreds of others, how the headline lied about the article it tops… “Click Bait” I posted. “This whole post is nothing but bullshit.”
I am asking you to not pass by these anonymous sites, but to do the same.. Just type in the comments: “Click Bait” and some type of warning…
I warn of this malfeasance every election year and since suckers indeed are born every year, new fish are always entering the pond, here is how these things are played….
A major paper, one of the top 5, runs a story with a headline that is very misleading. They send it out on their multiple feeds…
The news is that the Wall Street Journal is reporting (the lie).. All those papers reprinting the lie are legally then telling the truth, and cannot be sued for liable (though they could with deep enough pockets), because they are reporting not the lie itself, but that the Wall Street Journal was reporting it…
The story’s instigators are hoping that the credibility behind the Wall Street Journal, spreads the story wide enough so it becomes belief and every new reporter focuses anew on trying to one-up the story to a higher level, instead of reporting on it being bull.
So news outlets are very careful at first, to make the distinction that they are reporting the accusation itself… not its validity;”the news” is that a certain outlet made such an accusation. Nowhere is there any detail giving creedence to whether the claim is true. And if anyone goes to the original article making the accusation, they immediately find no evidence. It is bunk.
In the past it was called Swift Boating where unanswerable accusations are thrown out, no rebuttals allowed to air, and massive proliferation ensues. Such may have thrown a close 2004 election in the one state that made all thedifference. All’s fair in war I guess.
It also was used by the Washington Post, to sink Joe Biden’s 2008 presidential run, as detailed here in 2007. Here, when one combed that Washington Post article for proof, it came down to this single printed sentence… “that some on the editorial board “felt” Biden thought Blacks were poorer students than whites showing he must be prejudiced…” In today’s world, we have terrible corporate polices enforced on every state to close that very gap. That was truth back then, not prejudice. But the headline ran something like: “Biden Thinks Blacks Can’t Be Educated.” Yeah, it was pure race baiting.
This is just how it works…. In those days when Facebook was something only college kids used, there was no way to combat the newspapers and medias reach. Today there is…. if you use it…
When you see a lie on your social media, read the article, comment it is nothing but click bait and if you feel the Bern, put it up on your site ridiculing the perpetrators… People don’t read junk. They read what you wrote….
It is hard to convince anyone not to like Bernie… If enough of us call out the media where they get hurt the most, on social media, then we have fought a small part in the ongoing war to keep America in the hands of Americans… and not the hands of some Australian news conglomerate owner…
Bernie is running his campaign to change the world of the future over to what he thinks will promote a better world. Hillary is running a campaign to survive.
Did I call it correctly?
Being curious, I thought I’d take a look.
The problem when dealing with other people deciding who is a good candidate, is that you have to then accept that person’s choice of what is good policy…
For example, people in lower incomes see Bernie’s rates as reasonable because 1) they pay little in taxes and 2) he will provide services such as Medicaid and college tuition, an attainment they have always dreamed of obtaining.
Those in the investment world who care nothing about how people hurt, rank Bernie as being unreasonable and rank Trump’s program which is unreasonable, very highly…
So it takes some time and effort to explore both sides and see how things stack up. When one sees that Bernie will greatly increase taxes for ones 2016 income and Trump will greatly decrease taxes for ones 2016 income, one might jump towards Trump as the person giving them the most money… But no. To achieve that cost reduction, Trump who promises to balance the budget, will have to cut most of the services you receive, including Social Security and Medicare, including military and transportation, including crime and the judiciary… So one would assume your life would change greatly either way, and putting all costs together, Bernie’s plan with an organized society could be much cheaper than Trumps plan where all society is in chaos.
For example: roads, an odd example but one all can grasp because we know the difference between free and toll roads. Now and in Bernie’s world you will drive for free. In Trump’s world, you pay $1 on every road you drive… Going to work and coming back will cost you $5 each way. At $10 a day, 5 days a week, and for 52 weeks a year, this one cost would cost you $2,600 a year out of the $5550 dollars Trump says he’ll save you. That’s just roads. What about medical? What about food? What about education? What about all those other things you get as a United States Citizen which you will have to pay for …
So seeing what you get, is important when deciding on cutting or lowering taxes… The answer to deciding should be not whether you pay or get money back; it should be decided which one makes you richer or poorer over a whole year….
You need to see this… It is a tax calculator which inputs the rates all candidates are proposing and tells one how much more or less they pay in taxes… It does not tell you how much or how less you lose in services.
A family of two adults and one child at $50,000 will save $3200 with Trump $1800 with Cruz, $30 more with Clinton, and $6800 more with Sanders.
But under Sanders they get free healthcare; free college; increased infrastructure developments, and their bosses get penalized by the tax brackets if they do not give you substantial raises.
As a business person, I can say that taking the healthcare costs out of business and putting it on government, benefit one between $158 and $359 per month per employee. Which as a business person is much more relief to bottom line after taxes than Trump’s or Cruz’s lower taxes.
But as a very wealthy person, Bernie’s tax increases will make changes… Higher estate taxes, higher tax rates on income, higher financial transaction fees, higher capital gains taxes, and will drastically change the way we park our money. Instead of putting it into stocks and bonds, we will put it into land, businesses, and development. Profit no longer becomes a prime driver, because it becomes money that gets taxed and lost. Instead we invest in our businesses before profits so in the following year, we increase its future value, but not necessarily its income. No different than buying a Van Gogh to hold and sell at some future date.
Those making $10 million according to the calculator can pay $3 million more in taxes. Which tends to make one who is still earning $10 million a year, not want to report he is making $10 million and instead choose to say, buy a company yacht for $5 million and ensure that 1000’s of Americans have another job to work on for another 4 weeks..
So though some people get hurt and some get better under all candidates tax plans, the real focus should be on which makes America better?
And I think no one can argue, what makes America better is when all of its citizens can expect a better future in each subsequent year than they had in the last…. To have a top few get better at the expense of many on the bottom, is great for those few, but must be balanced by the anguish of the many… Likewise to have a bottom few (as in the totally fictional welfare queens) enrich themselves off the top, is no good also… What works best is when all Americans benefit? America should be where the rich get richer, and the poor…. get richer as well.
That needs to be the measuring stick.
So take a family making $50,000.. Out of current deductions they now take home $38,000 (federal, state, FICA, Medicare). Under Bernie, they will take home $32,000. And pay nothing for medical or college. Take college. At $20,000 a year or $80,000 for four, if they started a private college tuition account they would pay $80,000/ 21 years from birth or $3800 a year. But no one can afford to do that, but one can see the cost is rather practical… Medical costs for a family of 3 run according to the NIH, $6,800 for most families. That is almost an even swap. The family is simply paying the Federal government what it once paid insurance companies and medical services in co-payments and deductibles.
The difference is quality. One gets better healthcare service when one is on Medicaid for all than one does with private health plans. So families pay the same under Bernie, get better coverage, and get free education to boot.
And under Cruz and Trump, Pell Grants are gone. Federal loans are gone, all federal grants are gone. There is no assistance for states to help out. Small states of course get hit worst than large states. Something all small states need to consider…
But the reality is that for a very large number of Americans who see no future today under the status quo, a status quo being perpetuated by Hillary Clinton, by Ted Cruz, and by Donald Trump, all allow the rich to benefit AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL OTHERS, Bernie’s plan is very viable and very realistic…
No matter what those who have so much income that they have no money-worries, say…
One thing to remember over this past weekend in which Bernie overwhelmingly won three Pacific Rim states. All three were caucuses, not primaries, and all were open.
This does not discount Bernie’s wins, but it does require explanation for the differences.
Look at it as a voter… In a primary all you have to do is show up at a polling place and vote for candidates on your ballot. You are done.
At a caucus, you first have to be highly motivated. Because you leave your house and you show up at a venue expecting to spend long hours. You get herded into camps and the candidate with the biggest camp, wins the delegates… Does that explain it well in common language?
So caucuses measure enthusiasm more than a candidates actual pull across a state. Many old people would love to participate in caucuses, but it would cost them severe medical strain to do so. Caucuses tend to be populated by younger people who are more enthused, have less baggage, and less scheduling limitations…
But, it is also how someone long ago decided delegates should be selected.
This is just a reminder that though Sanders did win 80% of the delegates over Hillary in those three states, it does not mean that all voters in those states will overwhelmingly and enthusiastically support him in the election..
So in analyzing these results from this past weekend, one should call it with these modifications.
Among highly energized democratic voters in these three Pacific Rim states, Bernie supporters took 80% of the delegates. In caucuses attended by highly motivated voters including independents, Hillary supporters averaged only 2 out of 10.
Though that may not accurately describe a states entire political party, it does show who is able to demonstrate enthusiasm in that state’s electorate…
If you happen to be voter who thinks the good times have past and really wants things to change for the better, enthusiasm is the first place one should look.
Martin Luther King said: you cannot have social justice when you perpetuate economic injustice.
Giving a person rights on paper doesn’t better their life, as long as they are prevented from finding a job, establishing a nest egg, and buying a house to get their part of the American dream.
For example, inner city blacks living with 50% unemployment, still can’t live with dignity given to them by their freedom, even though they DO have a right to vote, even though they can’t be discriminated by race to get a job, and even though they maintain a “right” not to be discriminated against were they to buy a house they will never have money enough to afford….
In other words, opening the door to political power, does not put food on a table. For the true freedom envisioned by Dr. King, you need economic opportunity open to all.
The challenge for Deldem and by default, the Hillary campaign, is how does Hillary accomplish this.. What is her plan for “taking from the rich and giving to the poor”, to quote Jesus himself?
I have found nothing in my search, which is why I’m asking Deldem to step up.
Let me tell you how Bernie plans to do this.
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Rebuilding the infrastructure uses unskilled labor. Like the military, people learn on the job how to do it. It requires manual labor, it is prioritized in our urban environments (since those were the first edifices built and the most in danger of failing). To pay for this, someone has to take on the top one percent and with the backing of the entire nation, make them begin to pay for the rebuilding of this nation. Making the top one percent reinvest in the nation that gave them their money in the first place, is the core of Bernie’s campaign.
Reversing Climate Change requires change to the existing structure. Change requires manual labor. We need new power sources built, and old power sources demolished and sold for scrap. All which require manual labor at good pay, and are centered around our urban areas, since that is where energy is mostly used. This change unfreezes huge amounts of money now locked down in old energy schemes. Whereas good policy now is to sit on oil to raise it’s price (sitting which does not create jobs) the new corporate success stories will be those who could outbuild their competitors to tap new markets first.
Creating Worker Co-ops, giving workers an ownership stake in the businesses they work for, causes productivity goes up, absenteeism goes down and employees who are much more satisfied with their jobs. For too long, ownership in companies has been toward the financial side. Often an handful of men, own a handful of investment companies, who the have ownership rights of most of America’s corporations. ALL board decisions are made ONLY to appease the financial side. Germany requires all corporations to have labor vote on all their corporate boards. This single idea has prevented Germany from many of America’s corporate financial meltdowns. For too long, American workers have been treated like paid slaves. It is time they own both the risks and rewards of financial ownership in those companies for which they work. The advantage for the workers as that as their effort makes money for their boss, it increases their wealth as well.
Growing the Trade Union Movement gives employees stronger rights to negotiate higher wages, pure and simple… Essentially it removes the labor market from out of the slave economy it is in today, (where the bottom line is free labor and only the minimum wage law hold the wages above zero),… and puts it back into a market economy …. a place where the price of labor is negotiated based on the business needs of two parties. People do have to eat; if you force them where they have to work very low wages in order to accomplish that, you can keep profits to yourself in perpetuity. Flipping that, so they negotiate higher wages backed by their ability to go on strike without permanently losing their right to eat, changes the dynamic. Just a threat of such provides pressure on those financial interests who also have an economic interest to prevent a strike, so they willingly up-front pay pricier amounts for their labor.
Raising the Minimum Wage raises the floor. It is a simple concept into which a lot of effort has gone to confuse the issue. All raising the minimum wage means, is that if you are making $7.25 for every hour you work, then are making $15.25 for the same time spent, you have $8.00 more dollars in your pocket to spend for having worked that one hour.. All other talk about this putting black teens out of work is to distract you from that simple truth… You have a lot more to spend if you get paid more for the time you put in.
Pay Equity for Women Workers is so easy to fix. You simply say from this time forward, it is illegal to pay women less than men for the same amount of work. Then let lawsuits and courts determine what that wage should be. If someone can prove a male hired prior to them was paid more, take the employer to court and let the courts sort it out.. It’s done. But it takes someone willing to say: as of now, it is illegal to pay men more than woman and ironically it is a man, not a women, who is offering this solution.
Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers instead of foreign investors, go a long way to making any company see it is more lucrative to stay at home to invest here than go overseas to China or Mexico. Currently that is not the case. Our very lenient corporate tax laws enacted by the Cheney-Bush Presidency, encourage businesses to expand to cheaper labor markets. With proper taxation on those profits earned overseas, that becomes less lucrative. By raising taxes on the higher profits earned by those companies who shift jobs overseas and lowering taxes on those who invest here, a powerful dynamic of economic investment is shifted back to our shores. Raising corporate tax rates and then, only giving tax credits for capital investment here in America, solves a lot of woes.
Making College Affordable for All simply opens the door of opportunity. It allows those who can’t afford to better their lives, a new opportunity to do so. The rest is up to them of course. But it opens the door of opportunity to 80% of our population who now cannot afford to go through it…. It breaks the monopoly our for-profit entities today have in saying: it is impossible to get a good job unless one mortgages ones life to us first. In Colonial America, people who had to do that, were called indentured servants. This gives audacity of hope to inner-city children right now, who now see all dreams end upon leaving high school.
Taking on Wall Street… Just how effective would YOU be in taking on Wall Street if they had funded 80% of YOUR campaign? Just think on that for a minute. Think of you going against your children; your spouse; your aged parents and how much of an emotional toll that would weigh on you? How strong would be your will to put someone else’s financial interests over theirs? This alone is the greatest argument for giving Sanders a shot. For if someone at some round-table in the future were to ever encapsulate these first 15 years of this American century, it could be easily done with this sentence: America chose to put the interests of investors over the interests of its people… . Entrusting the reverse of that to someone who has gotten 80% of their support from investors, is simply not wise.
Health Care as a Right for All is simply about choice. Do we want health care as a right by all, or do we want to allow it to be dictated by ones wealth… We can choose either way. Each have their benefits; both have their detriments. The simple question is what do we want to do? The Affordable Health Care Act did make up immense ground by giving some rights back to the American people. There are still areas where it needs tweaked. The newest best addition is to insert a basic government-subsidized plan, like an income-based graduated Medicaid plan, to compete against the corporate plans already in the market place. Unfortunately, Health-care is a recipient of huge financial investment. Only someone with the backing of the American people and no allegiance to Wall Street, can make it happen.
Protecting the Most Vulnerable Americans was an American philosophy once had by all, then lost. It has been replaced by a corporate-driven philosophy of every person for themselves. Although freedom does enable one to do ones best to succeed on their own, freedom without responsibility creates a greater cost to society than freedom with responsibility. For example: we are responsible to our veterans who when we asked to give up their lives for our well-being, they said sure, send us. On a moral scale we can never pay them enough, yet a certain political party every year, cuts back their benefits because of an ideology that says government is too big… Another case: our children were thrown into the claws of corporate America with the advent of Common Core. Again, someone beholden to Wall Street for 80% of their funding, is not going to fight too hard against the biggest problem hurting America. It will take someone beholden to the American people only, to make America great again.
Real Tax Reform: it all comes down to this really. America got totally screwed up beginning in 2000. We stopped taxing the top earners of their fair share and went from a yearly plan of a $200 billion dollar budget surplus scheduled to end the national debt by 2008, to a $1.7 trillion dollar deficit today which our children and grandchildren are now on the hook for. If we had chosen not to do that… tax cuts, and instead worked to continue the “Dave Ramsey Way” to pay off our debts as do every American citizen, our taxes could now be lower because of no debt-interest payments. The simple explanation as to why we have a super-big problem, is that as the rich got richer (and they have), as the poorer got poorer (and they have), the taxes on those on top getting all the money, also were reduced. Real tax reform can only come with a lot of “back payments” tacked onto the regular payments at the same time. Real tax reform will hit those with money hard. Just as if you, who had not paid your mortgage at all for a couple of years, would one day get hit with a demand note from your mortgage company.
How can you ask for that demand note, when 80% of your funding comes from those to whom you will need to ask?
To summarize: there are only two candidates who can take on the number one problem this nation faces which is: it is being run by Wall Street. Today we are a nation which top-down is always favoring investors over the interests of its own citizens. This really is not new for history; it has always been that way. It is new for America though. One of those candidates with wild red hair… has not a clue what he is doing today , much less tomorrow. The other, with your backing, can actually make the difference.
So my challenge to Deldem (and the Hillary camp), is for them to engage and explain to us all, how someone beholden at 80% to those who created 80% of the problems America faces today, can force the policies that should have happen 15 years ago, which Wall Street is against, back into effect ?
Without their brilliant or compelling argument to persuade me, I just can’t see it happening. Which is why today, with as clear and eye as I can see, Bernie is the only option Americans have today if they want to reach a destination of financial stability at levels we were well on a course to achieving back in 2000, when ironically Hillary was still in the White House…
Of course… if American voters DON’T want any improvement in the way things are being run, entirely happy with the status quo, there are still 4 other candidates (3 Republican,1 Democrat) out there who are still trying to earn their allegiance.
One of the denizens over a Kilroy’s decided to jump into an economic argument throwing pies.
In the process of us demolishing his ignorance all of us realized he’d never been taught how corporate profits work. It then occurred to some of us that perhaps some of the reason the really “common-sense” arguments of how to “make America great again” have not resonated, is because perhaps a lot of you out there also don’t know the real shape things are in either….
This is not a screed. This is just a demonstration of where things are… using data and charts that are very easy to find only if you know where to already look (FRED) and very hard to find if you don’t know where they are…
We’ll start with a parable…..
Once upon a time there was a family whose last name was Quintiles… A little larger than average they were nuclear with a father who worked, a mother who also worked and 3 children spaced roughly 3 years apart…
The mother went back to work when her first child reached teenager status. They had unlimited food… All they ate was pie (there is a joke there). As the children were growing up, the mother portioned out the pie for all so all could get enough to eat….
When the mother went back to work she taught her oldest to put the pie in the oven and feed the children while leaving two pieces for the parents when they returned home.
He was to divide the pie into five pieces and give everyone their share… For a while they monitored the portions closely then seeing no issue never looked at it again. ..
Over time the portion being retained by the teenager gradually grew in size. After all he was cutting. The children couldn’t complain. And the parents never knew because he left portions for them that were consistent.
The smallest got it worst.. Being small and weak he lost the largest share of his portion first. After getting used to living on that bigger piece, when desirous of more pie, the oldest then began sliding the knife inward on the middle child’s portion… It got smaller and smaller.
Then he begin trimming Mom and Dad’s. who were really too busy to notice or care. In the end he was eating half the pie, and the other four were sharing the other half….
One day, the littlest one complained. Then the other four noticed they too had smaller portions. They banded together, and re-arranged duties so the first child now carried out the garbage and the other two children got to rotate pie cutting duties…
They all had enough food forever. However the oldest one threw a fit.. “Not fair”, he cried… “You all get more food, and I’m losing it… This is Socialism”. Eventually when his pleas had no listeners, he too shut up and was content with his “never-ending” piece of pi….
The end.
What does that mean you say? Master, please explain…
Ok.. so you may be clear. The family is American society. The earners are the American working class who earn and buy things that fuel the economy. During Conservative rule, the American people elected to let corporations be what run our government and by extension, our lives… They were put in charge of the government and for a while it was nice. Then they started wanting more. With no greater force to stop them, they took more and more and more.
Everyone else got less. They got more. Everyone else’s pie got smaller and smaller though the entire pie stayed the same. Those with smaller pie pieces were given a litany of excuses including saying they had no choice. Hard times were upon us. But no one was looking at what they were getting as they made our lives more miserable.
Finally the bottom class said we can’t live on $7.25 an hour, and the conversation got started. Everyone realized their portions too had decreased, and that all that decrease had accumulated to the pie of the ones who’d been appointed to do the cutting with no supervision or regulation or negatives for doing wrong.
They got together, changed the rules, forced the recalcitrant child to obey, and he screamed “Socialism”… and threw a fit.
The fit was ignored and the tantrum stopped. The child ended up being happy getting enough to live on as was everyone else…
Nice story.. you said something about charts?
This is the chart showing time since we began keeping records. Notice the gradual increase in the inclines in the Clinton years, steeper in the Bush years, and steeper in the Obama years.
Even looking at this chart can be misleading. For example in the Clinton years the rising tide did raise all boats.. Corporate profits rose because every level of income also rose, from poorer to richest. Anyone living during those times of higher federal taxation did better each year than the year before. But, with the cuts of the Bush era, the benefits only went to top earners, something Obama was not able to change with the Tea Party holding down both houses and tax increase on the wealthy, during his term…
So a better guide would be the ratio of Corporate Profits (CP) to the total pie (GDP). This would show the how much corporate profits were taking of the finite pie.
The thing to remember when viewing this is that America’s middle class’s greatest times were between 1950 and 2000… The chart shows why.
The numbers on the left stand for percent of the national pie… At Bill Clinton’s swearing in, the national pie was divided 5% to corporations and 95% to the people. Today it is at 11% for corporations versus 89% for the people….
We, The People, under the new rules written by the corporations, for the corporations, and of the corporations, have been squeezed out of 6% ….. (6% which now mostly goes to the top earning 16,000 people)
Currently our GDP is around $18 trillion dollars a year…. $18,000,000,000,000.
Six percent of that (amount originally ours but now corporate’s) is roughly $1.1 trillion… At a 150 million of us working that averages out to an rough income loss of $7.333 per worker…
Would you be ok with $7,000 more per worker in your family? $14,000 more PER YEAR in two-income families?
That is what happens when you move $1.1 trillion from Corporate profits over to employee income.
Let them scream Socialism on deaf ears. We know it won’t hurt them, it’s all bluff, because we know they were doing quite well when they had far less profits…
So if you don’t have enough to live well, don’t blame Mexicans. Don’t blame those on SNAP. Don’t blame Muslims. Don’t blame inner city inhabitants. Don’t blame Obama. Don’t blame the Supreme Court. Don’t blame anyone except those who are entrusted with the cutting of the pie you are to get…
Right now, that is Republicans in Congress and those lobbyists handing them laws to be passed…
The only way it changes is for all to gang up and make the change… Only one candidate is unbought and offering to do that.
You can hear if from Deldem, a Hillary supporter… “Looks like your candidate is out.” The media across the board has echoed the same message… “Bernie is out of the race. He can try going forward because he has so much money from his donors, but the race is over. He can’t win… ”
Hillary’s victory speech in Florida briefly mentioned Bernies campaign, then went into fluff mode. Platitudes after platitudes like those extra fluffy lemon meringue pies being forced on you around large round tables in a banquet hall, none of which could be pinned to the protein of any policy.. Anything said, would cause her crowd to roar right then and as a listener focusing on what was being said, all those cheers were more for the incantational music of her speech, than the actual words being said…
Obviously she was tired and wanted the thing over… So, are her surrogates really telling the truth when they say the race is over? I had to look.
Current Delegate count: Hillary 1139 / Bernie 825 … these are the delegates won on primary and caucus votes. For now, we can ignore the super delegates who at a series of whims, can switch to Sanders and back to Hillary and over to Sanders again. Of real earned delegates, Bernie has 42% and Hillary 58%…
The media is quick to just take the lazy approach… count states and call a winner. Hillary won all 5 states. The Southern states went to her handily, and Ohio was 166,000 strong in her favor, and Illinois was within 34,000 votes…
Let’s look at Chicago…. Hillary won Chicago by 58,000 votes. But she only won Illinois by 34,605 votes. Which means… across the entire rest of the state of Illinois, from Wisconsin down to Kentucky, Bernie beat Hillary by about 24,000 votes. (From the map, the Black sections went Hillary. The white suburbs when Bernie. )
Missouri was very closely won by Hillary… 0.2% margin. 1531 individual votes.
Here is the state map of the results.
And here is how St. Louis voted…
Meaning Sanders carried the entire rest of the state from Kansas to Illinois, by 5200 votes….
Counties in North Carolina and Ohio which had larger numbers of blacks, went for Hillary; in areas of fewer blacks, they tipped to Sanders.
This is important for you to know; from here we go forward…..
Arizona, Idaho, and Utah are up next Tuesday… Arizona has 4.7% blacks. Idaho has 0.8%. Utah has 1,3%… Based on the above trends we should guess Bernie. Of course, there are the Hispanics. Arizona 30% . Idaho 12% . Utah 13.5%. Some are using Florida to say Hispanics are solidly behind Hillary. But Hispanics in Florida are primarily of Cuban descent. In the West, they would be mostly Mexican.
A closer approximation would be next door Colorado which went 50%-40.3 for Bernie. Colorado is 4.5% black, and 21% Hispanic. Next Tuesday, 121 delegates are up for grabs in states heavily favored for Sanders.
On the 26th, come Alaska, Hawaii, and very liberal Washington State. We all know Alaska is too cold for blacks but 3.9% of their population stays there anyway. Fewer made it to Hawaii, 2.5%. Washington State sits on 4.1%…On this day 142 delegates are up for grabs in states heavily favored for Sanders.
The following week Wisconsin (6.6% black) splits up their 84 delegates and Wyoming (1.8% black) adds their 14… It is possible at this point Bernie will have caught up with Hillary in earned delegates providing both a level playing field for New York’s 247 delegates on April 19th. …At 17.6% black New York is the potential Hillary win…
And the formula may be different then. After seeing win, after win, after win, after win, after win, after win, people who liked Bernie but thought he couldn’t win, may decide he can… which is why you have to play these things out and not make snap decisions on March 15th of how people will vote far, far out into the future.
Hillary is strong in the South… Hillary won Ohio and Florida back in 2008. But she did not win the nomination in 2008. Now the South is done, you can stick a dessert fork in it. States that have previously voted in the areas into which the primaries now head, have mostly been above the 58% margin that Sanders needs to win. 67.7% of the vote in Kansas, 64.3% in Maine, 59% of the vote in Colorado and 61.6% in Minnesota, a close 57.1% in Nebraska. 60% back in New Hampshire..
So don’t be put off by the smugness of that team who just put up points on the board… They now have to shift to defense to minimize the yardage expected to come their opponents way… If they can’t slow the offensive, we then have a close race, keeping primaries in contention as we did in 2008 right up to the very end….June 1st.
But it certainly looks like the media who was very wrong in Michigan, is very wrong now when they try to paint the race as over… and throw Deldem into that mix as well.
At the current spread of 314 earned delegates, this looks like the high-water mark of the Hillary campaign. Looking at the map, all her strong suits are played out…. Bernie’s are just beginning.
The gray……. is still in play…….
The media will show you nonstop the violence at Trump’s latest rallies. They have an ulterior motive for doing so.. They want to incite more violence to occur so they can keep citizens’ attention focused on their channels…
As soon as I heard Chicago was successful at shutting down a rally, I KNEW, it would ripple through America and be the start of a giant wave of protesting…
For 99% of America does indeed have something to protest… They are suffering more than anyone in their family line since their great-grandparents lived. America has gone downhill, slid across the ice on the pond, and fallen into the icy river on its far side… Only young George Bailey can save us now.
It is just like when 99% of young people had something to protest in the 60’s,.. being drafted to fight a proxy war that we would ultimately abandon and walk away… For those not living then, two camps divided. One fought against the power of status quo, knowing they were on the right side of morality, knowing that accepting what is wrong because you were simply told to, was unconscionable. The other camp, also knew the war was wrong, but warped the test of the draft as a loyalty benchmark, a high attainment that must be surmounted to prove you were indeed loyal to the United States of America… To them, if drafted and you didn’t go fight in a petty, ill-conceived, poorly strategized war, and if you weren’t willing to die just solely to prove your loyalty to America your country, then you weren’t good enough to be a United States Citizen…
The irony of course being that large numbers of draft dodgers used legal means to escape the war, including one who went on to become Vice President of the United States of America, then send 4,425 Americans to die, and 32,223 to return to America wounded just in order to get his oil company deep inside the Western desert of Iraq, to steal their high grade oil for free.
Youth didn’t protest that as we did Vietnam, mostly because 2003 was a volunteer army. We weren’t disrupting careers, killing sons and daughters, by random lotteries.
But economically,… under the auspices of multiple Republican Congresses which have been almost criminally delinquent on improving the quality of life of young people. a lottery did materialize. If you were extremely lucky, you could partake of the American dream… Like Powerball, everybody has to play to create a pool for the winner. But only one winner takes all.
If the 99% were every to realize that should they not play Powerball twice every week, they would be guaranteed to save $6 a week ($312/year)… (which would make most of them $312 richer at that year’s end)…. the scheme would fall short. The winner would only have his own ticket as the prize for his winning because nobody would play.
Therefore it is important to distract the 99% with lots of noise that causes their brain to think of what you program for them, instead of what is in their best interests. You say things like “you can never win these billions, if you don’t play“. “We have lucky winners all over the place who were just like you except they bought a ticket.”
The idea is to distract you from thinking of your abysmal chances of winning, and from totaling up the cost your addictive behavior is costing you…. Of course if you win, then it is worth it… but YOU will never win… It doesn’t take much thinking to reach that conclusion and by distracting you, thinking about such things never crosses your mind.
That is Donald’s role right now.
Do you remember exactly when Donald entered the race? It was the week after Bernie dominated the news feeds about filling stadiums everywhere he spoke. For only one week, Bernie’s message got out… What he was saying was in the paper every day. Then Donald stepped in saying Mexico will pay for his wall, instantly and ever since, becoming the elephant in the room… Nothing else about Bernie has gone mainstream. Hillary is safe.
But let us assume it wasn’t Hillary who was the beneficiary. Let us assume that someone didn’t want us to know how affordable Single Payer healthcare really is to run. Let us assume someone didn’t want us to know how rapidly the fortunes of the Middle Class rise as soon as taxes go up on the top 0.1 of the top 1%. Perhaps someone didn’t want young people to know how easily they could go to college and not wallow forever in catastrophic debt. Let’s assume someone didn’t want the shadowy area of Wall Street put under the Fed’s microscope. Or perhaps someone didn’t want you to know how they purposefully caused the financial crises for their profit in 2008 and took a lion’s share of your 401 K’s out of your pockets, jeopardizing your retirement. Perhaps someone didn’t want you know how easily it is to fix Social Security permanently so it lasts till perpetuity. Perhaps someone didn’t want you to know how easy it is to make healthcare a right, and not a profit making machine… Perhaps someone didn’t want you to know that charter Schools are get-rich shams, and that the Smarter Balanced is a fake assessment designed solely to break teacher’s unions and open up more for profit charters.
If these even closely sound like some far out extremist ideas to you, then the policy of entering Trump into 2016’s race was very sound. For those attending these unreported rallies of Bernie were rapidly learning just how easily all these could be accomplished if we just elected people who would work for us, and not Wall Street… And suddenly, after Trump, there was silence on all Bernie was saying….
And so if you look across the past months, you can see a trend of where when each uproar dies out from a previous outrageous action, a new one gets inserted to flame things up again… Their effect is never wasted as would occur if they weren’t being orchestrated. If Trump truly was shooting from the hip, then we’d have multiple flair ups going all the time, each canceling out and eating into the analysis time of the other.. But that isn’t the case… The effect appears planned just as if it were on a sit-com… One line said… wait for the laugh track. then the rebuttal… wait for the laugh track. Timed perfectly for the desired effect.
The serious problem in 2016 for those with money and power, is Bernie. With either Kasich, Cruz, Rubio, Trump, or Hillary, had you a problem with Common Core or the Smarter Balanced Assessment, you could not approach them for a fair hearing… They all owe big money subsidizing Common Core… Only Bernie could effectively act independently and steer government back towards appeasing the will of the people, over the current status quo which is crafted to appease the will of a fortunate few.
Only Bernie. Wall Street does need to fear him. for if he ever becomes President and gets a super majority in both houses…. Wall Street gets handcuffed with all the regulations of the New Deal and contained in a cage of its own making.
Which is why he is the only candidate who is good for you… Most watchers are shocked he is still going at it as strong as he is.. I certainly wouldn’t have written a scenario where a hunched old man could with a miracle wind behind him, become the 2016 Democratic candidate and possibly the next president of the United States? Appearance=wise, he is the least likely person to ever be president in the modern age. But here he is riding solely on the strength of ideas… Ideas that were cannons of government until Reagan, until we tore down the temples in which they were kept.
So the violence? It will grow. Just as one successful sit in of a Dean’s office in Berkley spread to almost every campus by the end of the second year… For if you speculate it would be great to do something huge and outrageous, and someone else does it first, you then know it’s possible so there is nothing holding you back…
I’m looking forward to the first mass killing inside a Trump event, with NRA smuggled-in weapons… Anyone want to take bets on the death toll? I’m staking out the number 13…..
Sorry I’m late but I just read the exit data from Michigan. Basically it was enthusiasm which polls don’t track that staged the upset.
More people went out to vote for Sanders than expected. Fewer people were willing to come out to vote for Hillary than expected…. That decided the difference.
Why?
“Ho hum, nah we don’t have to vote for Hillary. She’s gonna win by a landslide”……
versus……….
“C’mon, no way you’re sitting out this primary! You’re voting. For the first time in OUR LIVES we have a real candidate who is on OUR SIDE, I’m not letting you not vote! We gotta send a message!”
Blacks in Detroit did not vote as heavy as they did for Obama because they have nothing to believe in… White Democrats across the state set record attendance levels to make their voices heard… Blacks need to start looking at Bernie for their own sake, not just let some leader who owes or is friends with Hillary, make their decision for them.
It’s called enthusiasm…. Something most Baby Boomers have not felt in a president since JFK …..
If there is anyone Black voters cannot believe, it is the media of America owned by Wall Street who is bankrolling every single candidate in this election, but two.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump
Killer Mike nails what is wrong with Hillary Clinton… Perhaps black “reverends” should listen to their hearts, and not phone calls coming in to their house in the dead of the night….
kavips 