Bernie Sanders was interviewed by Melissa Harris-Perry on Black Lives Matter and racial justice on The Rachel Maddow Show(12/28):
Other news items:
Sanders’ Plan To Reform The Fed Exposes A Democratic Rift On Wall Street
The Clinton wing of the party is still figuring out what to do with the Warren wing.
The Federal Reserve is becoming the focal point of a longstanding divide between more business-friendly Democrats and the party’s populist branch over how the next president should promote full employment and police Wall Street.
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put forward a lengthy list of proposals for reforming the Federal Reserve in a Dec. 23 op-ed in the New York Times.
Lawrence Summers, a former top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, who nearly became Fed chairman in 2013, penned a response on Tuesday agreeing with Sanders on some grounds, but forcefully pushing back against the notion that Wall Street influence at the Fed is too pervasive.
The disagreement between Sanders and Summers embodies a larger rift within liberal ranks about the need to lessen the influence of Wall Street at all levels of government. But it also reflects broad agreement on the centrality of the Fed as an enabler of economic growth and the need for greater financial reforms.
Read the rest of this article on HuffPo.
A New Year’s prediction: Sanders’s small donation surge keeps growing
By Brent Budowsky,
The month is ending, and the quarter is ending, and that means it is time for the next quarterly presidential campaign fundraising reports to be released. I predict that, within days, we’ll learn that the Bernie Sanders campaign has achieved yet another new surge in the number of small donors and the amount of money raised from those donors will again stun and amaze the political world.
It seems that almost every major campaign event brings more small donors to the Sanders campaign and more money raised from those small donors. Even when Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) is under attack from the Hillary Clinton-biased Democratic National Committee, the result is another explosion of small donations to his campaign.
The great value of small donors is that their contributions tend to be recurring and are often repeated as the campaign moves from one state to another, creating a large pool of incoming money and a steady stream that continues as the campaign moves from state to state.
The number of small donations to the Sanders campaign has already grown to more than 2 million and that number will be even higher when the coming quarter financial report is released, and will probably surpass 3 million by sometime in January.
Read the rest of this op-ed on TheHill.com
No, Bernie Sanders is not going to bankrupt America to the tune of $18 trillion
by Paul Waldman
The big policy headline today comes from the Wall Street Journal, which delivers this alarming message:
Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’ Proposals: $18 Trillion
Holy cow! He must be advocating for some crazy stuff that will bankrupt America! But is that really an accurate picture of what Sanders is proposing? And is this the kind of number we should be frightened of?
The answer isn’t quite so dramatic: while Sanders does want to spend significant amounts of money, almost all of it is on things we’re already paying for; he just wants to change how we pay for them. In some ways it’s by spreading out a cost currently borne by a limited number of people to all taxpayers. His plan for free public college would do this: right now, it’s paid for by students and their families, while under Sanders’ plan we’d all pay for it in the same way we all pay for parks or the military or food safety.
But the bulk of what Sanders wants to do is in the first category: to have us pay through taxes for things we’re already paying for in other ways. Depending on your perspective on government, you may think that’s a bad idea. But we shouldn’t treat his proposals as though they’re going to cost us $18 trillion on top of what we’re already paying.
Read the rest of this article on WashingtonPost.com
Last, but not least… This item!
‘Men Who Bern’ Calendar Is The Sexiest Way To Support Bernie Sanders. #FeelTheBern
By Taylor Pittman
You can now show your support for Bernie Sanders (and the men who plan on voting for him), no matter what month it is.
The 2016 Men Who Bern calendar features Bernie Sanders supporters who clearly #FeelTheBern. Actor and bartender Joe Beuerlein, who is also behind the Men Who Bern Instagram account, came up with the idea for the calendar.
“Bernie supporters from all over the country were asked to submit photos for this calendar. Some guys (incredibly) got back to me,” he wrote on MenWhoBern.com. “Some pictures we took with the photographer Richard Gasparro. Some I took in my living room! But we’re pumped with how it turned out.”
The project has no affiliation with Sanders’ official campaign, but Beuerlein wrote that the calendar “was made to raise money for the grassroots operation here in New York to win Bernie’s home state.”
Read the rest of this article and see the calendar’s pinups at HuffingtonPost.com
Happy New Year, everyone!