This is my Bernie Sanders news roundup for January 4 through January, 7, 2016.
See my new piece: When China catches the flu, America gets pneumonia?
Bernie Sanders Plans Barbershop, HBCU TOUR, And Prayer Meetings
Seventy-four year old Vermont Senator and 2016 Presidential candidate hopeful has been working hard to gain the vote and confidence of Black voters. In the past few months we’ve seen him walk the streets of Baltimore, meet with Killer Mike, and even have a conversation with Black Lives Matter activist. Sanders even has a history of marching during the civil rights movement and advocating for change back in the day. Yet and still this has some black voters asking, “What have you done for me lately?” Feeling the heat, Bernie sent in his team to answer that question. On Wednesday Jan 6th, his camp held a national African American Outreach Press Call conducted by his Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver, Senior Strategist Tad Devine, and African American Outreach Director Marcus Ferrell, to discuss the state of the campaign and specific efforts to connect with African Americans as he approaches the first primaries and caucuses.
Read the rest of this article on Blavity.
Bernie Sanders Took A Walk Through Freddie Gray’s Neighborhood. Here’s What Residents Think About It
“People will still be poor in Sandtown when Bernie leaves.”
BALTIMORE — As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) walked down the streets of one of Charm City’s most disenfranchised neighborhoods on a sunny Tuesday morning, he was met with straight talk from the area’s predominantly black residents.
“What you gon’ do with all this, Bernie?” shouted one man running alongside the crowd moving down the streets of Sandtown-Winchester, the neighborhood that was home to Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died after a “rough ride” in police custody in April. Another woman yelled about the need for change, while others voiced a desire for better schools, more job opportunities and an end to police violence.
It’s understandable why Sanders chose to visit Sandtown. The neighborhood’s landscape underscores the issues addressed in his economic and racial inequality platforms, as well as his calls for criminal justice reform. The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate discussed increasing the minimum wage, eliminating mass incarceration and funneling money back into America’s black communities with several community leaders, including the Rev. Jamal Bryant, a prominent pastor in the city, and former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner (D).
Read the rest of this article on HuffingtonPost.
Sanders: Clinton lacks courage to stand up to Wall Street
By Jesse Byrnes
Hillary Clinton hasn’t stood up to Wall Street, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) contended on Wednesday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning joe.”
“Do I think Hillary Clinton or many other senators have shown the courage that is necessary to stand up the Wall Street power? The answer is no,” Sanders in a response to a question about whether Clinton had provided cover for Wall Street.
“We need a president who now has the courage to stand up to the billionaire class and Wall Street,” he said during the appearance.
When co-host Joe Scarborough interjected a question about whether Clinton has the courage to stand up to the billionaire class, Sanders responded, “Well I’m running for president because I think not.”
Read the rest of this article on TheHill
Morning Joe: Sanders on Wall Street, college, Social Security
Clinton Comes Out Swinging at Sanders Wall Street Plan—Before He Unveils It
The Democratic front-runner’s campaign is criticizing Sanders’s failure to address the issue of “shadow banking.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is attempting to preempt rival Bernie Sanders’s big Wall Street policy speech by suggesting that the Vermont senator’s plans wouldn’t do nearly as much as hers to prevent a future financial crisis.
The Democratic front-runner has developed policies aimed at reining in the “shadow banking,” an area that Sanders’s proposals have yet to address. He’s set to speakTuesday in New York.
“Unfortunately, Senator Sanders has so far taken a hands-off approach to some of the riskiest institutions and activities in our economy, which were among the biggest culprits during the 2008 crisis,” Gary Gensler, Clinton’s chief financial officer and the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, said in a statement, referring to the activities of hedge funds and high-frequency traders. “In his speech tomorrow, Senator Sanders should go beyond his existing plans for reforming Wall Street and endorse Hillary Clinton’s tough, comprehensive proposals to rein in risky behavior within the shadow banking sector.”
Not surprisingly, the Sanders campaign was less than enthusiastic about Gensler’s assessment. “Senator Sanders won’t be taking advice on how to regulate Wall Street from a former Goldman Sachs partner and a former Treasury Department official who helped Wall Street rig the system,” Michael Briggs, Sanders’ communications director, said in an e-mail.
Read the rest of this article on Bloomberg.com
Bernie Sanders’ walloping #BreakEmUp speech on Wall Street
Here are the video and text of Bernie Sanders’ rousing address on banking and Wall Street, themed #BreakEmUp, given Tuesday, January 5, 2015.
Click here to view on Blog#42.
Clinton and Summers are wrong on Sanders’s Glass-Steagall proposal
By Robert C. Hockett
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), along with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others, has called for the passage of an updated version of the Glass-Steagall Act in our nation’s next round of financial reforms. Sanders’s rival for the Democratic nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, joined by her husband’s former Treasury secretary, Larry Summers, objects to this proposal (although both make constructive proposals of their own). Her professed ground is that the original Glass-Steagall Act wouldn’t have prevented our most recent crisis, which was caused mainly by shadow banking. This is a bit like objecting to the iPhone 6s because your flip phone had inadequate functionality. It suggests incomprehension of Sanders’s, Warren’s and McCain’s proposals, for the whole point of these proposals is to regulate 21st-century shadow banking just as the original Glass-Steagall regulated 20th-century shadow banking.
So what is shadow banking? “Shadow banking” refers to the performance of risky bank-like functions by institutions that are not as carefully regulated as banks. The most dangerous such function is that of borrowing short-term in order to invest in longer-term financial instruments, all while hoping that you will be able to “roll over” — renew or refinance — your short-term loans over the durations of those longer-term investments. When you can do that, you can make a great deal of money by investing in higher-end speculative financial instruments, because short-term borrowing costs are lower than long-term speculative yields. But you also put those who lend to you — notably bank depositors or counterpart small savers (more on them, below) — at great risk, for you’re engaged in a “musical chairs” form of finance: You avoid bankrupting yourself and your lenders only as long as your speculative investments keep rising, bubble-fashion, in price.
Read the rest of this article on TheHill.com.
Pew Research Center will call 75% cellphones for surveys in 2016
Pew Research Center will increase the percentage of respondents interviewed on cellphones from 65% to 75% in most of its 2016 telephone surveys. We’re making this change to ensure our survey samples properly represent the now roughly half (47%) of U.S. adults whose only phone is a cellphone.
Nine-in-ten Americans have a cellphone, and the share of adults who are cellphone-only has steadily increased since 2004, the year the government began tracking the size of this group. To keep pace with the public’s changing habits and lifestyle, we have increased the percentage of respondents interviewed by cellphone nearly every year since 2009.
Read the rest of this article at PewResearchCenter.
Trump calls Sanders ‘pathetic’
By Ben Kamisar
Donald Trump chided Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as “pathetic” during a Tuesday night campaign rally in Massachusetts.
“I remember when Bernie Sanders, when they took over his microphone. That’s not happening with Trump, folks,” he said to the crowd after repeatedly pausing to wait for security to escort out protestors.
“That’s going to be our leader? I don’t want to help Hillary, although I would rather run against Hillary. That scene where he lost control of his mic was pathetic, and this is what we have leading our country? “
Read the rest of this article on TheHill.com.
Bernie Sanders on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (extended clip)
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