The New York Times has the Op Ed Bernie Sanders and the Black Vote.

The author of the article doesn’t offer any hints for a solution for Bernie Sanders’ “problem”. However, I found one comment to be instructive. As you read this comment, try not to start mentally refuting it as you read it, but try instead to understand how Ahmina could have formed her opinion.

Ahmina Detroit September 13, 2015

As an African-American woman I will vote for whichever Democratic candidate ends up on the ballot, because I know in the end my community will fare slightly better under a democratic president. However I am under zero illusions that Bernie Sanders is the saving grace for blacks in America. His analysis is one based solely on income, and he only added race to his agenda because he was pressured into it. When he was really confronted with the issues of race and racism, in Seattle and at Netroots, he reacted as most white liberals do – with arrogance and anger. White liberals are worst than conservatives when it comes to race because they truly believe they have it all figured out, and that they stand beside us in equal condemnation of “those” racist, conservatives. When in reality they stand atop us in condemnation of “those” others, propped up by their own white privilege and society’s emphasis on white supremacy. Class, income, and whether someone is middle class WILL NOT alone solve the issues of racism in this country, and as long as liberals continue to believe this we will never be a united left. For those who would like to discount my last point please research environmental justice, mandatory minimums (i.e. crack vs cocaine), and the prison industrial complex before wasting my time.

I believe part of the problem is that when Bernie Sanders is confronted about his problems with garnering more votes from people of color, he immediately jumps to income inequality and minority unemployment. By the time he gets to the issues of concern identified by Ahmina, he has already lost the attention of the audience he needs to be addressing.

I intend to do more outreach to the African American community to find out if my analysis is a correct one. I have heard from some black people that I may be on the right track.

I was pleased to see that handing out Bernie Sanders flyers in Worcester yesterday, I had little difficulty handing them out to minority voters. I only had a few people who did not want a flyer.

The Washington Post has the article What Bernie Sanders means by ‘democratic socialism.’ (You still have your choice of pajamas.)

I’ll use this excerpt of what he said about Scandinavian Social Democracies to give you a hint at his great explanation.

“Are these democratic societies? Obviously they are,” Sanders said, relaying that voter turnout in Denmark tends to approach 90 percent.

“Is it a society where the government owns every mom-and-pop store?” he asked. “Of course not. You have all kinds of capitalist entrepreneurship going on, a lot of wealth being created. But what else do you have? … An effort to make sure that all people benefit from the wealth that’s being created. So you have a much more equitable distribution of wealth and income. … I talked to a guy from Denmark, and he said, ‘In Denmark, it is very hard to become very, very rich, but it’s pretty hard to be very, very poor.’ And that makes a lot of sense to me.”

Read the rest of his explanation so that you can better understand what he wants, and you can better explain it to other people.

YouTube has the video of Bernie Sanders at Liberty University with Q&A – 09-14-2015.

Bernie Sanders speaks at Liberty University and answers questions from the University after speaking.

Liberty University is a private, non-profit Christian university located in Lynchburg, Virginia, United States, that describes itself as a Christian academic community. Liberty’s annual enrollment includes 13,800 residential students and over 100,000 online students as of May 2013. When including the number of people taking its online courses, LU is the largest Evangelical Christian university in the world, the nation’s largest private non-profit university and 7th largest four-year university, and the largest university in Virginia.

Today, I learned of a response Biblical Argument for Bernie.

Jim, a Liberty University Alumnus, explains how an Evangelical Christian can be both theologically conservative and politically liberal, and support Bernie Sanders.

The Daily Kos has a partial transcript of the above audio in its article An Evangelical responds to Sanders’ speech at Liberty U.

If I can find where I made comments on the original presentation at Liberty U., I will post them here. I, too, noticed the sour faces and muted response at Liberty U that Jim speaks about in his response.

YouTube has the video Saving Capitalism by Robert Reich.

From the author of Aftershock and The Work of Nations, his most important book to date–a passionate yet practical, sweeping yet minutely argued, myth-shattering breakdown of what’s wrong with our political-economic system, and what it will take to fix it.

I commented on his YouTube posting

This is an explanation that should be shared far and wide. Whenever you hear a “conservative” friend tell you about the free market, you should point her or him to this video. I am putting this on my blog and on my Facebook page.

I’ll get the Reich’s own Facebook posting of this video as soon as I can get it from the lost bowels of Facebook, and as soon as Facebook will start responding to me again. Facebook is still circling the drain trying to respond to my connection request.

Here is the Facebook post by Robert Reich. The loss of memorable items on Facebook is exactly why I post on my blog, with Facebook posting as a teaser for this blog.

I may have to buy this book, even though just about every book of this type that I read is wonderful in diagnosing the problem, yet disappointing in describing what we can do to fix it. I can’t really blame the books for this failure. Diagnosing and describing the problem the way that Robert Reich does is a magnificent talent. Figuring out how to fix the problem is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Bernie Sanders’ run for President is an attempt to tackle the much more difficult problem. That is why I cannot pass up the opportunity to vote for him even if the odds are stacked against his success. If it were easy, someone would have done it already.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Corbynomics 101—It’s the Deficit, Stupid!

As anyone who’s followed the discussion has seen, the proposal from the newly-elected leader of the British Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, to implement “People’s Quantitative Easing” or PQE, has created a lot of controversy (Richard Murphy’s blog is a good place to see the PQE defense against these arguments).  The basics of the proposal are that the government would create a public bank for financing infrastructure (National Investment Bank, or NIB), which the Bank of England (BoE) would then lend to directly in order to fund.  The NIB would then carry out infrastructure projects to jumpstart the economy, create public capital, and create jobs.

Maybe this New Economic Perspectives article would be better titled “It’s Not The Deficit, Stupid!”

Here is an example of what Bernie Sanders could do if he managed to figure out how to get the public to understand this.

Notice the mention in the article of Stephanie Kelton whom Sanders brought in as chief economist for the Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee. “Stephanie Kelton termed it, Overt Monetary Financing of Government (OMFG)”

The details of the article are enough to make a CPA’s eyes glaze over, but the mere knowledge that something like “People’s Quantitative Easing” or PQE has been proposed somewhere is very important.

To put this PQE in context, note that The Wall Street Journal has the article Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion.

Stephanie Kelton tweeted in Sep 2012

Randy Wray says #Fed intervention approx. $29 Trillion. #Bernanke says Fed created 2 million #jobs. Translation: $14.5 million per job.

Econo Monitor published the L. Randall Wray December 14th, 2011 article The $29 Trillion Bail-Out: A Resolution and Conclusion.

So Corby’s calling his program PQE to emphasize the similarity to the FED’s QE, makes it reasonable to compare The Wall Street Journal ‘s estimate of $19 Trillion for Bernie Sanders program to the $29 Trillion of the FED’s QE. Remember that the estimate on the FED’s spending was made before December 2011. By now the total is probably higher.

The Daily Kos has the post The Astonishing Story of the Federal Reserve on 9-11.

Still, while our President was posing for photo ops and our Vice President was hiding under a mountain, colleagues of Roger Ferguson speak of him as having been “cool under fire without being overbearing” and they praise him saying he “nailed it” when it truly mattered. Kenneth A. Gunther, President and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said, “The Federal Reserve’s response on September 11th ensured a fully functioning payments system when the private sector could not…. The Fed’s dual roles [as provider of services and regulator of the payments system] are an essential element of the ongoing homeland security of the United States.”

For all those politicians and the public who think they know all about what the FED does and think it should be abolished, this is the article that would disabuse them of their notions if it weren’t for the small factor of human nature. Once your gut has told you that we don’t need no stinkin fed, no facts are going to dissuade you. We all can come up with rationalizations for why we are right despite all the evidence that says we are wrong.

In my list of favorite quotes, I have an eloquent explanation.

Mark Twain

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The New Statesman has the article What the Corbyn moment means for the left.

Rumours of the death of the political left have been exaggerated. Corbyn, like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Scottish National Party, is an immune response from a sick and suffering body politic trying to fight off a chronic infection that threatens to swallow hope for ever. There is a crisis in representative democracy in the west and it was established well before the stock-market collapse of 2008. The old centre left is at odds with its electorate because it decided for itself the limits of what was politically possible a decade ago.

There are many great paragraphs in the above article, but for me this one is the most powerful and succinct description of what has been wrong with US politics for many years. The most obvious symptom is the annoying habit of President Obama first negotiating with himself down to a minimal position that surely the Republicans will accept, and then finding out that the Republicans only want to negotiate him down even further. Then after negotiating the President down below the minimum acceptable compromise, they won’t vote for his proposal anyway.

How many times are we expected to be sold down the river, and then expected to ask for more of the same, please?

I really like the idea of thinking that Bernie Sanders’ rise as an “immune response from a sick and suffering body politic trying to fight off a chronic infection that threatens to swallow hope for ever.”

The Nation has the article It’s Official: The Pentagon Finally Admitted That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons, Too.

After five decades of pretending otherwise, the Pentagon has reluctantly confirmed that Israel does indeed posssess[sic] nuclear bombs, as well as awesome weapons technology similar to America’s.

As the article admits, there isn’t an awful lot of new information that people didn’t suspect anyway. I post this on my blog mainly to keep track of this article and the information in it. I know that someone, someday is going to argue with me that there is no proof that Israel has nuclear capabilities. I want to be able to refer back to this article for my own benefit, not that there is any hope that the article could change anyone’s mind.

The Atlantic has the article The Real Cuban Missile Crisis: Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.

I’ll give you the closing paragraph of the article. You’ll have to read the article to be amazed at how this conclusion became inevitable.

This esoteric strategizing—this misplaced obsession with credibility, this dangerously expansive concept of what constitutes security—which has afflicted both Democratic and Republican administrations, and both liberals and conservatives, is the antithesis of statecraft, which requires discernment based on power, interest, and circumstance. It is a stance toward the world that can easily doom the United States to military commitments and interventions in strategically insignificant places over intrinsically trivial issues. It is a stance that can engender a foreign policy approximating paranoia in an obdurately chaotic world abounding in states, personalities, and ideologies that are unsavory and uncongenial—but not necessarily mortally hazardous.

For some Americans, this could change their whole view on the lessons of lying historians, real history, and what they think of our current foreign policy. Even for people who look askance at our current foreign policy and were never that enamored with JFK at the time, this is a surprising article.

This certainly has lessons for us to learn about our current situation and the Iran nuclear deal. The fact that LBJ took the actions that he did in Viet Nam that led to the eventual demise of “liberalism” in the US because he was misled by JFK, has a special poignancy.

Let me explain my convoluted argument about LBJ. LBJ did a lot of great things, civil rights acts, war on poverty, and great society, but what did him in has his obstinate stance on Viet Nam. Johnson’s vehemence over his Viet Nam policy may be a direct result of the secrets JFK kept from LBJ, and the lies he and his top people told to LBJ. The guns and butter strategy led to inflation and Richard Nixon. The inflation problem outlasted Nixon and Carter, and brought us right to the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. It has taken over 50 years for this country to get to the edge of what might be a recovery if Bernie Sanders can win the Presidency.

The New York Times published the column The Deafness Before the Storm.

Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.
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That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release.

To think that Dick Cheney is still running around trying to give us “honest” advice.