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Nanjeanne

Nanjeanne's Journal
Nanjeanne's Journal
March 29, 2016

The Heresy and Evangelism of Bernie Sanders. About Zionism, Being Jewish and Really Interesting

In Village Voice
TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2016 AT 9:35 A.M. BY JESSE ALEXANDER MYERSON

Asked about his religious life by CNN's Chris Cuomo during the February 23 South Carolina town hall, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders distinguished himself from his competition by declining to praise the God of Abraham. Instead, in his signature phlegmatic Brooklyn staccato, the senator discussed universal human solidarity, lifting his arms for emphasis: "We are in this togetha.

"That's not just words," he continued. "The truth is, at some level, when you hurt, when your children hurt, I hurt. I hurt. And when my kids hurt, you hurt. I believe that what human nature is about is that everybody in this room impacts everybody else in all kinds of ways that we can't even understand.

"It's beyond intellect," he concluded. "It's a spiritual, emotional thing."

SNIP
The New York of Sanders's childhood was full of Yiddish socialists. Often, these were Jews of Sanders's sort, their spiritual practice less fixated on giving glory to God on high than fighting for emancipation here on earth. Although that interpretation of Judaism may seem profane, even blasphemous, at first blush, it has a firm basis in scripture.

The Torah repeatedly reminds Jews that, because we were strangers in Egypt, we are obligated in turn to welcome the stranger in the course of our lives. Scripture also tells us that our religious ceremonies are not ends unto themselves but a means through which to fortify our spirits for earthly liberation work: From Isaiah, we learn that our fasting on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, is not for the purpose of "mak[ing] your voice to be heard on high," but rather "to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke."

SNIP
It will not be easy to undo the work of the past seventy years. Even now, we find fearmongering that invokes the old perils of Jewish bolshevism. But in our rejection of Zionism and our revival of socialism, young Jews are reclaiming our birthright — the right to belong to a Jewry worthy of our heritage. A heritage carried forward in the sacred heresy and grumbly evangelism of the 74-year-old Brooklyn Jew improbably running for president.


Long Article but so worth a read: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/the-heresy-and-evangelism-of-bernie-sanders-8450444
March 29, 2016

Bernie Sanders Rally To Be Held In The Bronx, NY on March 31!

Join Bernie Sanders for a rally in South Bronx, with Residente, ex vocalist of Calle 13.

This event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required, but RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Admission is first come, first served.

Doors Open: 4:00 PM

Saint Mary’s Park (New York, NY)
450 St. Ann's Ave
Bronx
New York, NY 10455

https://go.berniesanders.com/page/event/detail/rally/44pmm

March 26, 2016

Bernie Rally in Madison, Wisconsin - BERNIE JUST INTRODUCED!!!!

Here's the Youtube Link:

March 26, 2016

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone: Young People Are Right About Hillary

interesting read on Wenner's editorial on Clinton and why Taibbi thinks he is wrong.

I was disappointed to hear that Rolling Stone had endorsed Hillary Clinton, but I also understood. In many ways, the endorsement by my boss and editor, Jann Wenner, read like the result of painful soul-searching, after this very magazine had a profound influence on a similar race, back in 1972.


SNIP

In fact, it was during Bill Clinton's presidency that D.C. pundits first began complaining about a thing they called "purity." This was code for any politician who stood too much on principle. The American Prospect in 1995 derisively described it as an "unwillingness to share the burden of morally ambiguous compromise." Sometimes you had to budge a little for the sake of progress.


SNIP

For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others.

And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.


SNIP

But that's faulty thinking. My worry is that Democrats like Hillary have been saying, "The Republicans are worse!" for so long that they've begun to believe it excuses everything. It makes me nervous to see Hillary supporters like law professor Stephen Vladeck arguing in the New York Times that the real problem wasn't anything Hillary did, but that the Espionage Act isn't "practical."

If you're willing to extend the "purity" argument to the Espionage Act, it's only a matter of time before you get in real trouble. And even if it doesn't happen this summer, Democrats may soon wish they'd picked the frumpy senator from Vermont who probably checks his restaurant bills to make sure he hasn't been undercharged.


SNIP

Young people don't see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between idealism and incremental progress. The choice they see is between an honest politician, and one who is so profoundly a part of the problem that she can't even see it anymore.

They've seen in the last decades that politicians who promise they can deliver change while also taking the money, mostly just end up taking the money.


Whole article should be read.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-young-people-are-right-about-hillary-clinton-20160325#ixzz440rT1Odq
March 25, 2016

Rosario Dawson's Powerful Letter to Dolores Huerta: Setting the Facts Straight About Bernie Sanders

Brava Rosario Dawson for a wonderful open letter to Dolores Huerta after she penned back in February an article full of distortions. It's unfortunate it will not get one tenth of one percent the attention that Huerta's and Ferrera's misrepresentations of Sen. Sanders and his supporters did. But well worth the read.


Dear Dolores,

Before responding to your article on Bernie Sanders on Medium, I want to take a moment to acknowledge you and the work you have done for Latina/os, workers’ rights, unions, the feminist and LGBTQ movements, as well as against police brutality and pesticides. You stood up and gave a voice to the less fortunate and unrepresented parts of our communities, no matter what obstacles or challenges were thrown in your way. This is exactly why your article on Bernie Sanders came as such a surprise to me — that the same woman who has made it her life’s mission to speak the truth and shed light on corruption, lies, and false narratives created by the corporate elite and special interest groups, would now suddenly create a narrative that distorts facts and misguides American voters.

<SNIP>

My intention is not to tell anyone how to vote, but instead offer the facts and invite you to a healthy dialogue and debate.

So let me address your statements made:

1. People of good will can disagree about the H.R. 6094 (109th): Community Protection Act of 2006, which Bernie Sanders voted for. But:

— The words “indefinite detention” did not appear anywhere in the bill Bernie voted for. The bill only applied to people awaiting deportation (“under orders of removal”), often for having criminal records.

— The Congressional research office said people could be detained indefinitely under the bill if they were “specified dangerous aliens under orders of removal who cannot be removed.” Only about 4,000 people had been detained for more than six months as of 2009 — and the bill Bernie voted for would have required review of their detention status every six months.

— The bill split liberals in Congress, with some voting against it and many others (including Nancy Pelosi, Hillary supporter Sherrod Brown, and DNC chair and Hillary supporter Debbie Wasserman Schultz) voting for it, along with Bernie.

2. About the 2007 bill you criticized Bernie for voting against and have made your main argument:

He supported the DREAM ACT, but the entire bill had too many sections that would have been detrimental to American workers, immigration reform, immigrants and their families, so he ultimately decided to keep fighting for a better bill. A couple of the more contentious points were:

— It stepped-up border security, adding 20,000 more Border Patrol agents and 370 miles of additional fencing (you might call that “Trump wall” building) along the U.S.-Mexico border.

— It removed four of the five family-based categories under which an immigrant could apply for permanent residency. All that was left was the preference for spouses and children of U.S. citizens (which strikes me as a form of privilege).

— It expanded the horribly abusive guest worker program that has left some people in what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “close to slavery“ in its report on the subject. (There are other horror stories, too.)

— The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a federation of our country’s largest trade unions, both opposed the bill. LULAC’s Executive Director said the group “cannot support a bill that will separate families and lead to the exploitation of immigrant workers while resulting in widespread undocumented immigration in the future.”

— The AFL-CIO compared the exploitative nature of the guest worker provision to a “modern-day Bracero Program,” referring to the program launched during the Second World War to meet labor demands in the United States — one which led to the forced deportation of millions of Mexicans, including a few U.S. citizens, from the United States under Operation Wetback beginning in 1954. (Article by Hector Luis Alamo here.)


And so much more - read the whole article here: http://linkis.com/www.alternet.org/ele/bXrAM

And to read (if you missed it) Dolores Huerta's article, here's the link: https://medium.com/@DoloresHuerta/on-immigration-bernie-sanders-is-not-who-he-says-he-is-b79980adff6a#.bxzwi58ju
March 24, 2016

The International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union Endorses Sanders

International Longshore and Warehouse Union Endorses Bernie Sanders for President

SPOKANE, Wash. – Bernie Sanders on Thursday welcomed the endorsement of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents approximately 50,000 women and men who work in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii.


SNIP

“Bernie Sanders is the best candidate for America’s working families,” said ILWU International President Robert McEllrath. “Bernie is best on the issues that matter most to American workers: better trade agreements, support for unions, fair wages, tuition for students at public colleges, Medicare for all, fighting a corrupt campaign finance system and confronting the power of Wall Street that’s making life harder for most Americans.”

http://blog.4president.org/2016/2016/03/international-longshore-and-warehouse-union-endorses-bernie-sanders-for-president.html
March 18, 2016

Salt Lake City Utah Rally with Sanders. Then Tucson and then Phoenix!

Crowds gathering in Utah
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Doors are scheduled to open at 12:30 pm Mountain Time

He then heads to Tucson - Doors open at 4:30 p.m. A Future to Believe In Tucson Rally, Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church Ave, Tucson

Phoenix tomorrow.

March 15, 2016

Matt Taibbi's piece: How the 'New York Times' Sandbagged Bernie Sanders

Really interesting article about the NY Times story on their piece, Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors which was CHANGED TO Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories. He shows how they "corrected" the original version to take on a completely different slant from what was originally printed.

The New York Times ran a piece about Bernie Sanders Monday, a sort of left-handed compliment of a legislative profile. It was called "Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors."

I took notice of the piece by Jessica Steinhauer because I wrote essentially the same article nearly 11 years ago. Mine, called "Four Amendments and a Funeral," was quite a bit longer. Sanders back then was anxious that people know how Congress worked, and also how it didn't work, so he invited me to tag along for weeks to follow the process of a series of amendments he tried (and mostly succeeded) to pass in the House.

I came to the same conclusions that Steinhauer did initially: that Sanders was uniquely skilled at the amendment process and also had a unique ability to reach across the aisle to make deals.

"Sanders is the amendment king of the current House of Representative. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker… has passed more roll-call amendments (amendments that actually went to a vote on the floor) than Bernie Sanders. He accomplishes this on the one hand by being relentlessly active, and on the other by using his status as an Independent to form left-right coalitions."

Steinhauer the other day wrote very nearly the same thing. She described how Bernie managed to get a $1.5 billion youth jobs amendment tacked onto an immigration bill through "wheeling and dealing, shaming and cajoling."

The amendment, she wrote, was "classic Bernie Sanders," a man she described as having "spent a quarter-century in Congress working the side door, tacking on amendments to larger bills that scratch his particular policy itches, generally focused on working-class Americans, income inequality and the environment."


SNIP

Given how tough the Times has been on Sanders this election season (in October, the paper even sank to writing an article about his failure to kiss enough babies), the Steinhauer piece was actually sort of flattering. Sanders himself linked to the article. Maybe the paper was coming around?

Not so fast! As noted first in this piece on Medium ("Proof That the New York Times Isn't Feeling the Bern&quot , the paper swiftly made a series of significant corrections online. A new version of the piece came out later the same day, and in my mind, the corrections changed the overall message of the article.

First, as noted in the Medium piece, they changed the headline. It went from:

Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors

to:

Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories

Then they yanked a quote from Bernie's longtime policy adviser Warren Gunnels that read, "It has been a very successful strategy."

They then added the following two paragraphs:

"But in his presidential campaign Mr. Sanders is trying to scale up those kinds of proposals as a national agenda, and there is little to draw from his small-ball legislative approach to suggest that he could succeed.

"Mr. Sanders is suddenly promising not just a few stars here and there, but the moon and a good part of the sun, from free college tuition paid for with giant tax hikes to a huge increase in government health care, which has made even liberal Democrats skeptical."

This stuff could have been written by the Clinton campaign.
It's stridently derisive, essentially saying there's no evidence Bernie's "small-ball" approach (I guess Republicans aren't the only ones not above testicular innuendo) could ever succeed on the big stage.


Read the whole fascinating article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-new-york-times-sandbagged-bernie-sanders-20160315?page=2

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