The Democratic presidential candidates are working hard to sway voters here in Atlanta, and Bernie Sanders is generating plenty of buzz on Morehouse College’s campus on Tuesday.
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“People, for most part, are familiar with Secretary Clinton,” another student said. “Having a new face here shows, to some extent, that he cares. It also gives us chance to see who he really is.”
Today's stop at Morehouse kicks off a nationwide black college tour for Sanders, and it comes right on the heels of Former President Bill Clinton's Atlanta visit Saturday as he stumped for Hillary at North Clayton High School.
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Atlanta rapper Killer Mike, who has become an outspoken supporter of Sanders in recent weeks, introduced the Senator to a vibrant crowd of more than 4800 people.
The introductions and speeches were passionate, but the majority of Sander's rally tonight centered around three issues: so-called corrupt campaign finance regulations, working wages for American and a justice system that he says is broken and tied to institutional racism.
Sanders' outspokenness has already earned him support from local leaders, among them Clarkston Mayor Ted Terry and Sen. Vincent Fort.
"He's channeling Martin Luther King, Jr.," Terry said. "His social justice narrative lines up exactly with (he) talked about."
A just-unearthed video shows the arrest of what appears to be presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at a 1963 protest against school segregation in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood.
The footage was taken from Kartemquin Film's '63 Boycott project, which chronicles the Chicago Public School Boycott of 1963, and was filmed by Kartemquin co-founder Jerry Temaner.
The protest on Chicago's South Side took aim at racist education and housing policies being carried out in Englewood—namely the proposed contruction of a new school for black students made up of aluminum trailers known as “Willis Wagons,” named after the Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis who first ordered them. These trailers were used by the city to deal with overcrowding in black schools, thereby preventing integration of black students into less-densely populated white schools.
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This newly-released video seems to confirm Sanders' active role engaging in civil disobedience in a historic civil rights protest demanding equal treatment for black students in Chicago schools. Sanders is currently working to galvanize African-American support ahead of the Feb. 27 primary in South Carolina, as well as primaries in other minority-heavy states on Super Tuesday.
The daughter of Eric Garner, whose death at the hands of New York City police officers two years ago sparked allegations of police brutality against African-Americans, met with Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday.
Erica Garner introduced Sanders onstage at the University of South Carolina, where she called him a "dedicated leader" and a "fearless public servant that is not afraid to stand against the establishment for the people."
Sanders' South Carolina state director, Chris Covert, told CNN that Garner is also campaigning for the Vermont senator. Garner has also been canvassing on behalf of the Sanders campaign in South Carolina.
Last week, the Sanders campaign unveiled an advertisement featuring Garner, who spoke passionately about her support of Sanders.
Scrambling for the support of black voters as a crucial primary in South Carolina nears, Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont made appeals on Tuesday to corral their backing. Mrs. Clinton used an address in Harlem to propose $125 billion in new spending to reinvigorate poor and minority communities, and Mr. Sanders barnstormed the South, pledging to combat institutional racism and reform police departments nationwide.
With Mr. Sanders trying to cut into his rival’s long-held advantages among black voters, Mrs. Clinton, her voice growing hoarse, warned her audience, in a reference to Mr. Sanders: “You know, you can’t just show up at election time and say the right things and think that’s enough. We can’t start building relationships a few weeks before a vote.”
The black vote is likely to make up roughly half the Democratic electorate in the party’s Feb. 27 primary in South Carolina, and the two candidates highlighted similar themes in their appeals: the disproportionate economic barriers that young black men, in particular, face and the need to overhaul a criminal justice system that incarcerates young black men at high rates and to work with police forces to prevent officers from shooting black men or singling out African-Americans for arrest.
Mr. Sanders, speaking to students at a town-hall-style meeting at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, said he was tired of seeing “videos of unarmed people being killed by police officers.”
“What is going on now,” he continued, “especially with regard to African-Americans, this is not new. It has been going on decade after decade after decade. The only difference is the cellphone video. That’s the only difference because what was going on in the past was never recorded, and the police officer’s testimony was accepted as truth. This video, this cellphone makes all the difference in the world.”
Bill Clinton's latest comments on the race for the Democratic nomination were widely interpreted as a criticism directly aimed at Bernie Sanders, who minced few words when given a chance to respond.
"I do understand—obviously—he’s trying to do his best to get his wife to win the nomination," Sanders told Bloomberg's With All Due Respect. "But we should not be making silly remarks."
At a rally for Hillary Clinton in Palm Beach on Monday, Bill Clinton never mentioned the Vermont senator by name. But he said the Tea Party succeeded at the ballot box by deciding to "just tell people what they want to hear," before quickly adding that Democrats have also began "rewarding people who tell us things we know they can't do because it pushes our hot button."
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"Is there a comparison?" Halperin asked.
"No," Sanders shot back. "There’s no comparison."
Halperin followed up: "Just on the question, and we've discussed this with you before this, on the skepticism that you are telling people things that they want to hear."
Sanders' voice intensified. "Yeah, I am telling people what they want to hear! People want jobs. They want health care. They want educational opportunities for their kids. They want to deal with climate change. They want the wealthiest people to pay their fair share of taxes. Yeah, that’s what I’m telling people. And on every one of those issues, that is exactly what the American people want."
For Sanders, Nevada offers a chance to show that enthusiasm trumps organization, that he appeals to non-white voters as much as he does to white voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
"We think Bernie has a very powerful story with Latino voters," said Sanders' senior strategist, Tad Devine. "It's a story of a guy whose father came to the United States as immigrant who spoke very little English. It's the story of a life shaped by his activism in college."
He'll also attempt to demonstrate his case that union membership is broadly behind him. Sanders has long argued on the campaign trail that rank-and-file members of left-leaning groups like unions are strongly behind him, no matter what those groups' leaders might do.
"We've seen, across the board, across the country, that the rank-and-file membership of these different groups are overwhelmingly with Bernie," said his Nevada spokeswoman, Rania Batrice.
The Las Vegas Strip will give Sanders his best chance yet to prove that argument: Nevada allows same-day registration and allows casino workers to caucus anywhere -- which means they could all go from work, rather than returning home for caucuses that take place at 11 a.m. PT Saturday.
State Sen. Vincent Fort, the No. 2 Democrat in the Georgia Senate, flipped his endorsement on Tuesday from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. He instantly becomes one of the Vermont senator’s top surrogates in the South, where his campaign has picked up support from only a handful of black elected officials.
The Atlanta Democrat made his decision public just hours before Sanders is set to speak at a Morehouse College rally aimed at enticing black voters to give his campaign a second look. Fort, who is also considering a run for Atlanta mayor, had endorsed Clinton weeks ago.
“After months of looking at Bernie’s record and studying his positions on healthcare, Wall Street, predatory lending and the minimum wage, I came to the conclusion that Bernie’s position on the issues that affect my constituents in Georgia the most conform most closely to my positions,” said Fort.
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Fort said Sanders’ call for income equality and his attacks on a Washington establishment that favors the rich over the poor will resonate in the region as more voters tune in.
“He’s going to do well here. As people have a chance to listen to him, to have a chance to understand that he’s speaking to the issues that are the most critical,” said Fort. “As people study and listen to him, I think there’s going to be movement toward his campaign.”
A top Republican architect of the 2008 bank bailout stunned financial observers Tuesday with a speech calling on Congress to consider breaking up the nation's biggest banks, injecting an unlikely new voice into a debate that has dogged the Obama administration and roiled the Democratic presidential race.
“I believe the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy,” Neel Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs executive who worked for Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson during the George W. Bush administration, said at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Kashkari, now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, likened big banks to nuclear reactors and said the 2010 Dodd-Frank law championed by President Barack Obama to curb the risks large financial institutions pose to the economy "did not go far enough” to protect against a meltdown.
Instead, Kashkari said policymakers should give “serious consideration” to three proposals: Forcibly restructuring large banks into smaller ones, turning big banks into public utilities, or making it more expensive for all financial firms to use borrowed money.
In the Democratic presidential race, it’s become a familiar refrain: Bernie Sanders is a “single-issue candidate,” according to his rival, Hillary Clinton.
No doubt, the Vermont senator has more to say about economic policy than anything else. But as evidenced by a campaign stop here Monday, Sanders’s pitch is far broader than the caricature that’s been offered by the former secretary of state.
During an hour-long speech to a crowd of about 9,400 people at Eastern Michigan University, Sanders touched on issues including health care, immigration, criminal justice, climate change and marijuana policy, among others. All told, we tallied 20 issues -- give or take a few, depending on how one counts.
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Here’s a look at the issues Sanders covered:
1. Universal health care. Sanders backs a single-payer, “Medicare-for-all” system, saying that “America must join the rest of the industrialized world and provide health care for all."
2. Federal intervention in Flint, Mich. Sanders condemns the water contamination crisis, saying it is stunting children's development. He calls for the resignation of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and says: “If the local government cannot protect those children, if the state government cannot protect those children, then the federal government better get in.”
In a new op-ed published in the Guardian on Tuesday, famed French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty credits Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders with waking the larger American political establishment up to the problem of rising income inequality and channelling the Democratic electorate’s righteous outrage. Piketty says that Sanders’ campaign proves that a leader like Sanders—if not Sanders himself—“could one day soon win the U.S. presidential elections and change the face of the country.”
“Because he is facing the Clinton machine, as well as the conservatism of mainstream media, Sanders might not win the race,” Piketty observes, but, “in many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.”
Both former president Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama have failed to even attempt real tax reform, allowing for inequality to run rampant, according to Piketty. “Sanders’ success today” however, Piketty argues, “shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality and these so-called political changes, and intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism”:
“Meanwhile,” Piketty notes, “the Republican party sinks into a hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam discourse (even though Islam isn’t a great religious force in the country), and a limitless glorification of the fortune amassed by rich white people.”
When he talks about shutting the door of America to Muslims, all he’s talking about is scapegoating minorities. We will not accept that bait,” Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told a diverse crowd of local residents at the UAW in Dearborn.
Sanders’ hard-hitting words against Republican Presidential Candidate and front runner Donald Trump was one of several moments that drew large reaction from attendees during his campaign stop on Monday, February 15.
Arab American residents from around metro Detroit heavily attended the event. They were among hundreds of Sanders’ supporters who waited hours in a line wrapped around the UAW building in the Southend.
“The issues he stands up for are things an everyday person would want,” said Dearborn resident Samar Alsalmi. “He’s not a Billionaire that is against the little people. He’s a person who cares about everyone. He is very well informed about everything. He goes against Donald Trump, which is everything an Arab American would want.”
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For local Arab residents, Sanders’ appearance in Dearborn cemented support from the majority of the community —one that is growing reluctant to throw their backing behind Clinton.
Dearborn Heights resident Fahtme Abdallah said that the majority of Arab and Muslim residents should back Sanders over Clinton, because of his record on foreign policy.
“He is not afraid to come out and support us,” Abdallah said. “He is not afraid to go out there and mention Palestine, which is huge in the political world. Everyone shies away from that. He’s not afraid to say that he does not support Netanyahu. I think that’s huge for us…especially for Muslims.”
Last June, while digging through 50 boxes of archival material about Bernie Sanders’s four terms as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a reporter for the British newspaper the Guardian found a poem by Allen Ginsberg. Written by hand on a 1986 visit to the city, “Burlington Snow” didn’t name Sanders, but he was clearly the populist muse that inspired it.
Ginsberg wrote, “Socialist snow on the streets / Socialist talk in the Maverick Bookstore / Socialist kids sucking socialist lollipops.” Then he turned outward, questioning with almost Elizabethan wit: “—aren’t the birds frozen socialists? / Aren’t the snowclouds blocking the airfield Social Democratic appearances?”
After Ginsberg shares the city’s governing idea, the poem itself is shared: “Isn’t this poem socialist? It doesn’t belong to me anymore.”
The iconic Jewish-American poet was writing about the Jewish-American socialist almost exactly 30 years ago, on a February day in snow-covered New England like the one on which Sanders won in New Hampshire. Spreading online, the poem has delighted both poetry people and Sanders loyalists. No one combines those two groups like Eliot Katz; a leading “post-Beat” poet and Ginsberg protégé, Katz has spent 20 years, on and off, working on a book caled “The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg.” Published by the independent Beatdom Books in December 2015, it addresses both Ginsberg’s career as a poet and life as an activist.
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Eliot Katz believes that the way Ginsberg animates socialism as a form of sharing in “Burlington Snow” could have a positive effect. “I think it can help educate younger voters that democratic socialism, as Sanders practices it, is a form of inclusiveness, of expanding democratic rights, not taking them away, which would be the view of an older generation raised in the Cold War. Everything in the poem is shared — even the environment, something Sanders talks about a lot — and that message can only be helpful.”
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