This 9 March 2015 video from the USA is called Bernie Sanders Calls The Iraq War One Of The Biggest Blunders In U.S. History.
By Samantha Lachman in the USA:
Bernie Sanders Announces He Is Running For President In 2016
Posted: 04/29/2015 8:14 pm EDT
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I[ndependent]-Vt.) announced on Wednesday that he’ll run for president of the United States in 2016.
“I am running for president,” Sanders told The Associated Press. “People should not underestimate me… I’ve run outside of the two-party system, defeating Democrats and Republicans, taking on big-money candidates and, you know, I think the message that has resonated in Vermont is a message that can resonate all over this country.”
Sanders will make a more formal announcement about his presidential campaign on Thursday.
Sanders is the first official challenger for the Democratic nomination to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who announced her candidacy earlier this month.
Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” has been hinting that he would seek the White House for nearly two years. …
Sanders, who has also characterized himself as “an independent Democrat,” has expressed discomfort with the party, saying that it relies too heavily on “big-money interests” and doesn’t adequately distinguish itself from the Republicans. But he has noted the “dilemma” of running for president outside the traditional two-party structure and the challenges of building an independent grassroots movement to do so.
Late last year, he visited Iowa, which will host the first party caucuses in 2016, to test enthusiasm for his candidacy.
Sanders has argued that the country deserves a real debate about policy issues, suggesting that such a conversation won’t happen without a contested nomination process. “There’s so much to be discussed, Ed, and we’re not in this country about anointing anybody for a nomination,” Sanders told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz last year.
In the Senate, Sanders has focused on a range of issues, from reforming health care for veterans to addressing the threat posed by climate change. He has also been a strong advocate for a universal, single-payer health care plan nationwide, though the plan for such a system in his home state was recently dropped.
From the Washington Post (in 2006, when Sanders was still a congressman, not yet a senator):
The 65-year-old known to voters simply as “Bernie” is Vermont’s lone congressman, a six-term independent with a photo of Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate in 1912, on his congressional wall. He’s perhaps the most popular pol in the state and there’s nothing northern New England about him. Sanders was born in Brooklyn, raised by Jewish parents from Poland. His father’s family perished in the Holocaust. He chews on each syllable in an accent as Flatbush-inflected as the day he wandered north four decades ago.
More than 5,000 people attended a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at the University of Denver Saturday night. The rally was the largest since Sanders launched his candidacy for the 2016 Democratic nomination, following a rally of 3,000 people last month in Minneapolis and a week-long series of rallies across Iowa, drawing 500 people at Waterloo and 700 at Drake University in Des Moines: here.
BERNIE SANDERS: ENDING CORPORATE GREED “We have got to demand that corporations stop manipulating their shares to reward their executives and billionaire shareholders through the use of stock buybacks. We also must do a lot more to rebuild the middle class, check corporate greed and make our economy work again for working families.” [HuffPost]
BERNIE SANDERS DRAWS A CROWD The presidential candidate drew 10,000 folks to a Madison, Wisconsin rally, one of the largest crowds of the presidential season so far. [Mollie Reilly, HuffPost]
More than 10,000 people filled an arena in Madison, Wisconsin Wednesday night to hear Senator Bernie Sanders, the biggest rally held by any candidate so far in the 2016 US presidential campaign: here.
More than 100,000 people nationwide have attended campaign rallies for Bernie Sanders, the self-described “socialist” running for the Democratic presidential nomination, over the past few weeks, by far the largest crowds of any candidate in the 2016 presidential race: here.
Seattle City Councilperson and Socialist Alternative leader Kshama Sawant appeared at a Democratic Party campaign rally August 8 featuring Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders, who caucuses as a Senate Democrat, is campaigning to become the Democratic presidential nominee for the 2016 general election. Sanders and Sawant were also joined on the platform by a series of Democratic state and federal lawmakers and trade union bureaucrats: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
I’ve been following this man for a while. He seems like the one hope in American politics. He actually says what he thinks.
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He will have to fight piles and piles of big money.
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Yes, that’s the really depressing part. One just hopes (perhaps vainly) that Americans voters will wake up and prefer plain speaking to manipulated ‘realities’. I always feel that since US policies affect so much of the world, there ought to be an external vote for the rest of us.
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Yes, already during the Vietnam war, with United States nuclear weapons in the Netherlands, Dutch peace movement Sjaloom advocated that Dutch people should have the right to vote in the 1968 US presidential elections.
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Friend —
I am writing to inform you that I will be a candidate for President of the United States. I ask for your support.
Add your name to support my campaign.
For many months I have been traveling from coast to coast across our country, and have had the opportunity to meet with thousands of good, hard-working, and remarkable people. Like you and me, they are deeply concerned about the future of our country.
They wonder why they are working longer hours for lower wages. They worry about whether their kids will be able to afford college or get decent jobs. They fear that they may not have the savings to retire with dignity and security.
The challenges facing our country are enormous.
It’s not just that, for forty years, the middle class has been disappearing. It’s that 99% of all new income is going to the top 1%, and the grotesque level of wealth and income inequality today is worse than at any time since the late 1920s. The people at the top are grabbing all the new wealth and income for themselves, and the rest of America is being squeezed and left behind.
The disastrous decisions of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case and in other related decisions are undermining the very foundations of American democracy, as billionaires rig the system by using their Super PACs to buy politicians and elections.
And the peril of global climate change, with catastrophic consequences, is the central challenge of our times and our planet.
The middle class in America is at a tipping point. It will not last another generation if we don’t boldly change course now.
After a year of travel, discussion and dialogue, I have decided to be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. But let’s be clear. This campaign is not about Bernie Sanders. It’s about a grassroots movement of Americans standing up and saying: “Enough is enough. This country and our government belong to all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.”
Our movement needs people like you involved to help it succeed. Add your name now to say you support my campaign for president.
I run not to oppose any man or woman, but to propose new and far-reaching policies to deal with the crises of our times. And I run because I know we must change course now, or risk losing the future for so many to the interests of so few.
A successful national campaign is a massive undertaking, especially when we will be heavily outspent. It will require the active participation of millions of Americans in every community in our country. In fact, it will require nothing less than a political revolution which combats the demoralization and alienation of so many of our people from the political process.
Let me be very honest. It may be too late to stop the billionaire class from trying to buy the Presidency and Congress. The forces of greed already may be too powerful.
But we owe it to our children and grandchildren to try. We owe it to them to make the fight and, through the power of our numbers, turn back this assault on the foundation of our democracy and our future.
We are at a moment of truth. We need to face up to the reality of where we are as a nation, and we need a mass movement of people to fight for change.
I believe America is ready for a new path to the future.
On May 26th I will formally launch our campaign at the City Hall in Burlington, Vermont, where I served as Mayor.
I ask you to join with me in our campaign for President of the United States.
Sincerely,
Senator Bernie Sanders
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Sun May 3, 2015 1:42 pm (PDT) . Posted by:
“bigraccoon” redwoodsaurus
Citing Koch Brothers, Bernie Sanders Calls For “Political Revolution” Against “The Billionaire Class”
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/citing-koch-brothers-bernie-sanders-calls-for-political-revolution-against-the-billionaire-class/
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When we first booked the hall for Bernie’s event on Saturday night in Phoenix, we found a location that could hold 2,000 people. But after 5,000 signed up, we moved the venue. And after 10,000 signed up, we had to find an even bigger space.
And by the time the doors closed and the speech started, more than 11,000 people turned out for the largest event of the presidential campaign.
Our movement has grown beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
Supporters have created more than 1,500 organizing meetings on July 29th with over 25,000 people already signed up to attend one in their community.
We’re building an organization that can win Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and other states across the country.
And as of this moment, we’re just short of 450,000 individual, online contributions to help fund that massive undertaking.
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See also
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/latest-national-poll-shows-bernie-sanders-beating-scott-walker-donald-trump-jeb-bush
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A new poll came out this morning, and I wanted to make sure you saw it right away.
New Hampshire Democratic Primary
Bernie Sanders: 44%
Hillary Clinton: 37%
This is the first poll that shows us in the lead, but it won’t be the last. Last weekend over 65,000 people showed up to see Bernie in Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, and supporters recently hosted over 3,500 organizing meetings attended by over 100,000 people.
This is a campaign on the move, Linda, and it’s powered by real people, not billionaires and Super PACs.
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Richard Wolff: On Bernie Sanders and Socialism | #GRITtv
14 July 2015
This week: On Sanders and Socialism. Is socialism still an American taboo? Not so much, says professor Richard Wolff; nor was it in the past, says Nation columnist John Nichols.
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including his most recent; Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown 2010- 2014, and he hosts the weekly Economic Update podcast.
John Nichols’ many books include The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism, and, most recently, Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media-Election Complex is Destroying America. This episode also features an commentary from Laura on renaming capitalism.
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Wall Street’s greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior drove this country into the worst recession since the Great Depression. For too long, this billionaire class has corrupted our political system. We must act decisively to make our economy fair again.
Wall Street’s dangerous manipulation of our economy has helped divert most of all new income to the top one percent, contributing to the most unequal level of wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth.
Today, we live in the richest country in the history of the world, but that reality means little because much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals. The skyrocketing level of income and wealth inequality is not only grotesque and immoral, it is economically unsustainable.
The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class have rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country. As a result, Wall Street exists as an island unto itself, benefiting only the extremely wealthy while using our money to get rich.
That ends when I am president. Let me tell you what I’m going to do, then sign on to endorse my plan to take on Wall Street.
Tax Wall Street Speculation to Make College Tuition Free
Too many firms on Wall Street using high-speed trading to try to make a quick buck. But it’s risky and unproductive. Banks can execute thousands of stock trades a second thanks to sophisticated computer algorithms.
Wall Street can keep doing this if it wants—but they’ll have to pay a tax on every one of those trades. And this tax on Wall Street speculation would be enough to pay for my plan to make tuition free at every public college or university.
Break Up Banks that are Too Big to Fail
In the midst of all of this grotesque inequality in our country sits a handful of financial institutions that are still so large, the failure of any one would cause catastrophic risk to millions of Americans and send the world economy into crisis.
Most of the major Wall Street financial institutions that we bailed out because they were “too big to fail” are now bigger than they used to be. The six largest financial institutions now have assets equivalent to nearly 60% of our GDP, issue 35% of the mortgages, and oversee 65% of credit cards.
My view: If it’s too big to fail, it’s too big to exist. That’s the bottom line. As president, I will break up the big banks and restore some sanity to our banking system.
Make Banking Boring: Reign in the Recklessness
Banking should be boring. It shouldn’t be about making as much profit as possible by gambling on esoteric financial products. The goal of banking should be to provide affordable loans to small and medium-sized businesses in the productive economy, and to Americans who need to purchase homes and cars.
That is not what these huge financial institutions are doing. They’re instead creating an economy which is not sustainable from a moral, economic, or political perspective. It’s a rigged economy that must be changed in fundamental ways.
We need banks that invest in the job-creating productive economy. We do not need more speculation with the American economy hanging in the balance.
Unrig the Tax System
Our tax system is wildly unfair — rigged to benefit the very rich. Major corporations that earn billions in profits stash their money in tax havens and pay nothing in federal income taxes, while billionaire hedge fund managers pay a lower effective tax rate than nurses or teachers.
In order to reverse the massive transfer of wealth and income from the middle class to the very rich that we have seen in recent years, we need real tax reform which makes the wealthy and profitable corporations begin to pay their fair share of taxes. It is fiscally irresponsible that the U.S. Treasury loses about $100 billion a year because corporations and the rich stash their profits in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and other tax havens.
We need a tax system which is fair and progressive. Children should not go hungry in this country while profitable corporations and the wealthy avoid their tax responsibilities.
We Can Do This
The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.
I can understand how this might feel daunting. We are up against a billionaire class that has bought our political system to enrich itself, and is now faced with the breakup of their oligarchy.
Know this: when people come together to organize, we can beat any amount of money thrown around by the Koch Brothers, Goldman Sachs executives, or anyone else.
Our political revolution is underway, and when it is built, we will win not just against Wall Street, but we will win the White House.
Add your name to endorse my plan to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class.
We can do this, Linda. Thank you for standing with us.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
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