After dropping out of the 2020 race and backing his former rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said he believes the vast majority of his supporters will back Joe Biden in November. Although Sanders acknowledged that “everybody in American knows” how different the two are, he stressed the “choice is pretty clear” when deciding between Biden and President Donald Trump.
Sanders spoke to “CBS This Morning” co-host Tony Dokoupil in his first network TV interview since endorsing Biden to discuss their ideological differences, where we expects Biden to adopt a more progressive stance and what he thinks of the recent sexual assault allegation against the former Vice President.
Read a portion of their conversation below:
Bernie Sanders: On day one of my campaign, what I said is that, “If I lose, I will be there to support the Democratic nominee.” Because it is absolutely imperative that we defeat Donald Trump, who, in my view, is the most dangerous, irresponsible president in the modern history of this country.
Tony Dokoupil: That’s an argument against Donald Trump. But making the argument for Joe Biden is a different matter.
Sanders: To defeat Donald Trump, to me, and make sure that he is not reelected, is enormously important. So if you wanna make the point that Joe Biden’s views are not mine, no kidding. I think everybody in America knows that.
Dokoupil: I made a little list of some of the things that have been central to your campaign, and I’m hoping you let me know which of these you think could be part of a Biden administration. Universal health care is a biggie. Free college for all, canceled college debt, national rent control, a ban on fracking, a wealth tax, marijuana legalization, a 50% reduction in the prison population – these are all things you’ve campaigned on that have made you popular. Joe Biden doesn’t support any of them. Which do you see him moving on?
Sanders: Well, I think you will see him moving on making public colleges and universities tuition-free for families earning less than $125,000, not where I was. I wanted more… I think his views on climate change are not my views. But I think he is prepared to invest many hundreds of billions of dollars into sustainable energies like wind and solar and, in the process, create a whole lot of jobs… I think on health care he is not an advocate of Medicare For All, as I am. But I think he’s prepared to come forward with some ideas.
Dokoupil: Has he promised you anything?
Sanders: Well, we have talked about a number of issues. And you will see those evolving, coming out, I believe, in the next weeks and months.
Dokoupil: Joe Biden is gonna need every vote that he can get. How do you improve on your 2016 record to make sure that-
Sanders: My 2016 record was a fine record… in this house right here I got a couple of letters from Hillary Clinton, thanking me for the very strong support that I gave her. I did rally after rally, state after state… Look, the issue is that the American people are gonna have to make a fundamental decision. I’m gonna play a role in that. Do we come together to defeat somebody who is a pathological liar, somebody who does not believe in the rule of law, somebody who is prepared to give massive tax breaks to billionaires and ignore the needs of working families, or do we elect Joe Biden as president? I think the choice is pretty clear.
Dokoupil: I imagine that you will be fundraising for Joe Biden?
Sanders: Well, we will decide on what we’re gonna do with fundraising. All I would say is that we’re gonna do everything that we can to make sure that Donald Trump is not reelected.
Dokoupil: How do you campaign in the midst of this pandemic? Should there be conventions? Can you have rallies in the late summer, maybe?
Sanders: Well, nobody can predict that… The last thing that we want do is to do anything which gets more people sick and kills more people. That is the last thing that we wanna do… So I think that whether or not there’ll be a convention remains to be seen… I don’t know nor does anybody else, when rallies will be taking place, when candidates will be able to be out on the streets, shaking hands and talking to people face to face. Nobody knows that.
Dokoupil: I think it’s indisputable that this virus has exposed how medically and financially fragile many sectors of our society are.
Sanders: That’s right.
Dokoupil: In that tragedy, and our response to it, do you think society may reevaluate the need for the policies you’ve been arguing for, for 30 years now?
Sanders: The answer is yes. This pandemic, the economic collapse, has exposed the fragility of our health care system and our economy in terms of protecting working families. That is a lesson that I think many Americans are gonna learn from this.
Dokoupil: One of your most important allies, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said recently that she thinks it’s legitimate and relevant to talk about sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden. Do you agree?
Sanders: I think it’s relevant to talk about anything. And I think any woman who feels that she was assaulted has every right in the world to stand up and make her claims.
Dokoupil: Do you think that should weigh significantly in the mind of-
Sanders: I think that she has the right to make her claims and get a public hearing, and the public will make their own conclusions about it. I just don’t know enough about it to comment further.
Bernie Sanders is not a lifelong Democrat. He is not an Obama-Biden Democrat. He is not even a Democrat.
But that is not stopping the party from trying to make him feel welcome — now that it has stopped him from being its leader.
When Mr. Sanders dropped out of the presidential race a week ago, a Democratic establishment that has long kept him at arm’s length raced to publicly embrace him. Since he endorsed Mr. Biden, the former vice president, on Monday, party leaders have lavished Mr. Sanders with praise.
“Bernie is an American original, a man who has devoted his life to giving voice to working people’s hopes, dreams and frustrations,” former President Barack Obama said plainly in a video on Tuesday that announced his support for Mr. Biden. Never mind that Mr. Biden had spent part of the Democratic primary race accusing Mr. Sanders of disloyalty for considering a primary challenge against Mr. Obama in 2012.
A day earlier, Mr. Biden had called Mr. Sanders the “most powerful voice for a fair and more just America,” then theatrically acquiesced to Mr. Sanders’s quip that they play chess. A former top aide to Hillary Clinton enthused that Mr. Sanders was selfless.
This rush to show appreciation for Mr. Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who has spent much of his political career railing against the Democratic establishment, is partly an exhalation of relief.
But perhaps, above all, it is a projection of how desperate Democrats are to beat Mr. Trump. Establishment Democrats recognize that if Mr. Biden is to win in November, he will need the backing of Mr. Sanders’s loyal supporters, some of whom have expressed reluctance, if not disgust, at the notion of voting for the former vice president. By showing Mr. Sanders gratitude, they are hoping to mollify his supporters, too.
On Wednesday, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, was circumspect about the establishment’s newfound respect for his boss.
“He’s a person who has unrivaled integrity among many politicians,” he said. “When the dust settles, people recognize that integrity.”
Mr. Sanders, who is 78, said this week in an interview with The Associated Press that it was “probably a very fair assumption” that this presidential campaign was his last. But Mr. Shakir has rejected the idea that Mr. Sanders is guided by a wish to cement a positive political legacy in the eyes of a party he has long loathed.
“That’s not the way he thinks,” he said. “He does not think on legacy terms.”
Now Mr. Sanders is in the uniquely awkward position of being venerated by a party he has never joined but which he has shaped so much that it now can’t push him away.
The result is an exaggerated alliance that is aimed at soothing intraparty tension — with the added effect of calling into question whether political messages are simply a form of competitive posturing: For the moment, at least, voters can have an Obama-Biden-Sanders Democrat, a new political category that suggests identifying with the party means having everything or nothing at all.
And in a potential sign of the Sanders campaign’s willingness to let bygones be bygones, Mr. Shakir said on Wednesday that the January episode with Mr. Biden “didn’t leave any indelible impression.”
He also challenged the meaning of being a Democrat in the first place.
“There’s long been kind of a tension of whether a Democrat is defined by the partisan ‘D’ next to their name,” he said. “What Bernie has always pushed this party to reconcile is we stand for something and that’s what brings us together — it’s not a label.”
Some of Mr. Sanders’s devoted backers, including his former national press secretary, have indicated they have no such plans to fall in line. They have made clear that Mr. Sanders does not speak for them even as he has urged them to back Mr. Biden as well.
But for many Democrats, the overwhelming longing to beat Mr. Trump is enough to erase any lingering acrimony and to bridge the ideological gulf.
Paul ADK
They can gush all they want, they still have to win us over and I really don’t see a senile, groping, corporate stooge doing that, not one bloody bit.
DNC and their donors behind closed doors. Let settle this now. We will NOT allow Sanders to become our nominee PERIOD, News flash DNC and donors next meeting and see Byedone dropped into a tie with trumpcorp for Nov Election. Panicked voices(DNC) What can we do to get Sanders under 45 crowd on our side, We also need Sanders mail list as well!!! Well we sent hin a copy of the zapruder film to get him to drop out. Even if we get his mail list I doubt that will help. Most his supporters will tell us to shove it. What do we do, what so we do!!!!! Panic is really setting in 😨🤯
Americans filed 5.2 million jobless claims last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, pushing the four-week total to over 22 million as the coronavirus pandemic continued to send the workforce into a tailspin.
The new report, which covers the week ending April 11, puts cumulative job losses for the past month well ahead of those during the 18-month Great Recession of 2007-2009, until now judged the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The mass of jobless workers struggling to get through to state unemployment offices remained concentrated among lower-wage occupations, but it’s also starting to include middle and professional classes as quarantines and lockdowns spread economic misery upward. The International Monetary Fund forecast earlier this week that the U.S. economy will shrink by 5.9 percent in 2020.
But the worst is not behind us, as readings from every corner of the economy Wednesday delivered a dose of grim reality From retail and manufacturing activity to sentiment among home builders — not to mention reports from C-suites to Main Street of deepening stress — the new evidence makes plain the coronavirus-induced shock is severe already and getting uglier.
Retail sales dropped by a record 8.7 percent in March. The strength of consumer spending had helped the economic expansion power through some weak spots before the coronavirus crisis, so the collapse in spending is particularly concerning, if not entirely surprising (the consensus estimate among economists had forecast an 8 percent drop-off).
Manufacturing is also contracting sharply. Industrial production fell 5.4 percent in March, its worst decline since 1946, according to a new report from the Federal Reserve.The falloff in activity — which includes output from factories, utilities and oil and gas producers — “dwarfs any decline during the Great Recession,” Ryan Sweet of Moody’s Analytics writes in a note.
The housing market is registering severe distress, too. The National Association of Home Builders index posted its biggest-ever monthly decline, with sentiment among homebuilders plummeting 42 points to its lowest level since 2012. It now stands at 30, well under the 50-point mark below which confidence is in negative territory — and even further undershooting the consensus estimate of 55.
Anecdotal reports from small enterprises to the biggest companies filled in the dark picture. The Fed’s latest Beige Book, its survey of economic conditions on the ground as related by business people across the country, offered up a mosaic of misery. Economic activity has contracted “sharply and abruptly” across the map, with contacts in every region reporting “highly uncertain outlooks” and “most expecting conditions to worsen in the next several months,” the report found.
What is so stunning about the size of the declines that we are is that they might be what you would expect in a really really bad recession year, not a month. Moreover, they are occurring before the whole economy slipped into a deep freeze. Now in a new ice age. https://t.co/m8slw26a5Q
Another 5.2 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, the Labor Department announced Thursday.
Why it matters: With the more than 16 million jobless claims filed over the past three weeks, more jobs have now been lost in the last month than were gained since the Great Recession.
And economists say that as bad as these weekly numbers look on the surface, they’re likely even higher. There are widespread complaints that state labor departments are having trouble processing the never-before-seen wave of jobless filings.
Colorado — like most states and territories across the country — is experiencing record unemployment numbers. But the state’s unemployment system is built on aging software running on a decades-old coding language known as COBOL. Over the years, COBOL programmers have aged out of the workforce, forcing states to scramble for fluent coders in times of national crisis.
A survey by The Verge found that at least 12 states still use COBOL in some capacity in their unemployment systems. Alaska, Connecticut, California, Iowa, Kansas, and Rhode Island all run on the aging language. According to a spokesperson from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, the state was actually only a month or two away from “migrating into a new environment and away from COBOL,” before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
As the pandemic has millions out of work, these systems have become a barrier for the recently unemployed. The federal labor department reported 16.8 million unemployment claims were filed between March 15th and April 4th. That’s approximately 13 percent of the US’s workforce, outstripping even the height of the 2008 financial crash, where unemployment topped off at around 10 percent. As more stores and businesses shutter as a result of the pandemic, the US’s unemployment systems are experiencing an unprecedented amount of traffic and requests — and states don’t have the resources to maintain them.
Former Vice President Joe Biden welcomed endorsements this week from his former 2020 rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama. After all, Biden needs all the help he can get with a group of voters that Sanders and Obama are popular among: young voters.
Biden, at this point, seems to be underperforming 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with that bloc of voters. The final pre-election polls among registered voters had her leading President Donald Trump among 18-34 year-olds by a 22-point margin, according to a compilation by The New York Times’ Nate Cohn. The post-election Cooperative Congressional Election Study with verified voters indicates a similar margin. Either way, Clinton was greatly overperforming among younger voters than her final 2-point national margin.
To see where Biden is, I took an average of the last five high-quality national probability polls with an 18-34-year-old voter breakdown (ABC News/Washington Post, CNN/SSRS, Grinnell College/Selzer and Company, Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University). Biden leads Trump by 14 points on average among them. He is, in other words, doing about 10 points worse than Clinton did, even as he is leading Trump by a wider margin (6 points overall) than Clinton was in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.
Biden’s weakness with younger voters is something we saw in the primary as well. He averaged less than 20% of the vote among those under the age of 30 in states with an entrance or exit poll. Just looking at those voters who chose between Sanders and himself, he did 5 points worse than Clinton did while competing with Sanders with this bloc four years ago.
Now, the good news for Biden is the fact that Sanders was doing better suggests that Biden can win over at least some of these younger voters. Indeed, a lot of them say they are undecided. Looking at those five polls we examined before, 13% of those under 35 say they are undecided or choose none of the above. That’s 6 points more than among voters overall in the same polls. This suggests there may be some bitterness against Biden from the primary, which is translating to a higher percentage who don’t back either Biden or Trump.
If Biden can win over some of these younger voters, it could help him expand his general election lead. He’s already leading nationally by more than Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by, even as he is doing worse among younger voters. Biden is doing so because he’s actually winning older voters by 9 points, a group Clinton lost.
If Biden continues to outperform among older voters while underperforming among younger voters, it could potentially make an untraditional map in the electoral college. On that score, we’ll have to wait and see.
Well, as the primary season proved, boomers + are most reliable voters. But at present, it’s too early to say how much the pandemic will influence voting if we don’t have a mail-in ballot system in place by fall.
Though most Sanders supporters voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 after she became the Democratic nominee, some — as many as 12 percent, according to a Harvard study — backed Trump. The Sanders supporters who voted against the Democratic nominee tended not to be Democrats and weren’t particularly fond of Obama, wrote the Monkey Cage blog’s John Sides, a Vanderbilt University political science professor. Sanders wound up backing the presumptive nominee a few months earlier in this cycle; he endorsed Clinton in July of 2016.
That’s why there has always been fear among some establishment Democrats that a meaningful number of Sanders supporters would sit out the November election if the lawmaker was not the nominee.
In a Tuesday interview with the Associated Press, Sanders argued that becoming uninvolved in the election now that he’s no longer running was “irresponsible”:
“Do we be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden and doing everything we can to move Joe and his campaign in a more progressive direction? Or do we choose to sit it out and allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get reelected?”
“I believe that it’s irresponsible for anybody to say, ‘Well, I disagree with Joe Biden — I disagree with Joe Biden! — and therefore I’m not going to be involved.’ ” But the fight to push Biden left will inevitably face a wall. Winning those who favored Sanders in 2016 and 2020 was never Biden’s sole focus. He has long positioned himself as able to pick up voters who previously voted for Trump.
And Obama highlighted Biden’s ability to attract both sides in his Tuesday endorsement of his former vice president. He said:
Right now, we need Americans of goodwill to unite in a great awakening against a politics that too often has been characterized by corruption, carelessness, self-dealing, disinformation, ignorance and just plain meanness, and to change that, we need Americans of all political stripes to get involved in our politics and our public life like never before. Given that, to expect Biden to embrace a very liberal platform is to misunderstand why he won and how he hopes to defeat Trump: as a centrist capable of building wide-reaching coalitions.
Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who worked on Clinton’s campaign, said that while there is room for Biden to move leftward, the former vice president is likely to keep his moderate, independent and former Trump supporters in mind when he entertains these topics.
“Some of those cultural issues — abortion, LGBT issues, etc. — that the Biden folks will be looking out for are the wedge issues that the Republicans tend to be pretty opportunistic about,” Payne told The Fix. “So I think the Biden campaign will have to be careful with how they engage on those issues.”
“But he’s got tremendous power in that he’s going to be able to make a historic vice presidential selection and someone who’s going to be exciting to progressives,” added Payne, who worked on black voter outreach.
Many Democratic voters backed Biden over Sanders because they disagreed with some of Sanders’s ideas or his broader vision of America. Biden knew this and ran as the centrist he is, believing that the number of voters interested in a moderate alternative to Trump was greater than the number attracted to Sanders’s revolution.
Biden was actually able to do something that the Sanders campaign promised their candidate was best equipped to do: build a broad coalition. In the primary, it was Biden who won suburban voters, older voters and white working-class voters — groups that mirror the coalitions that went for Trump in the 2016 general. And if he is going to defeat Trump, he may need to expand his popularity with those supporters and the public figures who help influence them. Widely embracing the ideology of the far left to appease the still-loud Sanders base could make that difficult.
Mr. Senility will have a big problem if the c-virus hangs around. The geezer/wrinkle/ get off my lawn cohort are much more susceptible to croaking from this disease. And…there’s no vaccine yet.
If he does run where his votes will mostly come from is a big question. He could have an especially big impact in Michigan, his home state, which right now of all the battleground states seems the most Dem leaning.
Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) has reignited speculation that he’ll run for president, sparking excitement among Libertarians who view him as their best shot at breaking through on the national stage in 2020.
Amash has been flirting with a third-party White House bid for months now but he’ll have to make a decision soon, with the Libertarian Party nominating convention coming up in late May.
With no high-profile name at the front of the pack, Libertarians are salivating over the prospect of having a sitting member of Congress at the top of their ticket.
They’ve been organizing pressure campaigns in Facebook groups and on Twitter to convince Amash to take the plunge. Top party officials say their phones are exploding with messages from excited party members asking them if they know anything about Amash’s plans.
“He’s toyed with this before and every time he does there’s a lot of excitement from within the Liberty movement,” said Joe Hunter, communications director for former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson’s Libertarian presidential run in 2016 and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld’s (R) protest campaign against President Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination.
“He’d be acceptable to a lot of Libertarians, but also to a lot of those ‘Never Trump’ Republicans,” Hunter said. “Of all the candidates out there, he’s at the top of the list of those that can bring us to a tipping point, where a third party or independent candidate convinces the media and donors that he or she can be relevant and have an impact on the race.”
Amash has described himself as a Libertarian in the past and it would be near-impossible for him to meet deadlines to get on the ballot in most states as an independent.
The first goal for many Libertarians is to have their candidate make the debate stage, which means meeting the Presidential Debate Commission’s 15 percent polling threshold.
From there, they want to build on the Johnson-Weld showing from 2016, when the ticket earned 4.5 million votes, tripling the party’s previous record.
Johnson got 9.3 percent of the vote in his home state of New Mexico, raising questions about how well Amash could do in his home state of Michigan, which will be among the most hotly contested battlegrounds in 2020.
THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC is a conundrum for the left. It has ignited a widespread need and willingness to help and fight for each other — while foreclosing many of the ways we typically imagine left movements taking shape.
With unemployment ballooning and maps of virus transmission and fatalities revealing the cruel geography of class and race in America, the pandemic has vindicated left critiques, revealing an American economy organized to enable the comfort and safety of the few at the expense of the suffering and sacrifice of the many.
“It’s a trigger event, the largest one of my lifetime,” said Paul Engler, organizer and co-author of “This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century.” Yet as major corporations work their will on Capitol Hill, extracting bailouts and reshaping the structure of the economy, no countervailing social movement has found footing to pushback or even articulate clear demands from Congress. That’s despite extraordinary leverage held by Democrats, who control the House of Representatives and, from a political perspective, have far less of a political need than President Donald Trump for economic relief packages.
Trigger events, Engler said, create tremendous opportunities for mass movements to form, coalesce existing social forces and organizations, and change the architecture of society. But the bailouts are happening now, before any of that has formed. Even if it had coalesced, most of the traditional tactics of left organizing — marches, rallies, occupations, picket lines — could endanger public health, and the risks of engaging in civil disobedience have risen, as jails have become petri dishes for the virus. That leaves corporate power effectively unopposed in Congress amid the most aggressive rewriting of the social contract in a generation, while workers spend their energy instead helping each other stay alive.
The vast majority of those laid off in the past few weeks, however, don’t have a union fighting for them. Activists are scrambling to respond to a flood of emergency needs — unsafe “essential” workplaces, joblessness, homelessness, loan defaults, unpaid rent, eviction — while simultaneously organizing workers and tenants to extract relief from their employers, landlords, and the state.
To provide for their needs and attempt to organize their grievances into a political force, organizers in Philadelphia have created an Unemployed Council. “The closest historical model we have [to the present crisis] is the Great Depression,” said David Thompson of Philly Socialists. “Back then, unemployed councils were able to get serious reforms and lay the groundwork for future organizing when workers were rehired.”
Multiple organizers I spoke to expressed hope that labor struggles undertaken during the crisis can give workers a taste of collective action — and prepare for an organizing blitz when the economy reopens. As Thompson noted, Depression-era Unemployed Councils “seeded” the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, the militant labor faction that emerged from the strike waves of the 1930s. Organizers in Portland, Oregon, are also building an Unemployed Council.
I support @seiu200united and TCGPlayer warehouse workers work to organize a union. Now more than ever, workers need a union contract to protect their wages, benefits, and safety on the job. https://t.co/N3FUldba2r
Katie @k_artig, thank you for your compassion &courage! This thread is light & by sharing your thoughts you are lifting others. It was a pleasure meeting you during #Bernie2020. The campaign was the spark, we are the FIRE! Never forget that! Many thanks to @breakfastclubam 👊🏾💜 https://t.co/GSBWSp27ud
Even in the movie Thor was brought down a notch before he could yield it again. So the next Bernie will have to prove him/her self to be able to do that as well.
Paul ADK
The lesser of two evils is still evil. I’m looking at Howie Hawkins, at the moment. This might be one of those elections where the most productive thing to do is to grow a third party.
Trump is not mine. That he is president is a direct result of the DNC having forced an unpopular candidate on the party. And the same thing is happening now, again. So why would my response be any different, this time? If Trump gets any trumpier he’s going to implode. I’m fine with that.
Bill McKibben, one of our leading environmental activists/authorities disagrees, at least for the battleground states. Now if we had ranked choice voting in the US, he would support the greens. He also points out that they would be a much stronger party if people could vote for them without worrying about being a spoiler vote.
I have much respect for Bill McKibben but I disagree with his argument that it’s ok to vote Green party in states where the election won’t be close, but not in swing states. I’m planning to vote Green but I’m going to donate money to the Green parties in each of the swing states. I think that is the most effective thing anyone can do to cripple the Democratic party. And cripple the Democratic party we must if we want to end the climate crisis and win single payer health care.
Hell if he won and the house and senate were controlled by the Dems it would be 4 years of nothing but comedy and numerous investigations, he would have a nervous breakdown…
Don midwest
joe, that joe
who I had never heard about until the Bernie interview
found him again
on democracynow this morning, epidemologist Peter Daszak was on the show
insane that Trump drop funding to WHO
recommend look up the interview
Peter is with institutes and Columbia University
I went to his twitter feed and found out that he was one of the 100 influencers on the corona virus according to a group that does that kind of stuff. Interesting that the #1 influencer was the head of WHO.
study was March 17 which is years and years ago in pandemic time
in any case they noted that 2 of the influencers did not have a twitter account. One had been on Joe Rogan’s show and as of March 17, that interview had had over 10 million views.
I am listening to the interview right now and it is up to 14.2 million views. And the interview was on March 10!!!
And still good stuff. Didn’t realize the prions are in deer. Prions from Mad Cow fame.
Is anyone gonna question Symone Sanders and Team Biden about what banks are doing with stimulus checks?
For some struggling Americans, the arrival of a deposit from the Treasury Department to help with basic expenses like rent and groceries during the coronavirus crisis was something to count on — until their financial institutions got in the way.
That was what happened to Benji Pedro of Columbia, S.C. Because his account at Safe Federal Credit Union was overdrawn by $2,650, he had planned to ask the Treasury Department to mail him a check. But before he could, the agency deposited $1,200 into the overdrawn account on Wednesday, and a representative of the credit union told him that it was keeping all of it, Mr. Pedro said.
Mr. Pedro, a 24-year-old recording artist who lives with his girlfriend and their child, said his account had been overdrawn because of subscriptions to two music services that he had forgotten to cancel.
Representatives of Safe Federal Credit Union had no immediate comment.
Identity theft plagued Mr. Benny once. He made the mistake of using a debit card at a gas station and his bank account was almost cleaned out (he was living in FL at the time). The bank did not notify him; he had to report it himself once he couldn’t withdraw some cash. Luckily, he got his money back but that was pathetic. Took weeks to straighten it out.
That I can believe, almost easier dealing with the IRS than a bankster
Don midwest
Fuck Fuck
Virus from China bio weapon lab
the intelligence communities playing the same game as the dem party
the republican party looking for an excuse
blame on the communists
to change the subject
The doctor on Joe Rogan’s show that I linked in another comment said
in the 1990 I worked in the area of bio weapons. I interviewed bio weapons developers from the old Soviet union because they wanted to talk. And he has been involved in other areas
he said flat out that humans don’t know enough to make this virus. Nature knows how to do it.
he published a book a couple of years ago that predicted that this kind of an outbreak would happen
there is no way it could happen from a bio lab
** Just at the time when all our institutions are under attack, and capitalism has wounded many of them, this is not the time to spread conspiracy theories to provide power and money to some groups
This is an extremely inflammatory accusation CNN is trumpeting even though, they admit, there's no evidence for it.
I hope the Right learned during Russiagate that self-serving leaks about US adversaries from anonymous IC officials through US media are fundamentally unreliable. https://t.co/VEiFvygwNp
** In the interview with Joe, and on democracy now with A. Roy, the attack on Gaia is resulting in this — going deeper into forests, people more dense
** there are thousands if not millions potential virus that could evolve
Don midwest
link to Peter
Despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, President Trump this week suggested the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab. Zoologist and disease ecologist @PeterDaszak says that idea is "pure baloney," calling it a needless "politicization of the origins of a pandemic." pic.twitter.com/5Jvf0HLLPD
That's a massive, global paradigm shift in one of the most conservative and slow-moving disciplines on the social sciences.#MMTpic.twitter.com/8wdmX25Bqt
I tended to favor her for VP and I recall her work on finance, but after this reminded that she can’t carry her home state, and she has walked back all the work that got her into politics, AND, she zapped Bernie
(another vague hope bites the dust)
well done segment
it shouldn’t be so easy to make such a damming critique of a politician
like Biden, dem establishment, what does Liz stand for?
Her most too clever by half move: if Warren had dropped out to endorse Bernie, she would have much stronger case for VP bc getting picked as Biden’s running mate would be a potentially meaningful gesture to Bernie voters. Now, the left hates Warren! So, she’s no olive branch. https://t.co/whYpkkTGPp
Definitely. She would have had a lot more leverage if she had backed Bernie when she dropped out even though I don’t think it would have made that much difference in the end result, especially with her crowd of voters. Now she’s a complete afterthought to Bernie’s endorsement.
Paul ADK
Not to mention the selective memory of the event. I believed Bernie’s take on that entirely. She was being opportunistic.
I gave her the benefit of the doubt early in the process, but when she pulled that crap on Bernie it was all over for me– she destroyed any bit of cred she had. She’s part of the Neolibcon problem
The Snake never had any principles. Only aspirations and objectives. And the pretty words that she took from Bernie.
Don midwest
states response to opening up after pandemic settles down
Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler has an article on Ohio which with a republican governor has done well on this outbreak. His head of public health worked in the Obama administration. Good comments and one former resident of the state who has followed the governor, Mike DeWine, who has used his Catholic background to go after abortion in the state, has done well with this crisis.
ANNAPOLIS, MD—Governor Larry Hogan today announced that Maryland is now in a position to plan the gradual rollout of the state’s recovery phase amid “very real reasons for hope and optimism,” laying out four building blocks for a recovery plan:
Expanding testing capacity Increasing hospital surge capacity Ramping up supply of PPE Building a robust contact tracing operation
Trump and his team of jerks wants to rush to open.
This will be a really big deal going into the election this year because Trump wants the economy to look good.
(I am going to ask a question — but I know the answer and hope I am wrong)
Will the dem establishment have a sane policy statement like the 4 points above and push back on the Trump media machine?
Trump has killed people
It is right there out in the open
When are the dems going to take strong stands? What do they stand for?
** to repeat how naive I was back in 2008 when I thought at any minute, the dem establishment would jump on the issue election integrity. why did it take so long to realize that they were ass kissers to capitalism?
and that capitalism is the new religion
Capitalism has replaced Nature as the main organizing principle of civilization
Joe Biden is very famous, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his YouTube channel.
Mr. Biden has just 32,000 subscribers on the influential video platform, a pittance compared with some of his rivals in the Democratic primary race and roughly 300,000 fewer than President Trump. The videos that Mr. Biden posts — these days, mostly repurposed campaign ads and TV-style interviews filmed from the makeshift studio in his basement — rarely crack 10,000 views. And the virtual crickets that greet many of his appearances have become a source of worry for some Democrats, who see his sluggish performance online as a bad omen for his electoral chances in November.
“This video is 2 days old and it’s sitting at 20,000 views,” one commenter wrote under a recent video of Mr. Biden’s. “This is a guy that is supposed to beat Trump?”
In a normal election year, a former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee would have no trouble filling an arena. But the coronavirus has forced Mr. Biden to abandon in-person gatherings and adapt to an all-digital campaign strategy — a daunting pivot even in the best of times, but one made even harder by the need to compete for attention amid a pandemic and a once-in-a-generation economic collapse.
The shift has been clumsy for Mr. Biden, an old-school retail politician who relishes face-to-face interactions. He lacks the social media firepower of Mr. Trump, whose 106 million combined followers on Facebook and Twitter dwarf Mr. Biden’s 6.7 million, and whose White House coronavirus briefings have allowed him to commandeer the news cycle. Mr. Biden’s first virtual town hall last month was marred by technical problems, and some of his other digital experiments — like a soporific campaign podcast, “Here’s the Deal,” which did not rank among the top 100 podcasts on Apple Podcasts as of this week — have not gone as well as hoped.
Online popularity doesn’t always lead to electoral success. (If it did, New Yorkers would be listening to daily coronavirus briefings from Gov. Cynthia Nixon.) But underestimating the internet’s influence is a mistake, too. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s surging popularity among the internet’s grass roots was a bellwether that indicated his candidacy might be stronger than it appeared in traditional polls. Conversely, Mr. Biden’s lack of support from meme makers and viral-content mavens could signal trouble ahead.
In the coming months, Mr. Biden will benefit from his proximity to Democrats with bigger online followings. This week, two videos containing new endorsements of Mr. Biden, from Mr. Sanders and Mr. Obama, got millions of views apiece and briefly stole the spotlight from Mr. Trump and his coronavirus task force. Mr. Biden will also benefit from the efforts of left-wing super PACs like Priorities USA Action, which has raised millions of dollars to rally digital support for the Democratic nominee online.
These efforts may still seem small in comparison with Mr. Trump, who has spent years building a vast data operation and a war chest that will allow him to blanket the internet with ads. Brad Parscale, who ran Mr. Trump’s digital operation in 2016 and is managing his re-election campaign, has said he does not expect Mr. Biden — or any other Democrat — to catch up to Mr. Trump, with or without social distancing.
“President Trump’s supporters will run through a brick wall to vote for him,” Mr. Parscale said in a recent statement. “Nobody is running through a brick wall for Joe Biden.”
For now, Mr. Biden’s supporters can take solace in his relatively strong polling performance, and the hope that a lull in the coronavirus allows him to return to the campaign trail this summer. And while some Democrats are worried that Mr. Biden’s online struggles are a preview of a rough road ahead, others don’t see social media success as a prerequisite for winning the White House.
Dims better come up with something more than simply ‘senile is better than the fat badly made up orange imbecile’ or it will be a slaughter in November. Seriously, there have been 30+ years of ‘lesser than 2 evils’ crap. So, that buzzard has finally come home to roost.
Stub
When he campaigned for Hillary, Bernie often said that even on her worst day she was better than Trump on his best day. Because of Biden’s dementia I don’t Bernie can get away with that this time.
Not to mention the super pac ads on his kid soon to come and his own sexual misconduct problems. It wont matter to Trumpcorps super pacs that Trumpcorp is just as bad.
wpDiscuz
He answers questions about the sexual assault allegations against Biden
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-supporting-joe-biden-2020-sexual-assault-allegations-defeating-trump/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/us/politics/bernie-sanders-joe-biden-democrats.html
They can gush all they want, they still have to win us over and I really don’t see a senile, groping, corporate stooge doing that, not one bloody bit.
T and R, jcb!!😊🕊 DNCraporate is just a YUPPIE version of GOPuke. I won’t touch them with a hundred mile barge pole. 🤮
DNC and their donors behind closed doors. Let settle this now. We will NOT allow Sanders to become our nominee PERIOD, News flash DNC and donors next meeting and see Byedone dropped into a tie with trumpcorp for Nov Election. Panicked voices(DNC) What can we do to get Sanders under 45 crowd on our side, We also need Sanders mail list as well!!! Well we sent hin a copy of the zapruder film to get him to drop out. Even if we get his mail list I doubt that will help. Most his supporters will tell us to shove it. What do we do, what so we do!!!!! Panic is really setting in 😨🤯
Bernie is being nice, but he’s also showing his politician side. Of course, his team knew about the allegations and he did too.
Funny how nearly every segment appeared quickly on CBS This Morning’s list of videos, but not this interview.
I think he meant not know enough about what actually happened between Reade and Biden. Reporters should ask Biden not Bernie.
Agree.
good answer.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/16/coronavirus-unemployment-claims-numbers-190026
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2020/04/16/the-finance-202-alarming-new-data-show-the-worst-might-be-ahead-in-a-coronavirus-economy/5e978e7c602ff10d49ae6083/?utm_source=reddit.com
https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-unemployment-filings-caded026-fce4-43cc-8dc0-5f0037747b69.html
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/14/21219561/coronavirus-pandemic-unemployment-systems-cobol-legacy-software-infrastructure
There was always massive incompetence in unemployment admin down here in Right-To-Serf-ville. Sounds like the rest of the country is catching up.😡
Right now, Biden is underperforming Clinton with younger voters but overperforming with older voters.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/16/politics/biden-young-voters/index.html
Well, as the primary season proved, boomers + are most reliable voters. But at present, it’s too early to say how much the pandemic will influence voting if we don’t have a mail-in ballot system in place by fall.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/16/how-far-can-joe-biden-go-appeal-former-sanders-supporters-democrats-left/
Hey Bernie, Raygun, Cheney, and ByeDone were/are unfit for office according to the Constitution. So, just another reason not to vote for them.
Mr. Senility will have a big problem if the c-virus hangs around. The geezer/wrinkle/ get off my lawn cohort are much more susceptible to croaking from this disease. And…there’s no vaccine yet.
If he does run where his votes will mostly come from is a big question. He could have an especially big impact in Michigan, his home state, which right now of all the battleground states seems the most Dem leaning.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/493038-libertarians-view-amash-as-potential-2020-game-changer-for-party
he’ll be way behind in delegates?
My NC pal who supported Bernie will vote for Amash in a nanosecond. She is a GOPer who despises the fat orange blob.
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/14/coronavirus-mutual-aid-worker-organizing-left-movement/
Mountains, sure. But not the corporate corruption that IS the DNC.
https://twitter.com/ttagaris/status/1250597575838912512?s=20
Merci dieu!
Even in the movie Thor was brought down a notch before he could yield it again. So the next Bernie will have to prove him/her self to be able to do that as well.
The lesser of two evils is still evil. I’m looking at Howie Hawkins, at the moment. This might be one of those elections where the most productive thing to do is to grow a third party.
Trump is not mine. That he is president is a direct result of the DNC having forced an unpopular candidate on the party. And the same thing is happening now, again. So why would my response be any different, this time? If Trump gets any trumpier he’s going to implode. I’m fine with that.
Bill McKibben, one of our leading environmental activists/authorities disagrees, at least for the battleground states. Now if we had ranked choice voting in the US, he would support the greens. He also points out that they would be a much stronger party if people could vote for them without worrying about being a spoiler vote.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/instead-of-challenging-joe-biden-maybe-the-green-party-could-help-change-our-democracy
I have much respect for Bill McKibben but I disagree with his argument that it’s ok to vote Green party in states where the election won’t be close, but not in swing states. I’m planning to vote Green but I’m going to donate money to the Green parties in each of the swing states. I think that is the most effective thing anyone can do to cripple the Democratic party. And cripple the Democratic party we must if we want to end the climate crisis and win single payer health care.
Hell if he won and the house and senate were controlled by the Dems it would be 4 years of nothing but comedy and numerous investigations, he would have a nervous breakdown…
joe, that joe
who I had never heard about until the Bernie interview
found him again
on democracynow this morning, epidemologist Peter Daszak was on the show
insane that Trump drop funding to WHO
recommend look up the interview
Peter is with institutes and Columbia University
I went to his twitter feed and found out that he was one of the 100 influencers on the corona virus according to a group that does that kind of stuff. Interesting that the #1 influencer was the head of WHO.
Coronavirus: Top Healthcare Professionals
study was March 17 which is years and years ago in pandemic time
in any case they noted that 2 of the influencers did not have a twitter account. One had been on Joe Rogan’s show and as of March 17, that interview had had over 10 million views.
I am listening to the interview right now and it is up to 14.2 million views. And the interview was on March 10!!!
And still good stuff. Didn’t realize the prions are in deer. Prions from Mad Cow fame.
Joe Rogan Experience #1439 – Michael Osterholm
Is anyone gonna question Symone Sanders and Team Biden about what banks are doing with stimulus checks?
And Pelosi and Schumer
Stories like this are what the FRighties and their slime mold allies hop on. Sad but true.
Not a very good credit union. Mine wouldn’t have paid those music subscriptions once I overdrew.
Identity theft plagued Mr. Benny once. He made the mistake of using a debit card at a gas station and his bank account was almost cleaned out (he was living in FL at the time). The bank did not notify him; he had to report it himself once he couldn’t withdraw some cash. Luckily, he got his money back but that was pathetic. Took weeks to straighten it out.
thanks for the tip! now that i think about it, he never did say he was over drawn. maybe it just kept charging
That I can believe, almost easier dealing with the IRS than a bankster
Fuck Fuck
Virus from China bio weapon lab
the intelligence communities playing the same game as the dem party
the republican party looking for an excuse
blame on the communists
to change the subject
The doctor on Joe Rogan’s show that I linked in another comment said
in the 1990 I worked in the area of bio weapons. I interviewed bio weapons developers from the old Soviet union because they wanted to talk. And he has been involved in other areas
he said flat out that humans don’t know enough to make this virus. Nature knows how to do it.
he published a book a couple of years ago that predicted that this kind of an outbreak would happen
there is no way it could happen from a bio lab
**
Just at the time when all our institutions are under attack, and capitalism has wounded many of them, this is not the time to spread conspiracy theories to provide power and money to some groups
**
In the interview with Joe, and on democracy now with A. Roy, the attack on Gaia is resulting in this — going deeper into forests, people more dense
**
there are thousands if not millions potential virus that could evolve
link to Peter
LOL about the Right learning about unreliable self serving leaks.
Nina is one of the guests on The Rising today.
Liz
lack of principles
I tended to favor her for VP and I recall her work on finance, but after this reminded that she can’t carry her home state, and she has walked back all the work that got her into politics, AND, she zapped Bernie
(another vague hope bites the dust)
well done segment
it shouldn’t be so easy to make such a damming critique of a politician
like Biden, dem establishment, what does Liz stand for?
what are her principles?
humphrey has a point: once a 🐍, always a 🐍. I never liked her, and hoped I was wrong.
I don’t hate Warren. But pulling out the gender card to blunt Bernie was bad advice. This is on Team Warren and her weak Obama advisors.
If anything killed Warren’s campaign, it was that and also the Senate Trial for removing Trump in January.
Definitely. She would have had a lot more leverage if she had backed Bernie when she dropped out even though I don’t think it would have made that much difference in the end result, especially with her crowd of voters. Now she’s a complete afterthought to Bernie’s endorsement.
Not to mention the selective memory of the event. I believed Bernie’s take on that entirely. She was being opportunistic.
I gave her the benefit of the doubt early in the process, but when she pulled that crap on Bernie it was all over for me– she destroyed any bit of cred she had. She’s part of the Neolibcon problem
Here’s the interview of Turner itself:
The Snake never had any principles. Only aspirations and objectives. And the pretty words that she took from Bernie.
states response to opening up after pandemic settles down
Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler has an article on Ohio which with a republican governor has done well on this outbreak. His head of public health worked in the Obama administration. Good comments and one former resident of the state who has followed the governor, Mike DeWine, who has used his Catholic background to go after abortion in the state, has done well with this crisis.
I live in OH
WAPO SHOULD GO TO COLUMBUS TO FIND OUT HOW ECONOMY WILL REOPEN, NOT PERPETUATE TRUMP’S MYTHS ABOUT IT
In a tweet this morning, she links to the governor of MD
Governor Hogan Plans Gradual Rollout of Recovery Phase Amid “Very Real Reasons for Hope and Optimis
Trump and his team of jerks wants to rush to open.
This will be a really big deal going into the election this year because Trump wants the economy to look good.
(I am going to ask a question — but I know the answer and hope I am wrong)
Will the dem establishment have a sane policy statement like the 4 points above and push back on the Trump media machine?
Trump has killed people
It is right there out in the open
When are the dems going to take strong stands? What do they stand for?
**
to repeat how naive I was back in 2008 when I thought at any minute, the dem establishment would jump on the issue election integrity. why did it take so long to realize that they were ass kissers to capitalism?
and that capitalism is the new religion
Capitalism has replaced Nature as the main organizing principle of civilization
and the dem party is riding that train
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/technology/joe-biden-internet.html
images
media
manipulation
no real politics going on
do just enough to win
Dims better come up with something more than simply ‘senile is better than the fat badly made up orange imbecile’ or it will be a slaughter in November. Seriously, there have been 30+ years of ‘lesser than 2 evils’ crap. So, that buzzard has finally come home to roost.
When he campaigned for Hillary, Bernie often said that even on her worst day she was better than Trump on his best day. Because of Biden’s dementia I don’t Bernie can get away with that this time.
Not to mention the super pac ads on his kid soon to come and his own sexual misconduct problems. It wont matter to Trumpcorps super pacs that Trumpcorp is just as bad.