Billionaire Leon Cooperman asked Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exactly what it is that he has done wrong. They refused to answer him.
The Washington Post recently published this article on billionaire Leon Cooperman.
The article states:
He… wrote letters to politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) whenever they criticized billionaires in their speeches, because he couldn’t understand: What exactly had he done wrong? What rule had he broken? He’d been born to poor immigrant parents on the losing end of a capitalist economy. He’d attended public schools, taken on debt to become the first in his family to attend college, worked 80-hour weeks, made smart decisions, benefited from some good luck, amassed a fortune for himself and for his clients and paid hundreds of millions in taxes to the government. He had a wife of 57 years, two successful children, and three grandchildren who were helping him decide how to give most of his money away to a long list of charities. “My life is the story of the American Dream,” he’d said while accepting an award at one charity gala, and he’d always imagined himself as the rags-to-riches hero, only to now find himself cast as the greedy villain in a story of economic inequality run amok.
Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez have all refused to answer Cooperman’s question.
Bernie Sanders assails Democratic ‘hypocrisy’ as the party edges closer to handing the rich a massive tax cut in Biden’s spending bill
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bernie-sanders-assails-democratic-hypocrisy-162124034.html
Bernie Sanders assails Democratic ‘hypocrisy’ as the party edges closer to handing the rich a massive tax cut in Biden’s spending bill
By Joseph Zeballos-Roig
November 18, 2021
Sanders says Dems risk charges of “hypocrisy” as they edge closer to handing the rich a tax break.
It’s bad policy, bad politics,” the Vermont senator told Politico.
Democrats are uneasy with efforts to provide a bigger state and local tax deduction for people in high-tax blue states.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is raising alarms that Democrats will be exposed to charges of hypocrisy due to a tax cut provision benefiting the wealthy in President Joe Biden’s spending bill.
“You can’t be a political party that talks about demanding the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes and then end up with a bill that gives large tax breaks to many millionaires,” Sanders told Politico. “You can’t do that. It’s bad policy, it’s bad politics.”
Sanders’ warning comes as Democrats become increasingly anxious with the largest slice of Biden’s social spending bill: a tax cut for rich Americans residing in high-tax, predominantly blue states.
The House is poised to approve a $1.75 trillion social spending bill that includes a measure lifting the amount of state and local taxes (SALT) that people can deduct from their federal tax bills to $80,000 from $10,000 through 2026. The $10,000 limit was imposed under President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law.
Experts say lifting the SALT cap would overwhelmingly benefit richer Americans. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center projects most millionaires would be in line for a tax cut under the House Democratic proposal.
“This is giving them a better deal than they had even before 2017,” Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, told Insider. “They will have more benefits under Democrats than even Republicans gave them under President Trump.”
Other Democrats are uneasy with the SALT provision. Sen. Jon Tester of Montana told NBC News he wasn’t “a big fan” of the idea because “it gives tax breaks to the wrong people.”
“It would be preposterous if this legislation ends up cutting taxes for the wealthiest people in America,” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado recently told Insider.
It’s also generating frustration in the House. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, a vulnerable Democrat in next year’s midterms, wrote on Twitter that SALT relief appeared like something Republicans would do instead.
https://twitter.com/RepGolden/status/1461099112603041792
“The fact that more people and orgs on the Democratic side aren’t up in arms about this is wild,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet.
Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means panel, told Insider it “absolutely” becomes more difficult for Democrats to tout the legislation to the public if it delivers a hefty tax cut to the rich.
“When you just do the math and you find out that most of it’s going to the very, very wealthy, it makes it harder to support,” Beyer said.
Sanders is spearheading negotiations design an alternate plan alongside Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey that would cut the level of tax benefits for the wealthy. They’re eyeing an income cap ranging between $500,000 and $550,000.
Communist Bernie Sanders wants to crash the stock market in order to “help” the millions of people who lost their jobs due to the government mandated lockdown of private businesses
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
August 7, 2020
Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill called “The Make Billionaires Pay Act.”
The bill would impose a 60% wealth tax on the urealized capital gains that billionaires made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The only way that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others could get the money to pay this tax would be by selling their stocks in the very companies that they themselves created.
That would push stock prices down and crash the stock market.
Sanders thinks this is the way to “help” the millions of people who lost their jobs due to the government mandated lockdown of private businesses.
Sanders is upset that amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been successfully delivering essential goods to the homes of millions of Americans during the government lockdown.
Sanders is also upset that Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has been successfully manufacturing huge numbers of electric cars.
So Sanders wants to punish them for their success.
And in punishing these billionaires for their success, Sanders would also end up punishing anyone who has a job or wants a job.
Sanders doesn’t like it when private businesses sell customers the goods and services that customers want. Instead, Sanders prefers that people have to wait in line. Sanders said it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food. These are Sanders’s exact words:
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, cause people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
You can see and hear Sanders saying those words in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
While Sanders thinks it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food, I wrote this blog post about what it’s actually like in the real world when people have to wait in line for food: The Maduro diet: How most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017
Sanders also said the following:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers”
Well, as it turns out, the communist policies of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have caused shortages of both deodorant and shoes in Venezuela.
In addition, Vermont has declared clothing to be “non-essential,” and has ordered Target, Wal-Mart, and other stores to stop selling it.
The people who elected Sanders to the U.S. Senate are the same people who elected the politicians in Vermont who ordered Target, Wal-Mart, and other stores to stop selling clothing.
Sanders is a communist who said:
“I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries”
Sanders’s entire economic policy is based on his envy and jealousy of those who are more financially successful than himself.
Sanders’s proposal is called “The Make Billionaires Pay Act.”
It would have been “Millionaires and Billionaires,” except hypocrite Sanders stopped using that phrase after the New York Times reported that Sanders himself was a millionaire.
Sanders then proceeded to defend his own millionaire status by saying:
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
I agree with Sanders on that one point.
But Sanders is a hypocrite because he does not apply the same justification to the wealth of Bezos, Musk, etc., that he applies to his own wealth.
Sanders claims that his proposed tax on billionaires’ wealth would be a “one time” event.
However, in the past, Sanders proposed an annual wealth tax that billionaires would have to pay every year, until they were no long billionaires.
Sanders tried to justify his proposed annual tax on billionaires’ wealth by saying:
“Billionaires should not exist”
https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1176481898685710337
The reason that Sanders thinks billionaires should not exist is because he is against allowing people to spend their own money on the goods and services that they want. Sanders prefers that people have to wait in line for food, and that there be fewer choices when it comes to everyday consumer products such as shoes and deodorant.
That’s not “democratic socialism” like they have in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.
That’s communism, like they have in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.
Here’s an article about Sanders’s new bill:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bernie-sanders-tax-billionaires-pandemic-health-care-204709337.html
Bernie Sanders wants to tax billionaires’ pandemic gains to fund health care
By Adriana Belmonte
August 6, 2020
A new bill introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Ed Markey (D-MA) would implement a one-time 60% tax on billionaires to cover the health care costs of every American for a year.
The Make Billionaires Pay Act would tax the $731 billion in wealth accumulated by the richest 0.001% of America between March 18 through August 5. This would apply towards 467 individuals.
“The legislation I am introducing today will tax the obscene wealth gains billionaires have made during this extraordinary crisis to guarantee healthcare as a right to all for an entire year,” Sen. Sanders said in a statement. “At a time of enormous economic pain and suffering, we have a fundamental choice to make. We can continue to allow the very rich to get much richer while everyone else gets poorer and poorer. Or we can tax the winnings a handful of billionaires made during the pandemic to improve the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans.
The money generated from this 60% tax would go towards covering out-of-pocket expenses for the uninsured and underinsured for one year.
The top five richest Americans – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, and Oracle Founder Larry Ellison —-would pay a combined $87.1 billion under the bill. In total, the tax would generate over $421.6 billion.
“In my view,” Sanders added, “it is time for the Senate to act on behalf of the working class who are hurting like they have never hurt before, not the billionaire class who are doing phenomenally well and have never had it so good.”
‘Demanding that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes’
The Make Billionaires Pay Act would cover all medical bills, including prescription drugs and coronavirus-related expenses, over the next 12 months with the tax staying in effect until January 1, 2021.
“Instead of more tax breaks for the rich while more Americans die because they cannot afford to go to a doctor, let us expand Medicare and save lives by demanding that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes,” Sanders said.
The popular senator also lambasted the fact that CEOs like Bezos and Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk saw their net worth surge during the pandemic — Bezos’ wealth increased by 63% while Musk’s nearly tripled.
In that same period of time, over 5 million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health care. And although President Trump pledged to reimburse hospitals for any coronavirus-related expenses for the uninsured, that still leaves non-coronavirus expenditures that could add up.
“During this unprecedented economic and public health crisis, millions of Americans are out of work and struggling to put food on the table while billionaires are getting even wealthier,” Gillibrand said in a statement. “Requiring billionaires to pay their fair share will help support workers and families dealing with job losses, food insecurity, housing instability and health care. Not only is this a common-sense proposal, but it’s a moral one and Congress should be doing all we can to assist Americans struggling right now.”
This isn’t the first wealth tax that’s been floated through Congress: Both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) frequently targeted the ultra wealthy throughout their presidential campaigns and each proposed their own kind of wealth tax that would go towards funding Medicare for all.
More proof that the lockdown is a scam: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders praised Black Lives Matter protestors, but said Trump’s proposed GOP convention was dangerous
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
June 12, 2020
My current list of reasons why the lockdown is a scam can be read at Here are 140 reasons why I’m against the COVID-19 lockdowns
Here’s something that I’ll be adding the next time I update my list.
On June 5, 2020, Bernie Sanders said the following of Black Lives Matter protestors:
“I’m very proud of the people standing up for justice and taking to the streets. When we study history we look at pivotal moments — the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II. People will look back on this time as one of those moments.”
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1268992801963982853
However, on June 11, 2020, Sanders said the following of President Trump’s proposed GOP convention:
“Trump wants 15,000 delegates cheering him at his GOP convention in Florida. No social distancing. His rejection of medical advice endangers not only those there but those they come in contact with. Trump’s a threat to the health and well-being of the country. He must be defeated.”
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1271137203318595584
Make up your mind, Senator Sanders. Either the virus is too dangerous for people to be gathering in large groups, or it’s not. You can’t have it be safe for people that you agree with, but dangerous for people that you disagree with. Viruses don’t work that way. The virus doesn’t know or care why people are gathering together in large groups.
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Note from Daniel Alman: I’d like to recommend that you visit Whatfinger News. It’s a really awesome website.
The state that sent Bernie Sanders to the U.S. Senate has ordered Target, Wal-Mart, and other stores to stop selling “non-essential” vegetable seeds because “the ability to browse for seeds and purchase them in person doesn’t outweigh the risk of spreading the virus”
Vermont is the state that sent Bernie Sanders to the U.S. Senate.
Sanders once said that it was a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food.
These are Sanders’s exact words:
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, cause people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
You can see and hear Sanders saying those words in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
Sanders also once said the following:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers”
Now, allegedly in response to COVID-19, Vermont has ordered Target, Wal-Mart, and other stores to stop selling “non-essential” items.
And Vermont considers vegetable seeds to be among these “non-essential” items.
The website from the government of Vermont states: (original link, archived link)
“the ability to browse for seeds and purchase them in person doesn’t outweigh the risk of spreading the virus”
So the same state that elected a U.S. Senator who said that it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food, is now ordering stores to stop selling vegetable seeds because they are “non-essential.”
In addition, Vermont has also declared clothing to be “non-essential,” and has ordered Target, Wal-Mart, and other stores to stop selling it.
So the same state that elected a U.S. Senator who said that Americans have too many choices when it comes to shoes, has also banned the sale of all types of clothing.
March 15, 2020: Bernie Sanders mentions the current “Ebola crisis” two different times. He also implies that multi-millionaires are immune from it.
Yesterday, Bernie Sanders mentioned the “Ebola crisis” twice.
Here are his exact words:
“The Ebola crisis, in my view, exposes the dysfunctionality of our health care system, and how poorly prepared we are despite how much money that we spend. And the Ebola crisis is also, I think, exposing the cruelty and the unjustness of our economy today.”
“We have more income and wealth inequality in America today than at any time in 100 years. And what that means that in the midst of this crisis, you know, if you’re a multimillionaire, no one’s happy about this crisis…”
Here’s video of Sanders saying those words. It’s the second video here, not the first one.
https://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1239347669409173505
Here is a transcript of what Sanders says next:
“… if you’re a multimillionaire, no one is happy about this crisis, you’re going to get through it…”
Meanwhile, in the real world, there is nothing in the medical literature that says that multi-millionaires will “get through” either Ebola or the Coronavirus.
And assuming that Sanders meant to say Coronavirus and not Ebola, it is age, not wealth, that is, by far, the bigger factor that determines whether you will live or die.
Here is a chart that shows the death rate by age in China. Source of image https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Click here to see a bigger version of the image.
Bernie Sanders bragged about how the government of New York is manufacturing hand sanitizer. What Sanders did not mention is that this hand sanitizer is not being made available to the general public. Only people who have the right connections will be able to get it.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
March 12, 2020
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Yesterday, I wrote this blog post, which is called “Bernie Sanders praises the government of New York for making its own hand sanitizer, which is made by prison inmates who get paid 65 cents an hour.”
Today I have some additional information that Sanders also failed to mention.
The New York Times just reported that this government-manufactured hand-sanitizer
“by law, can only be sold to state and local government agencies, schools, police departments and some nonprofit organizations.”
So it’s not being made available to the general public.
Only people with the right connections will be able to get it.
This is typical of how things worked in the Soviet Union.
This is not the first time that Sanders has spoken out in favor of the government doing things like this.
Sanders once said the following:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers”
Sanders also once said that it was a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food.
These are Sanders’s exact words:
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, cause people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
You can see and hear Sanders saying those words in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
But in the real world, it’s not a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food.
In May 2017, the Washington Post reported:
“In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds… a level of hunger almost unheard-of outside war zones or areas ravaged by hurricane, drought or plague.”
Then in February 2018, Reuters reported:
“Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year… according to a new university study…”
That’s 43 pounds in two years.
Here’s a photograph from 2014 of people in Venezuela waiting in line for food: (posted here under fair use from http://www.businessinsider.com/long-food-lines-are-in-venezuela-2014-2 )
You can read all about how this came to be in this blog post that I wrote.
Sanders also said:
“I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries.”
CNN reported that Sanders was in favor of nationalizing
“the energy industry, public ownership of banks, telephone, electric, and drug companies and of the major means of production such as factories and capital”
So here’s what we know about Sanders, based on his own words:
1) He wants the government to take ownership of major industries.
2) He wants people to have to wait in line for food.
3) He wants people to have fewer choices when it comes to consumer goods.
4) He supports a system where the general population does not have access to certain consumer goods, and only people with the right connections can get them.
5) He supports a system that uses prison labor to manufacture consumer goods.
6) He supports a system that pays these prison workers only 65 cents an hour.
Here are some of my other blog posts about Bernie Sanders:
Bernie Sanders does not want you to see these photographs of the health care that regular Cubans get
Video shows Bernie Sanders staffer Kyle Jurek advocating for riots, gulags, shootings
Bernie Sanders in the 1970s urged nationalization of most major industries
Bernie and Jane Sanders, under FBI investigation for bank fraud, hire lawyers
Bernie Sanders supports $15 minimum wage, but only pays his interns $12 an hour
An open question to Bernie Sanders regarding your recent comment about deodorant
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Bernie Sanders praises the government of New York for making its own hand sanitizer, which is made by prison inmates who get paid 65 cents an hour
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
March 11, 2020
Bernie Sanders just said the following:
“I just learned a few moments ago that in New York State the government is doing the right thing. They are manufacturing disinfectant, for hand washing, to make sure that everybody will be able to get the Purell or whatever they need.”
“What they’re saying is, they are telling the manufacturers today to stop the price-gouging. And they’re manufacturing it. And we are prepared to say that to the pharmaceutical industry: stop ripping off the American people.”
Slate just reported the following:
“New York Will Use Prison Labor to Make Hand Sanitizer”
“The incarcerated workers typically make 65 cents an hour”
Bernie Sanders is in favor of using prison labor that makes 65 cents an hour.
This is not the first time that Sanders has praised prison labor that makes horribly low wages. The prison known as “Cuba” makes it illegal for its 11 million inmates to move out of the country, and it pays its doctors only $40 a month. The condition that Cuba forces these doctor-inmates to live under is so horrible that their homes get running water for only one hour per day. Sanders thinks such a system should be a role model for the U.S.
Note from Daniel Alman: If you like this blog post that I wrote, you can buy my books from amazon, and/or donate to me via PayPal, using the links below:
Bernie Sanders Promises ‘Absolutely Free’ Coronavirus Vaccine, Praises NY for Sanitizer Made with Prison Labor
Bernie Sanders Promises ‘Absolutely Free’ Coronavirus Vaccine, Praises NY for Sanitizer Made with Prison Labor
March 9, 2020
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Monday pledged that he will provide all Americans with a free vaccine for coronavirus if he is elected president.
Addressing supporters in St. Louis on the eve of the Missouri primary contest, Sanders assailed Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for saying the Trump administration cannot control the price of the vaccine “because we need the private sector to invest.”
“We are uniquely prepared to take on a pharmaceutical industry which in some cases charges us ten times more for the same exact drug that’s sold abroad,” Sanders began.
“Let me tell you, if elected president, everybody in this country will get that [coronavirus] vaccine absolutely free,” he then said.
“Is that a radical statement? I mean that is the most obvious statement that anybody can make,” he added.
Later in his remarks, Sanders noted New York state’s efforts of using prison labor to produce hand sanitizer in an effort to offset alleged price gouging by Amazon, eBay, and others as the coronavirus continues to spread in the United States.
“I just learned a few moments ago that in New York State the government is doing the right thing. They are manufacturing disinfectant, for hand washing, to make sure that everybody will be able to get the Purell or whatever they need,” Sanders said.
“What they’re saying is, they are telling the manufacturers today to stop the price-gouging. And they’re manufacturing it. And we are prepared to say that to the pharmaceutical industry: stop ripping off the American people,” he added.
Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to make than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed.
“Until we test them in humans we have absolutely no idea what the immune response will be,” cautioned vaccine expert Dr. Judith O’Donnell, infectious disease chief at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. “Having a lot of different vaccines — with a lot of different theories behind the science of generating immunity — all on a parallel track really ultimately gives us the best chance of getting something successful.”
First-step testing in small numbers of young, healthy volunteers is set to start soon. There is no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they do not contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests of whether they protect.
First in line is the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. It is preparing to test 45 volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc.
Next, Inovio Pharmaceuticals aims to begin safety tests of its vaccine candidate next month in a few dozen volunteers at the University of Pennsylvania and a testing center in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a similar study in China and South Korea.
Global warming hypocrite and wealth inequality hypocrite Bernie Sanders just took a private jet for a 10 minute flight
Bernie Sanders claims to be against global warming.
He also claims to be against wealth inequality.
But he just made both of those problems worse by spending his campaign donations to take a private jet for a 10 minute flight.
What a hypocrite, and what a hypocrite!
Here are some other blog posts that I wrote about Bernie Sanders:
Bernie Sanders does not want you to see these photographs of the health care that regular Cubans get
Bernie Sanders Boards the Wrong Private Jet … Campaign Brain Fart
https://www.tmz.com/2020/02/29/bernie-sanders-boards-wrong-gulfstream-private-jet-campaign/
Bernie Sanders Boards the Wrong Private Jet … Campaign Brain Fart
February 29, 2020
Bernie Sanders is on the go all the time — which seems to have given him a momentary case of a campaign brain fart as he accidentally boarded the wrong jet.
The Democratic front-runner was spotted Saturday making his way off of a private Gulfstream between campaign stops in South Carolina and Massachusetts — the latter being where he held a rally at Boston Common ahead of Super Tuesday.
Fact is … the S.C. primary looks like it’s gonna go to Joe Biden, as he’s well ahead of everyone else in the latest polls. Looks like Bernie’s cutting his losses and moving on.
As for this little mix-up here, it’s kinda funny. Bernie’s been flying all over the country for different campaign events — so the guy’s definitely busy and has a preoccupied mind at the moment. Mistakes like this (getting on the wrong Gulfstream) are bound to happen.
Some have criticized Sanders for flying private at all — seeing how he rails against billionaires and elites. In fact, earlier this month … he was spotted boarding a private aircraft while Liz Warren got on her own jet as they both flew back to D.C. from different locations just 36 minutes apart. The implication … they coulda flown together, spared the air, etc.
Down in South Carolina, someone alleged he had as many as three Gulfstreams to himself to get somewhere just a couple hours away. Unclear if that’s true, but here’s something to keep in mind.
Most of, if not all, the candidates fly private at some point — so if you critique one ya gotta do ’em all. And while BS spent the most for private air travel in the last quarter of 2019, he’s also bought carbon offsets to balance things out — as have others. Pick your poison.
Bernie Sanders does not want you to see these photographs of the health care that regular Cubans get
Commentary by Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
February 28, 2020
In Cuba, if you’re a tourist with U.S. dollars, you get great health care.
And if you’re a high ranking government official, you also get great health.
But if you’re just an average Cuban citizen, you get the kind of health care that’s in these photographs.
All of these photographs are from the internet archive of the website therealcuba.com. The reason I’m using the internet archive is because the account at the original website “has been suspended.” I don’t know the reason for the suspension.
Source for all photos: https://web.archive.org/web/20100404025459/http://therealcuba.com/Page10.htm
The caption for the above photo says, “Floors full of excrements, bare mattresses, terrible food and even worse medical attention.”
Comment from Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill): The above photo shows one of Cuba’s environmentally friendly green ambulances, which does not burn any fossil fuel.
The caption for the above photo says, “Gentiuno reporters counted 27 dead roaches on the floor.”
The caption for the next four photographs below states:
These photos were taken at Havana’s psychiatric hospital, known as Mazorra, in early January of this year and taken out of the island by people who risked their lives to show the world what really is happening in Castro’s Cuba.
These are several of the more than 40 patients who died of hypothermia at the hospital, when temperatures near freezing hit the area where Mazorra is located.
These patients died because of the negligence of those in charge of this hospital, and after they died, hospital officials threw them on a table, one on top of the other, like bags of garbage at the local dumpster.
This is the fantastic healthcare that Cubans receive, according to Michael Moore and other useful idiots.
Patients are treated worse than animals. It is the cruelty of that brutal regime that has been oppressing the Cuban people for more than 51 years, while the dictator murdering and oppressing Cubans is referred to as “president,” and embraced by Latin American leaders who were democratically elected.
Many show marks that indicate that patients were beaten before they died.
The caption for the above photo says, “Yes, those black marks are flies.”
Bernie Sanders didn’t mention the dark side of education in Castro’s Cuba
Bernie Sanders didn’t mention the dark side of education in Castro’s Cuba
By Gregory J. Wallance
February 27, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeYCIfmeW70
Plain ignorance is the most charitable explanation for the misleading defense of communist Cuba offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on CBS News‘ “60 Minutes.” While saying he was opposed to Cuba’s “authoritarian nature,” Sanders insisted that “it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”
Sanders correctly stated that education became universal in Castro’s Cuba, but he ignored the deeply Orwellian nature of the educational system. Literacy was not sought by the Cuban regime just for the sake of literacy. From the outset, the regime viewed education, as two experts on Cuba explained in The Atlantic, as the “key to the revolution taking hold and creating a literate population loyal to the government.”
Cuban children were taught in school that their highest loyalty is to the Communist Party. They were instructed to denounce their parents to authorities for counter-revolutionary tendencies. If parents, in the privacy of their own home, explained ideas to their children that conflicted with communist ideology, they could be jailed for three years under the Code for Children, Youth and Family.
The school system stifled private religious beliefs. Cuban children were taught that God does not exist and that religion was the “opium of the masses.” If a child mentioned God in a class, the child’s parents were called in for a stern lecture that they were “confusing” the child and given a warning.
Starting in elementary school, a student’s progress was recorded in a so-called “cumulative school file.” The file not only recorded academic progress but also measured the “revolutionary integration” of both the student and the student’s family, such as whether they participated in mass demonstrations. The file was updated throughout the life of the child, whose education and work options would be determined by what it contained.
Cubans are literate, but the regime severely constricts how they can use their literacy. Freedom House describes Cuba as “a one-party communist state that outlaws political pluralism, suppresses dissent, and severely restricts basic civil liberties.” Only a small percentage of Cubans have access to the internet. Cubans cannot read viewpoints critical of, or disapproved by, the regime, and expressing such views means running considerable risks.
One example of political repression, among too many, is the Cuban dissident Dr. Óscar Elías Biscet, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he was awarded in absentia by President George W. Bush. Dr. Biscet has been repeatedly arrested for his non-violent political activities (as recently as last week) and held in horrific conditions. He was once sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. (Biscet was released after four years following international protests.)
But there is a less charitable explanation for Senator Sanders’ defense of an Orwellian system than simple ignorance. In 1985, Sanders visited Nicaragua and then defended the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime despite its serious human rights abuses, including the suspension of Nicaraguans’ civil liberties. He refused to call the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro a dictator even though Maduro had rigged his election and banned the elected legislature from passing laws. After a visit to Cuba in the mid-1980s, Sanders said that he was “excited and impressed by the Cuban revolution.”
That last comment is reminiscent of what Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist, had to say in 1921 after a visit to the nascent Soviet Union. “I have seen the future, and it works.” Evidently the heady revolutionary spirit and the glittering but false promise of a utopian society had blinded this otherwise tough-minded reporter to a nightmare. Something like that may have happened to Bernie Sanders when he went to Cuba and Nicaragua. But in refusing to acknowledge the brutal reality of these regimes, Sanders demonstrated that he is just as soft on left-wing dictators and autocrats as Donald Trump is on right-wing ones.
Bernie Sanders Misleading Narrative on Communist Cuba
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnrlottjr/2020/02/25/bernie-sanders-on-communist-cuba-n2561825
Bernie Sanders Misleading Narrative on Communist Cuba
February 25, 2020
With Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) becoming the odds on favorite to win the Democrat nomination, the media rehabilitation efforts have begun. First up on Sunday evening was CBS’s 60 Minutes, which moved to protect Sanders against attacks that he is a communist.
Host Anderson Cooper didn’t ask Sanders about his decision to honeymoon in the former Soviet Union or about past proposals for “public ownership of utilities, banks, and major industries,” proposals that Sanders has never disavowed. However, Cooper did ask Sanders about some positive statements that he has made about Communist Cuba.
In explaining why Cubans didn’t help the U.S. overthrow Fidel Castro, 60 Minutes first played an old interview of Sanders explaining it failed because people liked Castro. He “educated the kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.” No mention is made of the police state and Castro killing or throwing his political opponents in prison.
“You know it is unfair to simply say that everything is bad,” Sanders told Cooper. “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Sanders can’t acknowledge it, but the push in communist countries to make sure that everyone could read had a dark side — the literacy programs were a massive indoctrination effort. The communist governments used the education system the same way that they take over at the same time and use television, radio, and newspapers. Controlling information is the reason that communist governments would regularly jam radio Voice of America’s broadcasts in their countries during the Cold War.
That is the same pattern that we have seen in other noncommunist totalitarian countries such as Nazi Germany. But undoubtedly Sanders wouldn’t be as effusive in his praise of the Nazi education system. In both the Nazi and communist systems, even simple math problems contained indoctrination lessons for students.
Education was just another part of the police state to control people. If you could teach people from a young age how wonderful the government is and how horrible the lives are for people in freer countries, you didn’t have to spend as much money on the secret police.
Cuba, other communist countries, and other totalitarian countries spent a lot more on education than freer countries with the same per capita income. Totalitarian countries also start public schooling at younger ages than freer countries, and they did so because they wanted to weaken the connection between children and their parents and replace the parent’s values with those of the government.
Sometimes these governments went much further than simply starting school at younger ages. For example, during the 1920s and 1950s, the Soviet Union experimented with raising children in communal children’s houses and dining halls that almost completely removed children from the influence of their parents. While fighting in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the Soviet government forcibly took tens of thousands of 3-and 4-year-old Afghanis to the USSR and raised them away from the influences of their families. The hope was that when later returned to Afghanistan, they would form the core of a loyal government administration.
In 1989, immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union, former President Ronald Reagan pointed out, “the biggest of Big Brothers is helpless against the technology of the Information Age.” Unlike Sanders, Reagan understood that part of winning the Cold War was breaking the control that communist governments had over the information that their citizens received.
Sanders is not alone in praising Cuba’s health care system. Of course, when Fidel Castro got very ill, he went to Spain for medical treatment. Their most significant bragging right was their improvements in infant mortality rates. But while infant mortality rates were improving dramatically between 1960 and 1971 in all the rest of North, Central, and South America, Cuba alone saw things get worse. Cuba’s big improvements occurred long after the attempted overthrow of Castro. To lower the infant mortality rate, the government forced abortions for high-risk babies. The government also took many pregnant women away from their families and ordered that they stay in special maternity homes. By 2000, the Cuban government was ordering 40 percent of mothers to stay in these homes for at least a portion of their pregnancy.
Cuba was able to eventually get an infant mortality rate slightly below that in the United States, but Anderson Cooper didn’t ask Sanders any follow-up questions about how the Cubans accomplished this “transformation.”
Communist countries from Cuba to Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union impoverished their citizens, though their leaders lived lives of luxury. The general citizens had miserable lives. Bernie Sanders might not want to acknowledge it, but their supposedly fabulous accomplishments had a real dark side.
The Moral Failing of Bernie Sanders
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/bernie-sanders-support-communism-moral-failing/#slide-1
The Moral Failing of Bernie Sanders
February 26, 2020
Sanders was not a liberal during the Cold War. He was an outright Communist sympathizer.
According to CNN, Bernie Sanders “has been consistent for 40 years.” Some find this reassuring. Bernie is not a finger-in-the-wind politician who tacks this way or that depending upon what’s popular. On the other hand, if someone has never changed his mind throughout 78 years of life, it suggests ideological rigidity and imperviousness to evidence, not high principle.
Why make a fuss about Bernie’s past praise of Communist dictatorships? After all, the Cold War ended three decades ago, and a would-be President Sanders cannot exactly surrender to the Soviet Union.
It’s a moral issue. Sanders was not a liberal during the Cold War, i.e. someone who favored arms control, peace talks, and opposed support for anti-Communist movements. He was an outright Communist sympathizer, meaning he was always willing to overlook or excuse the crimes of regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua; always ready to suggest that only American hostility forced them to, among other things, arrest their opposition, expel priests, and dispense with elections.
Good ol’ consistent Bernie reprised one of the greatest hits of the pro-Castro Left last week on 60 Minutes. When Anderson Cooper pressed the senator by noting that Castro imprisoned a lot of dissidents, Sanders said he condemned such things. But even that grudging acknowledgment rankled the old socialist, who then rushed to add, “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”
Actually, the first thing Castro did upon seizing power (note Sanders’s whitewashing term “came into office”) was to march 600 of Fulgencio Batista’s supporters into two of the island’s largest prisons, La Cabana and Santa Clara. Over the next five months, after rigged trials, they were shot. Some “trials” amounted to public spectacles. A crowd of 18,000 gathered in the Palace of Sports to give a thumbs-down gesture for Jesus Sosa Blanco. Before he was shot, Sosa Blanco noted that ancient Rome couldn’t have done it better.
Batista was a bad guy, one must say. But summary executions are frowned upon by true liberals.
Next, Castro announced that scheduled elections would be postponed indefinitely. The island is still waiting. Within months, he began to close independent newspapers, even some that had supported him during the insurgency. All religious colleges were shuttered in May 1961, their property confiscated by the state. N.B., Senator Sanders: Castro also found time to knee-cap the labor unions. David Salvador, the elected leader of the sugar-workers union had been a vocal Batista opponent. He was arrested in 1962 and would spend twelve years in Cuba’s gulag.
The Black Book of Communism recounts that between 1959 and 1999, more than 100,000 Cubans were imprisoned for political reasons, and between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot. Neighbors were encouraged to inform on one another and children on their parents. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Cuba imprisoned gay people in concentration camps. Like other Communist paradises, Cuba’s greatest export was boat people. About two million of the island’s 11 million inhabitants escaped. Countless others died in the attempt. Did Sanders ever wonder why a country that had done such great work on literacy and health care had to shoot people to prevent them from fleeing?
Bernie Sanders has credulously repeated the other great propaganda talking point about Cuba: its supposedly wonderful “universal” health-care system. It’s not wonderful. Even those wishing to give Cuba the benefit of the doubt note the lack of basic necessities. Many hospitals in the country lack even reliable electricity and clean running water. A 2016 visitor found that patients in one Havana hospital had to bring everything with them — medicine, sheets, towels, etc.
The only working bathroom in the entire hospital had only one toilet. The door didn’t close, so you had to go with people outside watching. Toilet paper was nowhere to be found, and the floor was far from clean.
Yes, Cuba has high rates of literacy, but the state wanted readers in order to propagandize them. Granma tells people what to believe and forbids access to other sources of information. To this day, the regime controls what people can know. There are two Internets on the island. One for tourists and those approved by the government and the other, with restricted access, for the people.
Bernie Sanders has access to all the information he can absorb, and yet he remains an apologist for regimes that violate every standard of decency. Unlike the Cuban people, he is responsible for his own ignorance and pig-headedness. He claims to be a “democratic socialist,” but as his Cuba remarks suggest, the modifier may be just for show.
Cuban Americans Tell What Life Under Castro Was Really Like
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/02/24/cuban-americans-tell-what-life-under-castro-was-really-like/
Cuban Americans Tell What Life Under Castro Was Really Like
February 24, 2020
When Sebastian Arcos and family members tried to travel from Cuba to the United States, authorities stopped them in what turned out to be a sting operation to arrest one of his uncles, who had advocated and fought for Fidel Castro’s revolution more than 20 years earlier.
That was Dec. 31, 1981, and for trying to leave the island nation, Arcos was jailed for a year.
His uncle spent seven years in jail. His father, also a political supporter of the communist revolution and like many other citizens soured on the broken promises of democracy, was imprisoned for six years.
“For the sake of argument, let’s say both the [Cuban] health care system and education system are perfect, which they are not. There have been thousands of political executions, tens of thousands of political prisoners, and 3 million Cuban exiles,” said Arcos, 58, today associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
“So, the question to ask when we are told to consider the good things is: What is the price for the good?” Arcos told The Daily Signal.
Arcos said that he is “surprised when talking heads in the United States will give Fidel Castro the benefit of the doubt.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a professed democratic socialist, has defended comments he made in the 1980s, when he said of Castro: “He educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.”
In defending those remarks during an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Sanders said:
We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office [in 1959], you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/1231732950540132355
Castro handed control of the government to his brother, Raúl Castro, before his death at age 90 in November 2016.
Miguel Díaz-Canel was named president when the younger Castro stepped down at age 87 in February 2018, but is largely considered a figurehead. Raúl Castro, head of Cuba’s Communist Party, is said to make major government decisions.
Sanders noted that President Donald Trump has had kind things to say about authoritarian rulers such as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Arcos joined the Cuban Committee for Human Rights in 1987, providing reports to the United Nations Human Rights Commission before coming to the United States in 1992.
He said people should know better than to concede gross human rights abuses in Cuba, and then point to health care and literacy.
“That’s been the regime’s argument for decades,” Arcos said. “Whoever makes that argument is just repeating their lines.”
Cuba’s military dictatorship controls 80% of the economy. Political prisoners are common, and courts face political interference.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Cuba at 178th among the world’s nations based on how free its economy is.
Cuba did adopt some free market policies about a decade ago, but the government hasn’t been a strong effort to implement the reforms. Private property is allowed, but is strictly regulated by the government.
According to Heritage’s index, low state-dictated wages increase poverty in Cuba. The state runs the means of production, property seizures without due process are common, and the top income tax rate is 50%.
Repression in Cuba is on the rise, said Janisset Rivero, 50, a human rights activist who lived in Cuba until age 14. Her family was wrongly accused of engaging in seditious speech against the Cuban government because they received a letter from family abroad.
“Health care and education are not as good as the propaganda claims,” Rivero said. “It’s indoctrination more than education. The Cuban system doesn’t tolerate critical thinking.”
The two former Cuban citizens interviewed for this story gave similar accounts of health care in Cuba
They said the health care system has two tiers: One is for tourists, elites, and the military, which is top rate and what people see. The other is for the general population. When Cubans go to those hospitals, they have to bring their own food, water, bed sheets, and pillows.
Of support inside the United States for Cuba’s communist system, Rivero said, “It’s ignorance. Some people are ignorant.”
However, she suspects that in some cases, it’s worse.
“Some people simply support socialism and communism with a big state that can take control of people’s lives,” Rivero said. “Some supporters know exactly what is going on in Cuba and believe it would be OK here because they believe they know best.”
Frank Calzon, who retired last year as executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, was born in 1944. His parents sent him to the United States after the Castro-led revolution. He became active in human rights causes and led the center for 22 years.
“A lot of claims the Cuban government makes should be suspect,” Calzon said. “Cuban students are not really more educated now. In 1951, the country had 75-80% of students [who] knew how to read and write.”
A strong spirit exists in Cuba for freedom, he said, pointing to the group Ladies in White as one example.
“The Ladies in White is a group of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of political prisoners,” Calzon said. “They try to march to Mass on Sundays, but Cuban police intercept them and take them to prisons. They release them that evening, but they take them several miles out of their city.”
Fabiola Santiago: I went to school in Cuba under Castro. Here’s what it’s like, Bernie Sanders.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fabiola-santiago/article240425431.html
I went to school in Cuba under Castro. Here’s what it’s like, Bernie Sanders.
By Fabiola Santiago
February 25, 2020
Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago, pictured in third grade in Cuba, was ostracized for not wearing her school uniform with the required scarf of the young Communist pioneers.
Look at the little girl in the picture.
In her serious demeanor, a front for fear — and in her story — you might find, Senator Bernie Sanders, some of the profundity lacking in your populist bid to become the Democratic nominee and 46th U.S. president.
This girl’s real-life experience is the antidote to your cheap, propagandist talking points on Cuba’s education system and Fidel Castro.
The banner behind her tells you her school in the city of Matanzas is confiscated property. “Intervenida” is the euphemism the new government led by Castro used to swoop in and appropriate every asset in the country, not only from the wealthy but from the middle class, too.
And, to make the point that this is now Castro country, take it or leave it, the private school is renamed after his 26th of July Movement.
“You know, when Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program,” you told “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper. “Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
https://twitter.com/60Minutes/status/1231732950540132355
Let’s break it all down.
The girl is 8 and in the third grade, the daughter of a beloved and respected teacher forced to resign over her refusal to teach Communist dogma to her students. (More on the mother later.)
Her father, a merchant of flour goods, sees his small, one-man business operation confiscated, and when he declines to continue to operate it as an employee of the state, he is sent to work in the agriculture fields as punishment.
Everyone in town knows the family is leaving the country to the United States.
Like the thousands before them and thousands along with them, they’re branded “gusanos,” worms — and this creates a lot of tension for the children in your idyllic “literacy system.”
The girl has never scored below a 96 on any test.
She’s No. 1 on the honor roll — and the principal wants her to wear the state-mandated red scarf of the Communist youth organization, los pioneros, or she’s out. Her parents refuse. Her mother is called in for a conference. The women argue.
The truce: The price for not wearing the pañoleta is being knocked down to second place for lack of revolutionary spirit. The top spot will go to a boy who is an eager and loyal pionerito (like decades later, a returned Elián González would be, too).
The girl is sad to lose the place she worked hard for over a scarf she sort of liked and everyone gets to wear, except for her and her little brother. But she loves her friends, no matter whether they’re leaving or staying, or if they chant every morning —“Pioneers, for Communism! We will be like Che” — or stay silent like she does.
Communist indoctrination
As the years pass and the wait for a visa wears on, she learns to work around the Communist indoctrination.
When she’s asked to write a glowing essay on Fidel Castro, she writes biography, complete, thorough, but no glowing appraisal because at 10, she knows more than Bernie Sanders at 78.
She’s a little more effusive with Camilo Cienfuegos, the more charismatic comandante who mysteriously “disappeared” during a plane flight. Even she, a child, suspects foul play.
Her little brother, a smart-aleck class clown, also has to make adjustments.
When his teacher asks him to form a sentence with the words “agrarian reform,” her brother eagerly chimes in out loud: “The agrarian reform is very sour!” His sentence rhymes in Spanish — and it’s a hit with classmates, but not with the teacher, an ardent revolutionary.
She is so mad she grabs him by an ear and pulls so hard and long that the boy bleeds all the way home. The next day, the mother goes to school and she could be heard screaming to the teacher that if she ever touches one of her kids again, she’ll be the one dragged down the street.
The girl fears that her mother could go to jail and she would be without parents. But her mother is still respected because she had earned the place she gave up on principle.
Literacy predates Castro
See, despite your claims, senator, that it was Castro who started a literacy program in Cuba, a common and often-repeated lie, the girl’s mother worked in a literacy program in the countryside after graduation from a teacher’s college in the early 1950s.
Teachers had to do so to earn their spot in a city classroom.
She drove a Jeep (bought by her oldest businessman brother, who paid for her schooling) part of the way, then she rode a horse that was brought to her so she could reach the one-room school house.
This isn’t a tall tale of Cuban exiles in Miami. There are photos of all the above to prove it.
In one, she’s tending to the garden planted in front of the school, while a student peeks from inside. The back is inscribed: “First school where I was able to practice my profession as a teacher. San Gregorio Farm. Ceiba Mocha, Matanzas, Cuba.”
Yes, by the time she leaves Cuba in 1969, this girl knows that the Cuban education system is dogmatic and abusive to innocent children who are ostracized for their parents’ beliefs.
Her parents’ heart-wrenching decision to leave it all behind and start a new life in Miami, saves her from worse. After their 12th birthdays, her friends have to enroll in la escuela al campo. They have to leave their home and their parents to live in barracks in the countryside and work in agricultural fields.
Because the “free education” in Cuba isn’t free, and the Castro literacy program the American left has bought into is rooted in indoctrination and devotion to the one-party political system.
Your apparatchik views on Cuba, senator, are as old and dated as the photos of me and my mother.
Sixty-one years of unrelenting dictatorship later, and in the year 2020, the least Florida Democrats looking forward to the primary in March deserve from the front-runner is lucidity, not more obfuscation.
But when you can’t even verbalize on “60 Minutes” how you’ll fund your signature healthcare project, pay for all that free college and child care you’re offering, what else can be expected on Cuba?
You are who you are, a populist riding a wave of discontent, as unfit for the presidency as your rival on the other side of the political spectrum.
Truly not yours, the little girl in the photograph, a registered Democrat in swing-state Florida.
I recently found these three hilarious images on the internet
I did not create these images.
I do not know who did create them, so I cannot give credit to their creators. I am including links to show where I got them from.
https://i.redd.it/9m5hi78dkyi41.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/FIhlEwh.jpg
https://i.redd.it/fiw5auk0jyi41.jpg
Bernie Rally Features Trotskyist Seattle Council Member Whose Party Wants To Seize Control Of Banks
https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/18/kshama-sawant-bernie-sanders-socialist/
Bernie Rally Features Trotskyist Seattle Council Member Whose Party Wants To Seize Control Of Banks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PCc740TeIk
February 18, 2020
Seattle Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, a socialist who belongs to a Trotskyist organization that wants to seize control of America’s banks, was a featured speaker at Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign rally in Seattle on Monday.
In her speech to Sanders’s supporters, Sawant called for a “powerful socialist movement to end all capitalist oppression and exploitation.”
Sawant is a member of Socialist Alternative, a fringe Trotskyist group that is open about its goal of a “socialist United States and a socialist world,” according to its website.
The Trotskyist group’s platform includes taking control of the “top 500 corporations and banks that dominate the U.S. economy” and paying compensation “on the basis of proven need to small investors, not millionaires.”
Additionally, in order to put an end to layoffs, the socialist group calls for taking “bankrupt and failing companies into public ownership.”
Sawant was formerly an activist in the progressive Occupy Wall Street movement. Following Trump’s election, she used government resources to help organize anti-Trump “Occupy Inauguration” protests.
Neither the Sanders campaign nor Sawant returned a request for comment.
Bernie Sanders: “I was very excited and impressed by the Cuban revolution”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Lo8YcEcPY
Peter Schweizer: Bernie Sanders rails about common good but public service has made him (and his family) rich
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/bernie-sanders-public-service-rich-peter-schweizer
Peter Schweizer: Bernie Sanders rails about common good but public service has made him (and his family) rich
January 28, 2020
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been a loud and constant voice for socialist policies throughout his 30 years in Washington, D.C., a self-proclaimed champion of the collective good. But in researching my new book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Political Elite,” I discovered that while Sanders may talk about the common good, his public service has made him and his family quite wealthy.
Perhaps no one has benefited more from Sanders’s career in politics than his wife Jane.
When Bernie was first elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he appointed his then-girlfriend, Jane Driscoll, to head his administration’s Youth Office. Though the position was originally unpaid, Bernie eventually put Jane on the payroll over objections of the city council. The job was never advertised so that others could apply. A local paper noted that Sanders never bothered to provide evidence as to Jane’s “qualifications” for the position.
The appointment would remain a source of controversy for Sanders. After Bernie and Jane got married in 1988, his new wife received a big pay increase. As one local newspaper reported, “Political sparks flew at Burlington’s annual city meeting Monday night as Democratic aldermen raised a series of questions concerning a hefty pay raise for Mayor Bernie Sanders’ new wife and whether she should continue to hold her job as director of the Mayor’s Youth Office.”
After Bernie won election to Congress in 1990, Jane’s business ties to her husband rose to a new level.
In Washington, Jane became one of her husband’s top aides, serving at various times as his chief of staff, press secretary and political analyst. After a decade in Congress, Jane and family went about setting up a company that operated under three different names to provide income tied to Bernie’s political career.
On Sept. 27, 2000, the family formed Sanders & Driscoll LLC, a for-profit consulting company run by Jane, her daughter Carina, and son David. The business also operated under two trade names: Leadership Strategies and Progressive Media Strategies.
The fact that this entity and its aliases were formed just weeks before the 2000 election is significant. The Sanderses ran these out of their home on Killarney Drive in Burlington. These entities served as financial conduits to run cash to the Sanders family.
It is impossible to know precisely how much because Sanders’ financial disclosure forms, which he is required to release as a member of Congress, only listed “more than $1,000” as the amount of income they earned from these consulting firms. We do know that some of Bernie’s campaign dollars flowed through the LLCs. While running for House reelection in the early 2000s, critics claimed, “Sanders doled out more than $150,000 to his wife and stepdaughter for campaign-related work between 2000 and 2004.”
Some of the campaign money flowing to the family from Bernie’s campaign came as Jane served as a “media buyer” for his reelection. Media buying is a murky but potentially highly lucrative stream of income for those involved in political campaigns. Modern American political campaigns spend large sums of money on television and other forms of media. A media buyer handles the purchase of airtime and secures the contracts with media outlets.
Typically, a media buyer receives a commission of about 15 percent of the cost for a media campaign. So if a campaign were to spend, say, $1,000,000 on television ads, the media buyer would pocket a $150,000 commission. But here’s the kicker: the media buyer commission is not actually disclosed anywhere. Filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) only require disclosure of the bulk amount of the media buy. In this example, the FEC report will only disclose the $1,000,000 media buy. And as for the fact that Jane Sanders is the spouse of a politician, she is only required to disclose that she earns “more than $1,000” from her businesses.
What is interesting about the Sanders family foray into media buying, in particular, is that Jane Sanders had no apparent background in media buying. But in her husband’s 2006 campaign, she worked with two media buyers named Barbara Abar Bougie and Shelli Hutton-Hartig – two names that would become significant when Bernie’s political ambitions went national.
Bernie Sanders’s insurgent 2016 presidential campaign brought in a huge sum of money. A large chunk of it — nearly $83 million — flowed to a mysterious limited liability company with no website, no phone number, and no office space. Indeed, the LLC was registered to a private home on a cul-de-sac in suburban Virginia.
The mysterious company is called Old Towne Media LLC. Two names connected to the company are Barbara Abar Bougie and Shelli Hutton-Hartig, Jane’s associates from the 2006 campaign.
The Sanders campaign purchased a whopping $82.77 million in political ads through Old Towne Media, which could have earned the company a media fee of more than $12 million, based on the industry standard for ad-buy commissions. Was Jane Sanders somehow involved in this financial arrangement? FEC disclosures make it easy to hide where media buying fees actually go. Jane listed her income from her professional work at the time as simply “more than $1,000.”
When a highly respected Vermont reporter named Jasper Craven, working for the nonprofit VTDigger.com, asked Jane about Old Towne Media during a phone interview, she replied, “I have no idea what Old Towne Media is.” Then she hung up the phone.
Even when Jane got a job not working for Bernie, it still seemed to be connected to his political position.
In 2004, Jane was appointed head of Burlington College, a private school with fewer than two hundred students. One of the board members of the college admitted that Jane’s marriage to Bernie played a big role in her hiring because they thought that it would help with fundraising.
Attending Burlington College was not cheap; tuition was over $23,000 a year in 2014-15. In addition, the college received millions in federal money over the years and students could apply for federal government–supported student loans. That flow of money provided funds that could be directed into family enterprises. And Jane steered Burlington College resources in the same direction as Bernie did his campaign money: it went to the family.
Beginning in 2009, the nonprofit Burlington College agreed to a deal with the for-profit Vermont Woodworking School to set up a carpentry program. The school, launched two years earlier, was not accredited and happened to be owned by Jane’s daughter, Carina. Burlington College had never had a woodworking program before, and as when Bernie hired Jane to a city job while he was mayor, those outside the family were never invited to apply.
That first year of the alliance, the college gave Carina’s school $56,474 for “materials charges and lease of bench space.” By 2010, the cash flowing from the college to the family business was more than $133,000. Payments ballooned to $182,741 in rental costs alone by 2012. In total, Burlington College would funnel more than $500,000 to Carina’s woodworking school.
The transactions are notable because Burlington College at the time was struggling to pay its own faculty and bills.
Carina’s school also received at least one federal grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to install biomass heating. At the time, Sen. Bernie Sanders sat on the powerful Senate Budget Committee, with financial oversight of the USDA budget.
Despite the academic failings of the college, its continuing financial difficulties, and the growing river of funds that were flowing to her daughter’s business, Jane’s salary as president continued to rise. By 2009, she was making $160,000, including benefits.
It soon became apparent that the college did not have enough money coming in to pay its debts, and it started falling behind in its loan payments. The board of directors asked Jane to leave in 2011. She received a $200,000 severance on the way out.
Five years later, the college collapsed.
Bernie Leads 2020 Field in Private Jet Spending
https://freebeacon.com/issues/bernie-leads-2020-field-in-private-jet-spending/
Bernie Leads 2020 Field in Private Jet Spending
February 1, 2020
The Bernie Sanders campaign spent just under $1.2 million on private jet travel last quarter, outpacing the entire 2020 Democratic presidential primary field.
The most recent filing from Sanders reveals $1,199,579 in spending during the final three months of 2019 to Apollo Jets, LLC, a “luxury private jet charter service.” The campaign spent an additional $23,941 for transportation to Virginia-based Advanced Aviation Team.
The candidate who comes closest to matching Sanders in private jet spending was former vice president Joe Biden, whose campaign spent $1,040,698 to Advanced Aviation Team last quarter.
An analysis of private jet spending in filings from other top candidates found that Elizabeth Warren’s campaign spent $720,518 and Pete Buttigieg’s campaign spent $323,518. Michael Bloomberg, who pumped a whopping $200 million of his personal fortune into his campaign’s opening weeks, spent about $646,000 on private jet travel, about half of what Sanders spent.
Sanders has long leaned on private air travel on the campaign trail, despite his belief that limiting carbon emissions from the transportation sector is crucial to combating climate change. Traveling by private jet is estimated to produce roughly eight times the amount of carbon per passenger as traveling by commercial airliner.
“Global climate change is real, it is caused mainly by emissions released from burning fossil fuels and it poses a catastrophic threat to the long-term longevity of our planet,” he writes on his campaign website. “The transportation sector accounts for about 26 percent of carbon pollution emissions.”
Sanders further claims on his website that “climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet.”
The Sanders campaign has reportedly stepped up its use of private jet travel in recent weeks, chartering flights to get him back and forth between his duties in the U.S. Senate and the campaign trail in Iowa.
The Sanders campaign had previously spent about $380,000 on private air travel, also with Apollo Jets, LLC, according to previous campaign disclosures.
The Sanders campaign says the environmental impact of its private jet use is mitigated by the purchase of carbon offsets, which it purchases from NativeEnergy. Entering the final quarter of 2019, the Sanders campaign had purchased $9,030 worth of carbon offsets. It purchased an additional $23,200 in carbon offsets from NativeEnergy this past quarter, the most recent filing shows.
Alternatively, Amtrak offers service from D.C. to Iowa, which would cost Sanders $149 using the senior discount.
Video shows Bernie Sanders staffer Kyle Jurek advocating for riots, gulags, shootings
Vid Shows Bernie Sanders Staffer Advocating for Riots, Gulags, Shootings
January 14, 2020
Update: The full video of the Bernie Sanders campaign staffer has dropped and it’s worse than imagined. Not only does Kyle Jurek, who has been paid $11,000 so far by the campaign, advocate for putting Americans in gulags, but he also talks about plans to shoot Americans who don’t fight for the “revolution.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsUAvh_PCWA
Original article:
James O’Keefe is about to drop another hidden-camera expose on the Bernie Sanders campaign and explosive doesn’t even begin to describe it. The teaser dropped on Twitter Tuesday shows Kyle Jurek, who identifies as a “Field Organizer” for the Sanders campaign, explaining a plan for riots if Trump is re-elected. “F**king cities burn,” he says. Jurek then goes on to discuss the benefits of government reeducation. “In Nazi Germany after the fall of the Nazi party there was a sh*t ton of the populace that was f**king Nazi-fied. Germany had to spend billions of dollars to reeducate their people to not be Nazis. We’re probably going to have to do the same f**king thing here.”
Then he dropped some serious truth about Bernie’s “education plan.” Jurek revealed, “that’s kind of what Bernie’s whole free education for everybody…because we’re going to have to teach you to not be a f**king Nazi.” Perhaps the scariest part was Jurek’s high regard for the benefits of Soviet gulags. “There’s a reason Josef Stalin had gulags,” he said. “And actually, gulags were a lot better than what the CIA has told us that they were. Like, people were actually paid a living wage in gulags, they had conjugal visits in gulags. Gulags were actually meant for, like, reeducation.”
As if that’s not stupid enough, Jurek continues, “Greatest way to break a f**king billionaire of their like, privilege and their idea that they’re superior, go out and break rocks for twelve hours a day. You’re a working-class person and you’re going to learn what that means.”
Jurek also goes into what sounds like a detailed plan for civil unrest that will start in Milwaukee and spread to all the major cities in America if Bernie Sanders doesn’t get the DNC nomination. “Be ready to be in Milwaukee for the DNC convention. We’re gonna make 1978 [he means 1968] look like a f**king Girl Scout f**king cookout.” Then he issues a threat to police. “The cops are gonna be the ones that are getting f**king beaten in Milwaukee.”
Just a reminder for folks what gulags were actually like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzxBDWkwKWg
Bernie Sanders makes global warming and income inequality worse by spending his campaign donations on private jets
Bernie Sanders has repeatedly spoken out against global warming and income inequality.
However, I just came across this Politico article from last year:
In his campaign launch video last week, Bernie Sanders singled out the fossil fuel industry for criticism, listing it among the special interests he planned to take on. But in the final months of the 2016 campaign, Sanders repeatedly requested and received the use of a carbon-spewing private jet for himself and his traveling staff when he served as a surrogate campaigner for Hillary Clinton.
In the two years following the presidential election, Sanders continued his frequent private jet travel, spending at least $342,000 on the flights.
Increased scrutiny of his travel practices, which are at odds with his positions on wealth inequality and climate change, are among the challenges Sanders will face as he makes his second White House run.
Actions speak louder than words.
Sanders’ use of private jets proves that he’s lying when he says he’s against global warming and income inequality.
Here are some of my other blog posts about Bernie Sanders:
Bernie Sanders in the 1970s urged nationalization of most major industries
Bernie and Jane Sanders, under FBI investigation for bank fraud, hire lawyers
Bernie Sanders supports $15 minimum wage, but only pays his interns $12 an hour
An open question to Bernie Sanders regarding your recent comment about deodorant
The only way that rich people could pay Bernie Sanders’s proposed annual 8% wealth tax would be by selling enough stock to get the money to pay the tax. This would drive down stock prices, and would hurt every single middle class person who has a pension, a 401K, or an IRA.
Billionaires don’t just have billions of dollars in cash just sitting around, waiting to pay Bernie Sanders’s proposed annual 8% wealth tax.
For example, the richest person in the world is Jeff Bezos, the guy who created amazon. 99.9% of his wealth is in the form of stock in the company that he himself created. In the beginning, that company was worth zero. The only reason that it has value today is because he created that value. The stock in any company is worth only as much as what people are willing to pay for it.
If Sanders forced Bezos to pay an 8% annual wealth tax, Bezos would have to sell enough of his amazon stock to get the money to pay the tax.
That would drive the price of the stock down.
And that would hurt every single middle class person who has a pension, a 401K, or an IRA.
And it gets even worse than that.
Sanders tried to justify his annual 8% wealth tax by saying
“Billionaires should not exist.”
But if billionaires don’t exist, then the companies that those billionaires created would not exist either.
And the goods and services that are provided by those companies would not exist either.
Which is why Sanders also said that people in the U.S. have too many choices when it comes to deodorant and shoes, and that it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line to buy food.
Sanders said that Americans have too many choices when it comes to deodorant and shoes. These are his exact words:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
Well, as it turns out, the policies of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have caused a shortage of both deodorant and shoes in Venezuela.
Sanders also said that it was a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food.
These are Sanders’s exact words:
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, cause people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
You can see and hear Sanders saying those words in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
Well, as it turns out, the policies of Chavez and Maduro have caused shortages of food in Venezuela.
For example, in May 2017, the Washington Post reported:
In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds… a level of hunger almost unheard-of outside war zones or areas ravaged by hurricane, drought or plague.
Then in February 2018, Reuters reported:
Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year… according to a new university study…
That’s 43 pounds in two years.
Here’s a photograph from 2014 of people in Venezuela waiting in line for food: (posted here under fair use from http://www.businessinsider.com/long-food-lines-are-in-venezuela-2014-2 )
You can read all about how Venezuela ended up like this at this link.
All of this happened in Venezuela because Chavez and Maduro decided to wage war against the rich.
What is exactly what Sanders is trying to do.
In fact, I have never, ever heard Sanders criticize any of the specific economic policies of Chavez or Maduro.
Sanders hasn’t criticized Chavez or Maduro for setting price controls on food.
Sanders hasn’t criticized Chavez or Maduro for nationalizing farmland.
Sanders hasn’t criticized Chavez or Maduro for nationalizing the electric, steel, cement, and construction industries.
On the contrary, every single economic policy that Sanders has ever expressed support for adopting in the U.S. is completely in line with the economic policies that were enacted by Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela.
You cannot help the poor and the middle class by hurting the rich people who provide the goods and services, as well as the jobs, that the poor and the middle class need.
Bernie Sanders’s hatred for the rich exceeds any concern for the poor and the middle class that he claims to have.
Sanders would rather hurt the middle class and the poor, as long as it also meant that he got to hurt the rich.
A falling tide lowers all ships.
Sanders has repeatedly criticized the existence of “millionaires and billionaires.” (Although he stopped doing so after the New York Times reported that he was one of them.)
Sanders defended his own millionaire status by saying the following:
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
I agree with Sanders.
But here’s the difference between what I believe and what Sanders believes: I believe that it’s a good thing when any person becomes a millionaire or billionaire by providing their customers with the goods and services that their customers choose to buy. By comparison, the only person whose millionaire or billionaire status Sanders has ever defended is his own.
And I never trust anyone who doesn’t hold themselves to the same standards that they expect everyone else to follow.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 
