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Epic Bernie Sanders San Francisco Rally Could Draw Over 100,000 Supporters Before California Vote
The Sanders campaign has announced an epically massive get out the vote rally overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco’s Presidio on June 6th, only a day before Californians decide if they will stand on the right side of history and help nominate Bernie Sanders to run in the general election against Ronald Gump or whatever that other guy’s name is.
The rally will be held in the Presidio at Crissy Field and it’s set to begin at 3:30 PM. In addition to the headlining performance from Bernie Sanders, we will hear speeches by Cornel West, Shailene Woodley, and Danny Glover, as well as live musical performances from Dave Matthews, Fishbone, Fantastic Negrito, and John Dexter Stewart to keep the crowd’s enthusiasm high.
It wouldn’t be surprising if more names are added by the day of the event.
Bernie’s Memorial Day rally in Oakland drew an official Oakland PD estimate of 60,000 supporters, but some unofficial estimates have the crowd exceeding that amount by as much as 10 to 20 thousand.
http://politicsbreaking.com/epic-bernie-sanders-san-francisco-rally-draw-100000-supporters-california-vote/
Moving Left, Debbie Wasserman Schultz drops her opposition to payday loan regulations
Source: Newsweek
Under pressure from activists, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is dropping her opposition to new federal guidelines that would rein in predatory payday lenders.
The new guidelines, announced by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Thursday, would in many cases require lenders to verify borrowers’ income and ensure they can afford to pay back what they borrow. They would also prevent payday lenders from repeatedly withdrawing funds from borrowers’ bank accounts, resulting in heavy overdraft fees. Activists say the changes will curb predatory practices common in the payday lending industry. Opponents say the rules will gut the industry.
“As a strong supporter and partner of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Congress, I stand with the CFPB in its efforts to protect Americans from predatory lending. From the outset of this process, I have said that I trust the CFPB to do what’s right for consumers, and these proposed rules are an important step towards that critical goal,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. “After reviewing the proposed rule, it is clear to me that the CFPB strikes the right balance and I look forward to working with my constituents and consumer groups as the CFPB works towards a final rule.”
Wasserman Schultz’s opposition to the rule came in the form of support for the Consumer Protection and Choice Act, written in anticipation of the new CFPB guidelines. The bill gives states with modest payday protections, like Florida, even more leeway, a move some say favors payday lenders. It was not immediately clear whether Wasserman Schultz would drop her support for the bill, now that she has endorsed the CFPB guidelines.
Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/debbie-wasserman-schultz-cfpb-payday-lending-466230
Feeling the heat, so to speak.
President Obama, Pardon Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning
When it comes to civil liberties, Obama has made grievous mistakes. To salvage his reputation, he should exonerate the two greatest whistleblowers of our age
by Trevor Timm
As he wraps up his presidency, it’s time for Barack Obama to seriously consider pardoning whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
Last week, Manning marked her six-year anniversary of being behind bars. She’s now served more time than anyone who has leaked information to a reporter in history – and still has almost three decades to go on her sentence.
It should be beyond question at this point that the archive that Manning gave to WikiLeaks – and that was later published in part by the Guardian and New York Times – is one of the richest and most comprehensive databases on world affairs that has ever existed; its contribution to the public record at this point is almost incalculable. To give you an idea: in just the past month, the New York Times has cited Manning’s state department cables in at least five different stories. And that’s almost six years after they first started making headlines.
We know now that, despite being embarrassing for the United States, the leaks caused none of the great harm that US government officials said would come to pass. Even the government admitted during Manning’s trial that no one died because of her revelations, despite the hyperbolic government comments at the time, including that WikiLeaks had “blood on its hands”. (By the way, the US officials knew they were exaggerating in the media at the time.)
Even if you think that she deserves some punishment for breaking the law, six years behind bars (and being tortured during her pretrial confinement) should be more than enough.
more
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/06/03/president-obama-pardon-edward-snowden-and-chelsea-manning
A Threat, Not a Theory: It’s simply not true that as wages go up, jobs go down.
It’s simply not true that as wages go up, jobs go down. But trickle-downers need people to believe it.
BY NICK HANAUER
Few issues have moved more quickly from fringe to consensus than the “Fight for $15.” When colleagues and I suggested at a Democratic political conference in early November of 2012 that we should raise the minimum wage to $15, people in the audience literally laughed. When New York City fast food workers first walked off the job two weeks later demanding a $15 minimum wage (more than twice the federal $7.25 rate, both then and now), the number was widely dismissed as overreaching and symbolic—a mere bargaining tactic on the part of workers who had little if any bargaining power at all. Nobody predicted what would follow. As an early and vocal advocate for $15, even I was surprised by how fast the dominoes would fall.
But as remarkable as this political progress has been, the political rhetoric surrounding the minimum wage remains surprisingly unchanged. Minimum wage opponents continue to deride every proposed increase as a surefire job-killer, while reporters and pundits reliably characterize the passage of every minimum wage ordinance and statute as a dangerous experiment that threatens to harm the very people it’s intended to help. “California makes itself a guinea pig in a massive and risky minimum wage experiment” tweeted the New York Times’s Noam Scheiber. “Raising minimum wage risky,” the Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader’s headline tersely warned its readers following $15 victories in faraway California and New York. “Raising minimum wage hurts low-skill workers,” the Detroit News bluntly chimed in. “Even left-leaning economists say it’s a gamble,” Vox solemnly cautioned (without actually managing to cite a single left-leaning economist willing to pejoratively editorialize $15 as a “gamble”).
No one captured this conventional economic orthodoxy better than Noah Smith, a very smart economist and writer for Bloomberg. Smith, in an article titled “Finally, an Answer to the Minimum Wage Question” welcomed “the fact that, finally, we’ll have some data on how the $15 minimum wage would affect jobs.” In his article, Smith said he considered it a test because “in theory a higher minimum wage should cause increased unemployment.” Smith’s implication is that we have never run a minimum wage experiment before and that the increase is unprecedented in economic history. But the core assumption of Smith’s piece is a so-called “economic theory”—asserted as if it is a law of nature—that if the minimum wage goes up, employment must come down.
To be fair, Smith and the others above are not the first to predict economic Armageddon if the minimum wage was increased. The story of the minimum wage as a job-killing trade-off is deeply rooted in classical economics. It is the Law of Supply and Demand in action: “When you raise the price of employment, guess what happens, you get less of it,” former House Speaker John Boehner explained succinctly.
much more
http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/41/a-threat-not-a-theory/
The Kids Love Sanders Even More Than They Loved Obama
Anyone watching the huge crowds of rapturous young people at Bernie Sanders rallies this year might be forgiven for experiencing a flash of déjà vu. Those crowds look a lot like those drawn by Barack Obama in 2008. But the comparison may actually understate the intensity of the Kiddie Bern in 2016. As Jeff Stein reports at Vox, our best evidence is that Sanders is outdoing Obama's '08 record among young voters by both percentage and total votes:
A new analysis from Tufts University shows that Sanders has now surpassed Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic primary totals among young people in the 25 states where we can draw a comparison — whether you count by raw vote total or percentage of the overall vote share.
According to the Tufts analysis, in 2008 Obama defeated Clinton among under-30 voters by a 60-35 margin. So far Sanders is beating Clinton by a 71-28 margin. Obama racked up 2.2 million youth votes in the 25 states included in the study. Sanders has won an estimated 2.4 million in those states, with California, New Jersey, and a scattering of smaller states still to vote. Based on recent polling in California (the Field Poll has Sanders leading Clinton 75-10 among under-30s), it doesn't look like Sanders's domination in this demographic is going to change before the final bell.
What separates the two Clinton opponents most conspicuously is that Obama won the nomination while Sanders is almost certainly going to lose. So in 2008 the youth enthusiasm of the primaries smoothly rolled over into a relatively high turnout of under-30 voters in the general election, with very big margins, making the Kidz an important component of what came to be know as the Obama Coalition. It's another question altogether whether they'll turn out for Hillary Clinton. As a two-time big-time primary loser among under-30 voters, Clinton has her work cut out for her in matching the appeal of the cool 'n' hip Obama and the eccentric old socialist Sanders. She might want to think about making her college tuition and/or debt initiative a little more generous, and coming out clearly for marijuana legalization.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/kids-love-sanders-even-more-than-obama.html
If Sanders had gotten the AA support that Obama did, we wouldn't even be talking about HRC anymore. She would have conceded in April. And the 'kids' aren't going to be fooled by some last minute pandering.
Friday TOON Roundup 2 - The Rest
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Payday
Climate
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Refugees
Turkey Genocide
Iraq
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