Working Life

The Pope and Bernie Sanders share something: concern for the poor and a sharp critique of capitalism, as well as no fondness for the Wall Street class which funds virtually every other candidate, including the presumed front-runner. While others jostle for tickets to be in the picture with the Pope, Bernie’s hitting the streets with the very people he is campaigning to defend.

Read the full story

Long day in New Hampshire Saturday (after 10-hour, 3-leg journey from Seattle…don’t ask…) so just getting around to this…I was at the New Hampshire state Democratic Party convention, and, then, later at an event at the Manchester Bernie headquarters where, among other things, Bernie received the endorsement of the local postal workers union.

Read the full story

Bernie Sanders has been regularly making the connection between the relentless attack on workers by billionaires and big corporations, on the one hand, and racism and the impoverishment of non-white workers, particularly black workers. And, to boot, he regularly talks about of the importance of a strong organized labor movement–not because he needs a political […]

Read the full story

A common theme at Friday’s DNC meeting was the clear intention by the Democratic Party elite–principally, the chair of the party, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, to prevent much debate during the primaries. This is a pretty obvious tactic to prevent the “presumed front-runner” from having to answer many questions along the way and prevent the voters from […]

Read the full story

This is a two-part observation about corruption in politics and two people I have deeply respected for many years–one of whom I think has gone off the deep end. A true testament of whether a person running for office is really about what he or she says or is just blowing smoke to get elected […]

Read the full story

Republicans are embracing the full Dick Cheney doctrine. I don’t mean simply the “let’s break international law and bomb the fuck out of people in service to Halliburton.” I mean the doctrine that, for all the tough talk, when it came time to serve, the vast majority of these guys who are ready to go to war with Iran, decided, like Cheney, that when it came to serve in the military and put their lives on the line, they all had other priorities.

This is a group of “chicken hawks” who are ready to have more people die–Americans and others–but would never put their own lives on the line.

Read the full story

I had heard, now leaking out to the media, that the AFL-CIO will not rush to endorse anyone in the Democratic primary. This is good news for Bernie Sanders, and not so good for those on the Chipotle-eating circuit. It gives Bernie more time to show a hard-edged practical reason–as opposed to the obvious “I’d actually take on Wall Street and be good for unions”–for the AFL-CIO to support him, and it also gives more time for the Chipotle-eating crowd to show that, hey, we’re actually like regular, working people (though probably not “dead broke” like real people).

Read the full story