US Presidential Contenders

[Buster's Uncle]

Robert Reich explains why he endorses Bernie Sanders despite Clinton ties
Michael Walsh  Reporter  February 29, 2016



The former secretary of labor under the Clinton administration thinks that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading the movement best suited to address the excesses of income inequality in the United States.

Robert Reich, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, spoke to Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric on Monday about his reasons for endorsing Sanders over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I always try to do whatever my conscience tells me to do. I think very, very highly of Hillary Clinton. I’ve worked closely with her. I have nothing but admiration, and if she gets the Democratic nomination, I tell you I’m going to work my heart out to make sure she’s president,” Reich said in a phone interview.  “But on this one, I really struggled.”

Despite his close ties with the Clintons, Reich was attracted to the Sanders campaign because of its emphasis on addressing income and wealth inequality. The growing divide between the rich and poor and the struggles of the dwindling middle class are among Reich’s chief concerns.

“Bernie Sanders is really leading a movement to try to reverse this, to make our democracy work, to get big money out, and I think that’s extremely important. That’s why I’m supporting him,” he said.

Couric asked Reich how it would be possible for Sanders to follow through on his plans for campaign finance reform after the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision that corporations are people with the same rights as citizens.



Robert Reich was labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. (Photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)


The economist, who is an active liberal voice on social media, responded that mass mobilization is the only way to bring fundamental change to this nation – as evidenced by the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements.

“That’s why Bernie Sanders’ candidacy is so important. He does represent a movement, a mobilization to get big money out of politics,” he said.

Clinton needs to work hard, he said, to demonstrate that she is not tethered to Wall Street.

Reich expressed pride for his role in her husband’s administration in the 1990s but lamented that Wall Street still had too much sway over politics at the time.

“I don’t want to in any way denigrate Hillary Clinton. As I said, she’s been somebody who I’ve known for 50 years. I think that in these days where people have some justifiable concerns about Wall Street and its political power, its political connections, particularly after the Wall Street bailouts, it is very important that there not even be the appearance of impropriety.”



Bernie Sanders raises a fist and marches around after speaking during a rally at Colorado State University’s Moby Arena on Sunday, February 28, 2016. (Photo: Aaron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/robert-reich-explains-why-he-1375868143501366.html

[Buster's Uncle]

I said this yesterday:

This is not a rational country anymore, and right now we're in a lot more danger of Hitler coming back than Stalin, metaphorically-speaking.

I mean it everyday.

That's really all I have to say to what I found when I logged in this morning. We're in no danger of turning communist here in the US; quite the opposite.  We're halfway to the unforms and the sieg heil, not that the one sort of aggressive murdering police state looks very different than the other, ultimately.

[binTravkin]

What the right say about him is near to 100% fantasies and lies - he's a moderate with no fight in him against far-right extremism, trying instead to compromise and make deals with cranks who won't deal.

You mean like those insane quotes are made up?
I'd be careful with that.

Especially if people also say he's been very consistent for years.

bin, you couldn't be more sadly mistaken that my problem with the President is that he's too liberal.

I didn't say that or at least didn't think that.

As I already explained, I don't "think politics" so much as I "think reality".
Truth is, there are ideas that work and ideas that don't.
And they are neither overwhelmingly on the "right" or "left" as people like to brand them and during our history the "center of gravity" of "ideas that work" has shifted from one side to another quite a few times.

Here's just a few things that I consider "ideas that work":
 - liberalism
 - free market
 - globalisation
 - military strength and power projection
 - moralism with relative comparison as a basis for foreign policy

Let me explain the last two, since they may not be obvious.
We live in Pax Americana, a period of civilisation characterised by extended peace and great achievements in prosperity in technology.
This is all because some influential americans some 70 years ago had the idea that if they don't use their resources to make the world a better, safer place (first for them, and as a consequence for many others), somebody else will.
Now we have americans who think that despite massive evidence to the contrary, their influence is leaving the rest of the world worse off.
It seems that Obama and Sanders has this very bad idea which is already hurting millions of people and will in the end hurt americans themselves in a number of ways and on massive scale.


Morals is something people invented because they had enough time on their hands so as not to focus on their very immediate needs.
Ultimately it serves a greater good, by improving the connection between persons by setting up a "framework" of expectations and trust.
The amount of free time differs across countries and thus the amount of morals that are implemented.
This relationship is reciprocal.
You can successfully argue that if people in some backwards place tended to be more honest to each other, they would quickly improve out of their backwardness.
Morals do not work if we apply them horizontally across heterogenous societies, because if those other societies have not yet evolved to the level of your morals, they will just use your morals as a weakness, because you are more predictable and thus easier to exploit.
Instead of using morals as a "common framework" everyone agrees to be necessary and knows they will be worse off without, these people act like carrying a gun in a room full of people who have agreed guns are dangerous and discarded them.
E.g. you can't apply your framework of trust and morals to Russian elite, Iranian leaders and many other people U.S. deals with.
John Kerry is demonstrating big time, how morals "work" when you apply american morals to a society that is living at a different/lower morality standard.

This is also part of an argument against deliberations "should we invade Iraq" or any other place.
Truth is, american morals, imperfect they may be, are likely to be higher, sometimes an order of magnitude higher than those of target country, which means interventions often should be a no-brainer, as long as the balance sheet of tangibles is not in the red and there are no significant intangibles with negative value given intervention.

If you were to one day invade Latvia, it is entirely possible that the military administration you impose would not be more corrupt or less humane than the government we have elected ourselves.
And it's Latvia, an EU country and not the worse corruption statistics in the world.


Different question is - would the people of the place be able to put themselves together in a sane way after intervention, so that you can leave them to their own devices.

This is a very country-specific question, and if you are looking for answers regarding Middle East, you should look no further than the strangely straight borders of countries there and this document: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes–Picot_Agreement
There are quite a few historical precedents to conclude that sovereign countries with mixed ethnic and/or religious groups inside them do not work long-term.
We used to call them "empires", and half-jokingly say that "all empires end some day".
Iraq & Syria were/are empires - countries where a group related to one of ethnic/religious groups rules a diverse population of other ethnic/religious groups.
Empire: "A political unit having an extensive territory or comprising a number of territories or nations and ruled by a single supreme authority."
It was now their time to fall.
Had they fallen earlier or had U.S. or someone else helped to fall them earlier, a lot of misery would have been averted.

[binTravkin]

That's really all I have to say to what I found when I logged in this morning. We're in no danger of turning communist here in the US; quite the opposite.  We're halfway to the unforms and the sieg heil, not that the one sort of aggressive murdering police state looks very different than the other, ultimately.

U.S. has been reducing military/withdrawing from foreign policy for the most part of Obama, so even if it looks like this on the inside, the outside and the foreign policy reality is quite the opposite.
And Sanders is looking to keep on that track.

If you're thinking [Sleezebag], he has not even won his nomination yet, so I'm not considering him at all.
I'm talking what I see from Obama.

[Rusty Edge]

Well, I would describe Sanders as being left of both President Obama, and the entire US Senate. So I might describe him as worse, rather than the same. 
His idea of Medicare for all, jacking the minimum wage to $15/hour, and free college, are rather generous. The Obama administration compared it to flying puppies for everyone with winning Lotto tickets attached to their collars.

That was roughly my point to BUncle - if he thinks Obama is bad, is Sanders so much better when many of Sander's ideas are same or supersized version of Obama's.

I live in country where in past the state provided free healthcare, jobs, schooling, near-free transport etc.
I understand most people in U.S. have never seen it, and probably would not want to see it, if only they knew what it leads to.
What happens when you give too many things free to people is mass dumbing-down of society.
They start to expect and demand everything from the state and take it for granted, start to blame the state for everything that happens to them and the levels of individual initiative and risk-taking are drastically reduced.

No other candidate commands the sort of authenticity that Bernie Sanders does. He has a consistent voting record, and a history of activism that predates his political career.

This would make me cautious as it would indicate he has not really changed his thought about "bread lines being sign of economic health", etc.

In an Obama vs Sanders comparison Sanders seems to be the more left and more isolationist candidate, both are things that americans don't need, they just haven't understood it yet.
For people who have "lived left" and seen results of U.S. isolationism this is really scary.
For me, living next to Russia this is "where and when I run" type of scary.

I was right about the democracy, in the long run.

Same way you could say USSR was not so bad because in the end they gave way to democracy (almost) peacefully.
Well, it's just not true. Crime is crime.
If somebody ignores it while being informed or tries to wrap a lie around it, they are complicit.

I'd lay my money on an average randomly-chosen Iraqi preferring we'd stayed out.  -Obviously, the average Kurd might beg to differ, but you can't piss off everyone any more than you can please them all.

This all depends on whether you ask this before U.S. withdrawal or after.
U.S. withdrew from both Iraq and Afghanistan too soon, leaving a power vacuum which is now allowing regressive forces to grip those countries.
So, if you ask some Iraqi now, they'd tell you, "you'd better stayed out" not because you came in in the first place, but because after coming in you screwed up completely by leaving the country before it could live on it's own security-wise.

I'm following some Syrians on Twitter.
They feel completely betrayed by U.S.
Not only they didn't get the no-fly zone they were expecting, but the help they did get was meager and now most of it goes to the kurds, who are actively cooperating with Assad.

I agree about rationality.
From outside it looks like people in the U.S. have forgotten they are americans.
The set of values always associated with America for an Eastern European like me seem to be in places the exact opposite of today's wishes of average american.
And it's not like the lessons have not been there.
Just the wrong conclusions are made from them (Iraq, auto industry vs unions, etc), often the exact opposite of what had to be concluded.

I find your perspective particularly interesting. I don't have time to discuss it today. I hope you stick around.

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd.  What Rusty said, too.  You express your own opinions articulately, stimulate thoughtful (I hope) responses, and that's what the political conversation should be.]

And I'm talking about I have to consider a lot more than what's good for Latvia.

Isolationism doesn't work - granted.  Putin claims not to be a communist, and Putin's your problem.  I don't know what would be best thing to do about the recent imperialist aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region - but it ought to be stopped.  But you're making the same mistake the CIA kept making in Central and South America during the cold war; looking out for short-term limited interests that may not be what's right or good for the most people the longest.  A US gone police state, or in chaos, is bad for everyone.

I'd be a lot more worried about Sander's most radical speech and behavior were it not for a long, long record afterwards in Washington as a working Congressman and Senator who pragmatically got things done.  I'd put a lot more attention to what he's saying now than what he was saying in the 80s when little was at stake from the mayor of a rather small (and radically liberal, or he'd not have kept getting re-elected) city.

I regret that the bot invasion underway and a project I'm working on is pulling so much of my attention away from answering in more detail...

[binTravkin]

Isolationism doesn't work - granted.  Putin claims not to be a communist, and Putin's your problem.  I don't know what would be best thing to do about the recent imperialist aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region - but it ought to be stopped.  But you're making the same mistake the CIA kept making in Central and South America during the cold war; looking out for short-term limited interests that may not be what's right or good for the most people the longest.

The long-term solution is keeping your promises and backing them up with action or believable promise of action.
This is what Obama is not doing and what is enabling Syria crisis, Ukraine crisis and now possible disintegration of EU due to non-involvement of U.S. in these crises.
This will only lead to significant reduction of stability (to say the least) in every area U.S. has influenced to keep stable in past and as a consequence, to massive problems in U.S. itself as much of it's economy relies on there existing a global, relatively stable market for U.S. high-value-added goods/services and global, relatively stable (and thus cheap) market for raw materials.

A US gone police state, or in chaos, is bad for everyone.

What makes you think it's going that way?
From what I read of the past U.S., it seems that, on a personal level, U.S. has grown increasingly liberal starting around the time of Vietnam war, albeit since at least Kennedy the politics have been hijacked by some you were well warned about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

[Buster's Uncle]

All the Republican candidates announced in favor of torture interrogations recently.  The Pig wasn't instantly laughed out of the race, and has been saying racist things in public ever since.  Gitmo is still open, and Dick Cheney isn't in prison for treason.

[binTravkin]

Isn't what you describe more like "keep status quo" stance?
Haven't these things been a reality since like 60s at least?
Are they not being slowly and painfully dismantled, instead of being stepped up?

[Buster's Uncle]

No.  None of the aforementioned outrages are more than 15 years old - this country took a bad, bad turn after the thing that happened in New York.  Our current status quo is unacceptable, and parts are getting worse instead of better.

[vonbach]

Isolationism doesn't work

It worked just fine for the USA for quite some time. It certainly works better than trying to be the worlds policeman.
"Friends with all allies with none." Thomas Jefferson

[Buster's Uncle]

^Talk to him, bin.

[Buster's Uncle]

Funny thing - Western Europeans are so fond of saying that the US has a center-right party and an extreme-right party, that I get pretty surprised sometimes when Central and Eastern Europeans speak up.  It's like you guys aren't all one person who thinks exactly alike.

[Rusty Edge]

Isn't what you describe more like "keep status quo" stance?
Haven't these things been a reality since like 60s at least?
Are they not being slowly and painfully dismantled, instead of being stepped up?

As Buncle said, 911 changed things. Police Departments have been militarized. Electronic surveillance no longer requires an order from a judge, and the technology continues to improve. We still have a confiscation system, whereby police can seize property for profit when they find drugs, and we're subject to many more security checks than we used to be.

Then there is the matter of improved drones, Obama's foreign tool of choice, and he doesn't want to rule out using them against targets here in the USA. The CIA may have been scaled back, but that just means that functions have been hidden in the Homeland Security and Defense departments.

[Buster's Uncle]

^This.^

I know a Republican I can talk politics with profitably who lives in Tennessee, so when he said Hello on Skype tonight, I asked him who he voted for:

"Rubio" he said.
"I had to try to stop [Sleezebag]."

Not a lot of choices in front of any of us...