Bernie Sanders Delivers A Bern Notice On The Late Show

29 thoughts on “Bernie Sanders Delivers A Bern Notice On The Late Show”

• Bernie is the best and a longtime supporter of solar, against Keystone forever.

  • Love watching his rise. This could be a very interesting year ahead of us…

    • I’m hoping we don’t get another horror year like 2000 when Nader got 97,000 votes in Florida and Bush beat Gore by 600 votes. The result: Iraq war, ISIS, more conservative SCOTUS judges, Citizens United …
      Yep, in my fantasy world Trump runs as a third party candidate, tips Florida to D, and destroys GOP Presidential chances.

      • I think the eventual Democratic candidate is about to get some help from Boehner’s resigning.

        Chances are fairly good that the far right/religious wing of the Republican party is going to take over the House. With a little luck they’ll show no self-restraint and turn off the more moderate Republicans (few as they may be).

        The Crazies, as Rep. Peter King (R) calls them may cause a portion of the party to not vote or even vote for Democrats.

        • With Boehner gone, there is probably a greater chance of a Government shutdown over funding to Planned Parenthood.

        • I think Boehner has said that he will compromise on Planned Parenthood funding in order to avoid shutting down the government. His resignation is scheduled for after the budget is signed, IIRC.

          I can see a clear split becoming obvious in the Republican House. The ‘Crazies’ are likely to feel empowered and cause the moderates to identify themselves.

          Whatever, it’s going to be interesting. And it’s going to be interesting to see what else PBO can do using only administrative powers over then next 1.25 years.

          I’m pretty sure he isn’t done yet. I’m pretty sure he’s had a large number of smart people making lists of possible moves and then other smart people identifying the ones that can be done without Congressional action.

          I wonder if he has the ability to get Treasury to make low cost loans available for wind and solar farms? The default rate on an already permitted farm should be exceptionally low, very low risk for taxpayers. That should justify very low interest rates.

        • The clown car is gonna have to expand the space. GOP is run down with their rhetoric and same ol business as usual. Conservatives hate change, are anti progressive, want to control the masses, doesn’t care about environment (“drill baby drill”), puppets to corporations, wallstreeters, bankers. The GOP and Democrats on both sides are puppets and most all belong in the clown car. A voeter revolution is gonna shake up this country, we need to vote for everybody, because everyone counts.
          Bernie is the man, he is the only one speaking the truth.
          FEELTHE BERN!

        • There’s a line between discussing politics and how politics might impact cleantech and campaigning for specific candidates.

          You’re a bit too far on the campaigning side.

        • Please avoid campaigning.

          (I’m just starting with gentle requests. ;o)

        • While immigration and abortion may get out the votes, sustainable infrastructure (energy and water mainly, at the moment) are the real issues of consequence, both in governance and politically, in terms of cutting off the money that’s bought off the Republican party. There’s only one part of the US that doesn’t have a “killer-app” renewable energy source capable of expanding enough to replace fossil fuels yet, and that’s the South. The quickest path would be a combination of solar in Federal (DoD, NASA) installations, plus tall wind on-shore plus offshore wind in Federal waters (nearshore is state controlled). Can the Tennessee Valley authority operate as an Independent Power Producer outside the TVA watershed? Or the Army Corps of Engineers?

          The main issue is to show the local chambers of commerce in every region of the country that they can make money controlling their own energy infrastructure, more than continuing to rely on oil, gas and coal.

        • I suspect wind and solar will grow rapidly in the SE. The hard job of cost reduction has already been done by others and money talks.

          We have the large installation companies that can move into the region and bring their efficiencies with them.

          The big issue, I suspect, is getting past “Them wind mills is hippie stuff” to the realization that wind turbines and solar panels make for cheaper electricity.

          And that realization has taken hold. We’ve got a Green Tea Party campaigning for solar. TVA and utility companies in other states are buying Oklahoma wind because it’s cheap.

          Plus, if Texas is a leader in wind, and starting to ramp up solar big style, it can’t be all bad.

• It’s so funny how many articles there were on dailykos.com that Bernie had no chance to win, that the only value in his running is to pull Hillary toward the left and make her do things like finally claiming she’s against Keystone XL after all this time. But she’s just another Clinton or another Obama who will say whatever makes sense to get elected and then become a centrist once in office. Bernie has been talking his game for years and if he gets elected, he’ll do his best to keep his word. I wish him all the best.

  • Hummm…..

    I’d say Obama moved to the center in order to get elected and the back to the left as he governed.

    (The most left are frustrated that things didn’t move as far and as fast as they wished. And that PBO didn’t make more noise. Many of the wanted Obama to make a lot of angry noise, which would have been counterproductive.)

    H. Clinton, if she’s the candidate, will have to run as far to the center as she can. Then, based on her values, I would see her also the left.
    Berney might have too much “demonstrated far left” baggage to be elected in the general. Don’t forget, it’s the non-committed center that picks the president. Democrats vote for the Democrat, Republicans for the Republican, and the center calls the game.

    (I’m not saying Berney can’t win, I’m just saying that his history will work against him with those in the center-right.)

    • There is everyone else in politics and there is BERNIE. No one in politics has endorsed him yet he still goes up in the polls. I am with him, I support him with my meager donations every month. He cares about this country, world, how we need to protect it for the next 1000 generations. Anybody else will be failure.

      • That’s too much of a campaign promotion for this site. How about we keep it to a discussion of politics in general as it applies to cleantech?

        • I agree with you, but non-cleantech-related comments aren’t too surprising on a non-cleantech-related article, are they?

        • It’s not about discussing politics as they apply to cleantech. It’s using the site for campaigning.

          The line isn’t clear.

          Sometimes I make false positive calls, sometimes false negative calls.

          Damn humans…

• Do you disagree that a candidate needs to campaign close enough to the center to win a majority?

  Do you really think H. Clinton has no values?

  (I have picked no candidate at this point in time so don’t think I’m supporting someone with my comments.)

  • It depends on how you define center. Over the past several decades, the Overton window (what is politically acceptable/possible) has gone so far ‘right’ that it now looking backwards to a time before FDR. Bernie Sanders has set fire to much of the wall to the left of the Overton window so that win or lose his campaign is changing the definition of the word ‘center’.

    OTOH, I don’t think that Sanders can win if he adds a strong anti-war stance to his aggressive domestic agenda. There is such a thing as ‘a bridge too far’ (Nader, Kucinich, Stein).

    Examine Clinton’s exchange with the BLM activists – what values are evidenced in her responses to them? Seems to me she ducked the question of ‘heart’ and fobbed the question of policy back upon the citizens in front of her. Hard to say what she values beyond winning the Presidency from that exchange.

    • I define center as the midpoint between two extremes.

      The idea that somehow the center has moved right from the days of FDR is naive and incorrect.

      I was born when FDR was president. I can assure you that the population of the US certainly has not moved to the right but, if anything has moved far to the left.

      Race, women’s rights, acceptance of LGBT individuals, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, freedom to read books and see movies, …. We, as a country, have become much, much more ‘liberal’.

      Unions aren’t as strong as they once were. But at the same time we don’t need unions as much because much of what unions fought for has become fixed in law.

      Stores are now open on Sunday and Christian holidays.

      People can have children without being married and are no longer treated as semi-criminals.

      I can’t think of a single way that the US society, as a whole, is now more to the right. There are little fluctuations from time to time as things happen. We jogged right following 9/11, but we’ve gotten back on track.
      Yes, we still have unsolved problems, but for the most they are problems that existed during FDR’s days. Corporations have too much power, but that is not new. We’re just paying more attention now. Money has too much influence on elections, but that’s always been true.
      —

      When you bring Nader, Kucinich, Stein into the discussion I have to assume you don’t understand that one first has to obtain office before they can make changes. I don’t know much about Stein, I wrote off the Green Party after they ran Nader for the presidency. I doubt they’ll ever get another vote from me unless they grow some common sense.
      —

      I’m not ready to judge H. Clinton re: her interaction with BLM. I think some of the people in that movement acted like assholes. And in doing so they badly damaged their cause. To assume that because her response was not as slick as it might have been tells you nothing about her values.
      When I look at Clinton, Sanders, and others running as Democrats I find that their values, their attitudes toward race/sexual orientation/individual rights is pretty much the same as mine. One individual may set a different priority to specific issues than I would set, but I’m not running so I have to allow them to pick their priorities. What I want is a president who will move the country, or at least attempt move the country, in the direction I wish to see it go. That means that I want to most skillful politician/leader. I don’t want a Kucinich because the guy’s a fool. I don’t know if Bernie is electable, it’s too soon to tell.

      • You make some good points but: What kind of government do we have when the .01% are buying congressmen right and left, funding think tanks to spread their ideas, fighting renewable energy (ALEC), funding lobbyists, buying the news media? Right? Left? When a huge percentage of the population (40 million or 40% – I forget which – from Pew) are devastated by an unexpected $400 expense? When a college education costs a fortune?

        • We have a country with a major campaign financing problem. People of all political opinion should be concerned because we’ll have to work together to fix the problem.

          Perhaps we can fix it with legislation but that means both sides have to elect enough people who will work on the problem rather than serve their corporate sponsors.

          Perhaps it will take a constitutional amendment. And that means that both sides will have to be supportive in order to get enough states to sign on.

          We’re going to have problems like unreasonable income spread and too expensive education until we deal with the influence of corporations/the very wealthy.

          IMO we have a cancer that has invaded our body politics. It’s harming people of all political leanings. We need to band together to defeat this cancer like we would band together to defeat an invader.
          —

          Imagine if we asked votes of all political persuasions to sign a pledge to vote only for candidates in the primaries who agreed to accept no campaign donations above $X?

          What if we sent a generation of elected officials to Washington who were not beholding to large money and knew that if they did accept large money they would likely be voted out?

          Don’t you think the people who did get elected would work hard to keep their opponents from using big money against them?

        • I totally agree. Sounds like a dream come true. There is one person running for president who is already doing this.

          I’m 74. I remember Nader and McGovern. How do we make this time different?

          Everyone of us vows an 80% reduction on commenting in progressive echo chambers and uses the time to knock on doors.

        • Hurtling through space, all of us on the same spaceship, singularly out of control at the controls, yet I believe we can collectively steer correctly to avoid obstacles on our future path.

      • I think you need to travel to Europe someday. Universal access to healthcare and education is the norm there, as I think should be the case in any developed country.
        Yes the US has made some timid progress on social issues (and, as you mention, some steps backwards), but remains very much to the right/conservative.

        • France, Spain and the European side of Turkey a few months ago.

          I’ve been to a few other European countries as well since my first trip in 1976.

          You can pick out some European countries and use them to demonstrate the US is to the right.

          You can pick other European countries and use them to demonstrate the US is to the left.

        • I heard on Canadian radio yesterday, CBC, the Debators, that Canadian bacon is from the the loin and American bacon is from the stomach.
          Later, when I asked at my neighbourhood butcher which of the above bacons he sold, he said neither, this is is a European butcher and pointed to back bacon.
          He seemed to be more political than informative.

• Executive branch not the problem.

  Legislative branch is the problem.

  Judicial branch cannot be trusted after passing Citizen’s United.

  RIP checks and balances.

  The previous times the United States was at the levels of wealth inequality we are currently at, we had the US Civil War, The Great Depression -> WW2.

  Buckle up.

  • I now read that situation this way: both of those crises you’ve mentioned came when the US economy was at the end of a “long wave” growth period and the energy sources which had til then powered them (Civil War: coal/iron and rail transport were in early growth and regionally lopsided; agricultural frontiers that really powered both the North and South had reached their limits at the Great Plains. The Great Depression saw the maximization of that same coal/iron/rail network, and the start of its obsolescence by the next energy complex of petrol/auto-and-air). Now we are dealing with the death throes of that petrol/auto-air complex, and its replacement, hopefully, with something even better — not just cleaner sources of energy, but more widely distributed, for a far longer period of time.

    The wealth inequality may be a function of petrol’s physical limits of growth, where elites and institutions capable of fudging the levers of cultural power manage to continue collecting the levels of income they’re historically used to and believe to be their natural right (stock markets are supposed to grow at what 7 per cent forever, right?), while cheap petrol sources have dried up and the atmosphere’s ability to function as a carbon sink is saturated. If economic long waves typically take 70 or more years to play out, that means that the generation of elites and others that built that techno-economic system have died out and been replaced by their children who have grown up knowing no other system.

    If I remember correctly, several of the financial scandals we’ve seen since the 1970’s have involved high performers who got caught up in the expectations of others that their genius could continue forever. If they had resisted the temptation for eternal fast growth, they might have made a nice bundle and retired — instead they gave the crowd the false dream they wanted, even as the physical economy of this generation was reaching its thermodynamic limits. Depending upon what part of the economy their industry was in, some were quickly caught in a scandal, while others have found other means to keep the investment gravy train going: as energy and environmental costs go up, blame labor for demanding too much and move operations overseas, closer to the energy sources and where environmental regs are fewer. Ratcheting down labor costs to pay for more expensive energy has only seemed to work: less investment in social institutions has helped to reduce birth rates in the developed world to at or below replacement level — the only countries with positive growth rates have either re-invested in domestic reproduction (Sweden) or are virtually subsidized by immigration (US, UK, France…). Merkel’s recent offers to take in more Syrian refugees might make in sense in that light, if the rest of the German population were to accept it and deal with its consequences. Replacing domestic babies with immigrants isn’t as easy as swapping stocks in a portfolio — it can be done to a point, but requires major shifts in the institutions of socialization, to put it lightly.

    I really believe that making this transition to the next, more sustainable infrastructure (energy and water for now, biomass shortly therafter) is the single critical requirement in this generation — we can screw up a lot of other issues, but this one issue must be tackled, and we have to get it right, and do it right now. Denial would be suicidal, but so can good intentions if they have no strategy to implement them. The skills and values of both the left and the right are needed to make this transition and indeed to possibly get back on track with a new style of economic growth — this time for the whole world, not just a few countries. Both can continue to argue over what to do with the surplus that should result, but first we have to make sure there is a surplus. I hope that both “nuthin’ but oil will work” conservatives and “we gotta live within tighter limits, forever” leftists can realize that solar and the other sustainable power sources have not only an annual supply here on earth that outruns the total stock of all fossil fuels ever available; but that solar power streams thousands of times larger than that large and sustainable earthly supply exist throughout the rest of the inner solar system. PV panels and some of the other techs now developing aren’t just necessary to stay alive here on this planet; they’re core technologies for taking civilization to its next levels, both thermodynamically and geographically.

    From what I remember of American politics before the first oil shocks of the 1970s, some political leaders on both the left and right did a reasonable job of managing via the post-World War 2 “bipartisan consensus”, where some attempt was made to give everyone some share of the economic pie, since the pie really was growing bigger. Actions taken since then, if not the rhetoric, have seemed to assume a static or even shrinking pie. I believe we could do well, not just in the US but world-wide, to try to build a similar consensus that insists on building an global infrastructure capable of supporting a growing and sustainable pie for everyone — all regions, all social classes. In fact, making full use of the opportunities made possible by an “inner solar system economy” will probably require the talents of all our continents and social classes.

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