Bernie Sanders running for preznit?

[Wombaticus Rex]

We need to lose the term "mainstream media". There's nothing mainstream about them now.

I like that.

I am concerned about the endless capacity of Capital to buy out authentic alternatives, though -- I mean, look at RI, we've been carrying banner ads and selling your demographic information for 5 years now. I am equally concerned about the total lack of discretion that makes outlets like RT or Natural News or InfoWars or Veteran Times or Zero Hedge or Breitbart or HuffPo into success stories.

My concerns are weak little things, though. More interesting is the fact that both "sides" of our Bipartisan Consensus lost their base in the same campaign season. That, is remarkable as fuck, in and of itself.

I don't know how much that will erode the DNC and GOP institutions -- they're durable parasites -- but the damage it has done to corporate media and their pundits has been deep & ongoing. Anything we can do to destroy the reputations of talking heads, of any persuasion, during this opportune passage in history is God's Work. Troll hard and aim high.

[Nordic]

Yeah it's pretty remarkable isn't it?

What will fill the media vacuum?

Judging from what I see on FB a customizable hodgepodge of conspiracy theories, bad science, disinfo, infotainment, even worse propaganda ..... And, occasionally, some truth.

Interesting times.

[JackRiddler]

I mean, look at RI, we've been carrying banner ads and selling your demographic information for 5 years now.

I'd assume you're kidding but what do I know, blocks on ads and popups are the first thing I set up on any machine or browser because I'm very sensitive to extraneous bullshit distractions. (They tend to be so fucking aggressive and aesthetically horrible.) So does this site have banner ads?!

[justdrew]

maybe I'm just taking you too literally, but... you should not be seeing banner ads on RI. If you really are, PM me about it.

You know - I don't hear much about SWING VOTERS anymore.

Seems to me there's some kind of chance still, that Bernie gets the nom and Hillary becomes vice or something like that or whatever.

Actually, I'd be happy (yes, genuinely happy folks) with either versus the alternative. I could go on and on about why that's so, but really, you already know why, I don't need to say it again.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/bernie-sanders-rips-trump-amid-west-virginia-primary-win-it-is-not-enough-to-just-reject-him/

one way or the other, people who say they'd vote for Bernie must not vote trump, Many states are going to be wide enough of a margin on way or the other that most people of consciousness can just vote for Dog if they like. A few states will be close and important. Also, when defeating trump, he needs to loose fairly definitively. This will be a sea-change in American society and a significant advance for us. On the other hand, if he wins, and it is a risk, we' will be beyond "fucked to death"

I think even H must realize that. Also, I really don't buy the whole "she's evil" thing, no more so than American foreign policy always has been, and it's been about TWO GENERATIONS since any president has tried to really change course there. The institutional momentum and brain-lock among the button pushers of the bureaucracy almost assure crass idiotic maneuvers will be made. That is going to take time to change, no one president is going to be able to do it alone.

In the meantime, which candidate is it again saying, "we need to stop doing stupid shit" hasn't that been attributed to Obama? Has drumpf said that ?

[Freitag]

Troll hard and aim high.

[justdrew]

^ so just what is the point of posting that bullshit? ^

[Freitag]

^ so just what is the point of posting that bullshit? ^

Oh feel free to ignore it. It's only intended for those with a sense of humor.

[PufPuf93]

I mean, look at RI, we've been carrying banner ads and selling your demographic information for 5 years now.

I'd assume you're kidding but what do I know, blocks on ads and popups are the first thing I set up on any machine or browser because I'm very sensitive to extraneous bullshit distractions. (They tend to be so fucking aggressive and aesthetically horrible.) So does this site have banner ads?!

Must be kidding as I never see an ad or pop at RI without any effort on my part.

RI is one of fastest and least buggy sites on the internet and this makes my heart fond.

[Luther Blissett]

We need to lose the term "mainstream media". There's nothing mainstream about them now.

I like that.
…
My concerns are weak little things, though. More interesting is the fact that both "sides" of our Bipartisan Consensus lost their base in the same campaign season. That, is remarkable as fuck, in and of itself.

I don't know how much that will erode the DNC and GOP institutions -- they're durable parasites -- but the damage it has done to corporate media and their pundits has been deep & ongoing. Anything we can do to destroy the reputations of talking heads, of any persuasion, during this opportune passage in history is God's Work. Troll hard and aim high.

I don't know if I'm not thinking critically enough about it or if I'm just deriving some sort of Lokiesque joy from it but I don't know why it's not a surprise to me. I'm more surprised by the GOP but not surprised by the speed by which it is happening. Maybe my optimism about the potential of a third party launching on July 28 and gaining an actual win by November 8 requires me to be open and anticipatory about the prospect. Busting up the DNC has always been a perennial "lesser of two evils" challenge (and now I know that's been going on since before I was born) so a third party was always a villain until there emerges a candidate who signed off on the assassination of an American child and supports coups that murder environmental activists.

It's definitely cognitive dissonance on my part that institutional power and what I've always viewed as the biggest bedrock individuals in global hegemony do not all universally really care about the Grand Old Party in and of itself.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I really savor how wide open shit is, I like the sensation of being totally uncertain. No credit to me that it's a rare feeling, it's our constant state.

1) Burny Sander might fuck around and win this somehow. He could easily have the same Come To Jesus meeting with Wall Street -- no cameras, please -- that Barack did in Summer '08 back in Denver. Barack got elected off the digital / grassroots work of an activist base he promptly betrayed, as presidents do. There are precedents. Sanders has currency - real world proof of popular support. Things are touch and go at America HQ these days. Motherfuckers from the CFR are meeting to talk turkey with Trump. Speaking of -

2) Trump might fuck around and win this somehow. The man himself is a beautifully adapted specimen, truly born for the role he currently plays. Yet for that same reason, he has no real politics or convictions of his own. He could do 8 years of Clinton Neoliberalism, which would be a clean volte-face from Hillary herself running on a "8 years of Bush Neoconservatism" platform. Trump has juice, no matter how much of it is thanks to collusion with, you know, certain other NYC liberals. Speaking of -

3) 2016 is still Hers To Win. The actual money I had magnetized to my fridge has definitely been spent, but I'm still on the line for my bet about Pantsuit Killinger taking 2016 and liquid enough to mean it.

I'm a big fan of America as a crew, a label and a brand this year.

[Nordic]

Pantsuit Killinger. That isn't just funny, it has a lot of resonance.

[brekin]

Damn, Bernie. What gives?

What Killed Burlington College?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ge/482973/

The small Vermont liberal-arts college will close up shop this month, and a controversial real-estate deal made by Jane Sanders, Bernie Sanders’s wife, may be to blame.
Wilson Ring / AP
TEXT SIZE

DAVID A. GRAHAM 5:31 PM ET 2016 ELECTION
The end of the school year doesn’t just mark graduation at Burlington College, the small Vermont institution led by Jane Sanders from 2004 to 2011. The school announced on Monday that it will shut down later this month, facing insurmountable financial difficulties. The closure comes after years of difficulty for Burlington College, a small school founded in 1972 for nontraditional students.

“It is with great sense of loss to the educational community that Burlington College's progressive and unique educational model will no longer be available to students,” the school said in a statement.

Many of the school’s financial difficulties date to Sanders’s tenure as president. She has been a frequent presence alongside her husband, Senator Bernie Sanders, on the presidential campaign trail. In announcing the closure, the school blamed the "crushing weight of the debt" from the purchase of a new campus in 2010, during Sanders’s tenure. Burlington said its bank had pulled the school’s line of credit. The college was already at risk of losing its accreditation—which is essential for receiving federal funds and conferring legitimacy—if it could not resolve its financial difficulties.


inRead invented by Teads
When Jane Sanders became Burlington College’s president in 2004, she had previously served as interim president at Goddard College, her alma mater, about an hour east of Burlington. Bernie Sanders served as Burlington’s mayor from 1981 to 1989. (Jane Sanders holds a a doctorate in Leadership and Policy Studies from the Union Institute, a nontraditional school that critics sometimes call a diploma mill. Union made national headlines during the 2012 campaign because Marcus Bachmann, husband of then-Representative Michele Bachmann, also received his doctorate there.)

In an in-depth report on the school’s struggles earlier this year, Politico’s Maggie Severns laid out her approach:

In an interview with the Burlington Free Press at the time, she cited building enrollment and expanding the school’s small endowment as priorities. The college adopted a plan to offer more majors and graduate-degree programs, renovate its campus and grow enrollment a couple of years later. And in 2010, Sanders and the board went further: She brokered a deal to buy a new plot of lakefront land with multiple buildings from the Roman Catholic Diocese to replace the college’s cramped quarters in a building that used to house a grocery store. The college used $10 million in bonds and loans to pay for the campus, according to reports by the Burlington Free Press.
The land was 33 acres on the shores of Lake Champlain. Ironically, the diocese was selling the land at the time because it was cash-strapped. The purchase was huge—especially for a school whose annual budget didn’t crack $4 million. Jane Sanders plan was to bet big. To finance the deal, Burlington issued tax-free bonds, took a $3.5 million loan from the diocese, and received a $500,000 bridge loan from Tony Pomerleau, a wealthy local real-estate developer and close friend of the Sanderses.

But the land deal proved to be a white elephant. The school did increase its enrollment, slightly (on Monday, administrators said they had 70 students after last week’s graduation, plus another 30 who had placed deposits to join the incoming class), but not enough to make up the difference. Nor did donations rise enough to remain solvent.


inRead invented by Teads
Sanders left her post in 2011, for reasons undisclosed. Her successor Christine Plunkett tried to bring more financial stability but failed, and in 2014, its accreditor placed it on probation. Plunkett resigned. In November 2014, interim President Mike Smith sold 25 of the original 33 acres to a local developer for $7.5 million. Of that, $4 million went to the diocese to pay for the land—Burlington College hadn’t paid for all of it yet—and the rest went to the school’s bank.

That wasn’t enough, leading to today’s announcement. Burlington College was always a fragile concern. Its website notes that in the early days, it “had no financial backing, paid its bills when they came due, and paid its President when it could.” Jane Sanders’s plan to place a big bet on expansion in order to put the school on a more solid long-term footing was similar to decisions made by other college presidents, and sometimes those bets simply don’t work out.

But several questions at a press conference held by the school’s president and dean elicited surprising replies. Asked whether Jane Sanders was to blame for the closure, President Carol Moore and Dean Coralee Holm declined to answer, even as they acknowledged that that the college’s press release, in naming the land purchase as the reason for the closure, implicitly pointed a finger in her direction. Smith and Holm also declined to comment on whether there was a federal investigation into the college, or whether the FBI or other authorities had interviewed faculty, staff, or administrators, or if they’d sent any subpoenas. Those “no comments” may raise eyebrows, since it’s generally assumed that if the answer was no, administrators would simply have said so.

A spokesman for Bernie Sanders’s campaign said the campaign would not be commenting on Burlington College’s closure. Jane Sanders could not immediately be reached for comment.

There is no small irony to the fact that even as Bernie Sanders has made the crushing weight of student debt on many U.S. students a centerpiece of his campaign, the college his wife led has succumbed to its own crushing debt. Bernie Sanders has called for free tuition at public colleges and universities, which he says he would provide by increasing federal funding to cover two-thirds of the cost—in large by through a tax on the financial sector—while asking states to provide the final third. (Many observers have labeled that reliance on states unrealistic.) Sanders would seek to prohibit the federal government from profiting on student loans.

Burlington College, of course, is a private college, rather than a state-supported one. Politico noted that the average annual cost of more than $25,000 is more than $10,000 higher than the average for private colleges in the United States. Even as tuition has risen across the U.S., many smaller schools have struggled to keep up financially, and some have been forced to shutter. Burlington is now the latest member of that roll.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Yeah, she totally did that. Sad but true. Surprised it hasn't been a bigger issue already.

It's the same kind of bullshit behind so many of Vermont's problems: the good intentions of nice liberals who think it's okay to bend the rules for the right cause.

[Harvey]

Just a thought, since this is hot right now, a swift and well produced Kickstarter (or equivalent fundraising body) campaign by Sanders or some of their affiliates could probably save the college rapid fire and provide for some future rainy day funding for them while also ameliorating the fallout from the situation and elevating the grass roots nature of Bernies appeal.

It's a win, win. Anyone think of any reasons why not? Anyone able to get this idea to Sanders people?

[Wombaticus Rex]

Just a thought, since this is hot right now, a swift and well produced Kickstarter (or equivalent fundraising body) campaign by Sanders or some of their affiliates could probably save the college rapid fire and provide for some future rainy day funding for them while also ameliorating the fallout from the situation and elevating the grass roots nature of Bernies appeal.

It's a win, win. Anyone think of any reasons why not? Anyone able to get this idea to Sanders people?

It's a win, I'd agree on that much. But it would just be raising money to rehabilitate the image of Jane Sanders, really -- the college in question is a corpse with no assets but an accreditation which is about to be null and void. There is no faculty, no administration and no campus. So...save what?

Burlington, VT does not exactly need another college. Which, after all, is why the institution was dying when Jane Sanders inherited the mess.