Occupy Wall Street

The Sanders camp alleged that the joint fundraising agreement offered Clinton a chance to “launder” money through the DNC.

It clearly goes against what was intended for the joint fundraising committees.”  Given the already significant war chest Clinton had to run her campaign it is not surprising that Sanders supporters would find this news disturbing.

The right embarks on a political platform of reducing union power, reducing the real value of the minimum wage, cutting welfare spending, reducing taxes on the wealthy, and deregulating the financial sector.

the Democratic Party was captured by this same ideology, which in academic circles is often referred to as neoliberalism. It is now largely forgotten that it was Carter, not Reagan, who began deregulating the market.

Bill Clinton took the party even further to the right. In 1992 he ran on the promise to “end welfare as we know it”, a total repudiation of the FDR/LBJ legacy. With the help of republicans, Clinton was eventually successful in drastically cutting the welfare program. Clinton also signed important deregulatory bills into law, like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Bernie Sanders was against welfare reform and GLBA at the time (he voted for CFMA–it was snuck into an 11,000 page omnibus spending bill at the last minute).

The 2008 primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is sometimes billed as if it were a contest between two ideologies, but the most prominent difference between them was the vote on the Iraq War.

The Democratic Party, which was once the party that saw economic inequality and poverty as the core causes of economic instability, now sees inequality and poverty as largely irrelevant.

He is running to take the Democratic Party back from an establishment that ignores the fundamental systemic economic problems that lead to wage stagnation and economic crisis.

In the years since 2008, many Americans, in particular young people, are willing to consider the possibility that neoliberalism–the economic ideology espoused by both the post-Reagan republicans and the post-Carter Clinton-era democrats–is fundamentally flawed and must be revised or potentially replaced entirely.

Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal building on the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. She doesn’t understand the pivotal role inequality plays in creating economic crisis and reducing economic growth. She has been taken in by a fundamentally right wing paradigm, and if she is elected she will continue to lead the Democratic Party down that path.

Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist building on the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

If you made $30,452 in 1963, after adjusting for inflation, you paid a tax of 26 percent on the next dollar you reported to the IRS. If you made $36,255 in 2013, you paid a 25 percent tax on your next dollar of taxable income. Above these modest-income levels, the 1963 and 2013 stories start diverging. If you made $106,582 in 1963, after inflation, you paid a 47 percent tax on your next dollar of income. On income between $87,850 and $183,255 in 2013, taxpayers faced just a 28 percent rate. At the top, the biggest divide of all. Income over $1,522,595 in 1963, in today's dollars, faced a 91 percent federal income tax. Income at that level in 2013 faced a 39.6 percent top-bracket rate.

Custom planes like the Airbus pictured here can run up to $300 million. Airbus has sold 170 of them.

The number of public university presidents making over $1 million jumped to nine last year, with Ohio State’s Gordon Gee leading the pack at $6.1 million.

Emory University researcher Sabino Kornrich, the Dallas News notes, has one explanation for the income-sensitive SAT scores: “Wealthy parents are increasing their education spending so much that middle- and lower-class parents can’t keep pace.” The top 10 percent of U.S. income earners — average income, $253,146 — now spend $5,495 per year on education. The nation’s bottom 90 percent spend an average $1,088 . . .

Stat of the Week America's 400 richest individuals now hold a combined $2.9 trillion in wealth, a sum that about equals the gross national product of Brazil, a nation of 200 million people.

Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.

It may well turn out to be because Hillary Clinton is, as The Nation reports, "the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry." And who do you think demanded those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- the AFLCIO.

In fact, one of the easiest ways to achieve the Occupy movement’s goals of lower unemployment and household debt would be to use monetary stimulus to mildly increase this measure inflation.  

We should talk about deflating the debt. If we had wage and price inflation of four percent every year for two or three years that reduces the debt burden by eight, 10, or 12 percent relative to their wages.” 

American corporations are currently sitting on massive cash reserves. If the Fed announced a higher inflation target those horded assets would soon be worth less, thus incentivizing spending.

Look at the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr. Almost every entry names debt—from student loans, credit cards, medical, or housing—as a principal concern. Household debt is currently 90 percent of GDP.