Bernie Sanders recently was invited by the United Teachers of Los Angeles to speak to its Leadership Conference.
I was invited to make a tape introducing him. I did but you won’t see it or hear it. Technical problems. Just wait. You will hear Bernie loud and clear. He is still the only candidate with a thoughtful education agenda.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Could you provide a transcript of your introduction? We could add it when sharing this post. Thanks!
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My introduction was two minutes of praise for the Sanders’ Thurgood Marshall educatiin plan. I made a video selfie on my iPhone and UTLA used it. I’ll try to post it.
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Diane Ravich would make a great Secretary of Education under a Sanders presidency! Just saying!
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Just saying the truth, Lon.
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Like. 🙂
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YES!!!
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After a slow start in the 2016 campaign, Bernie has more than caught up on all the issues confronting public education today. He is the only candidate that dares to talk about how the wealthy are backing privatization, and he understands that it is the wealthy that seek to turn a public asset into a private one to generate additional revenue for those that are already wealthy. Bernie understands that privatization is class warfare. He now knows there is little distinction between for profit and non-profit schools. He know that many states and the federal government have been deliberately working with billionaires and against public education. Bernie understands the concept of equity. He understands that separate and unequal private charter schools do not provide educational justice. I will proudly vote for him in the primary. Bernie is the only candidate that professional public school teachers should trust to endorse.
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Go Bernie!
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Feel the Bern!
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Great speech — very personalized for people who care about students and teachers. Nothing is better than hearing praise from Senator Sanders for striking to stop privatization, reduce standardized testing, and lower class size. Nothing is better.
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I like Bernie. But he will never get the Swing States. Hope Wednesday debate opens it up for a discussion on education.
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He’s the one who can get those blue collar and Red4Ed collar votes in swing states.
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Not enough to get Republican women and Moderates.
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I disagree that there are people who vote but don’t have opinions one way or the other, so-called ‘moderates’. I have never met someone who votes but just wants bland bipartisanship. The mainstream media machine, owned by wealthy corporations, wants neoliberal centrists, but I don’t listen to the pundits. If there are indeed moderates, they are a tiny percentage of voters, the last-minute ‘undecided’. No, undecided voters have opinions, and are looking for candidates who are honest and don’t belong to Wall Street. That is Bernie.
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Bernie lost PA and FL to Hillary in the primary, but won WI and MI.
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Bernie won Michigan against Hillary.
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Moderates do have opinions. Just like Progressives.
And they tell you with their votes. There’s nothing wrong with that. My problem is with any Dem who refused to vote for Hillary, who I wasn’t a fan of and went ballistic when unions gave her an early endorsement, just because they disliked her.
Trump won! Trump first order of business was against Transgenders in schools and serving in the military. Then he attacked climate change and rolled back environmental protections. He filled the courts with nut jobs! Then he caged little children! There are so many executive orders he signed that curtail civil, voting, women’s and environmental rights that went unnoticed because of his tantrums!
As far as swing states, there are more than 4.
If Bernie gets the nomination, I of course will campaign for him. And pray people who were upset their candidate didn’t win, will suck it up and do the right thing….vote blue!
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It’s a very bad sign when Republicans like Meghan McCain and George Will tell Dems to vote for Biden.
Hillary thought that having Bloomberg speak at the convention would get Republican crossover votes-didn’t happen.
Young people, if they had been energized for Hillary like they were for Bernie, could have given the Dems the win.
Women voting for Republicans reflects stupidity. The GOP is the party of white, male entitlement and privilege. There will only be 11 GOP women in the House if the two announced female retirees aren’t replaced by other women. It’s at a record 25 year low. I speculate that most of the Trump women are older. Each year, more of them die off.
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Never mentioned Biden! Stop assuming!
I thought his appearance at the AFT Town hall was a mess!
There are many other candidates to consider, and I want to hear from all of them as is my right. But whomever wins, I will support.
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“Hillary thought that having Bloomberg speak at the convention would get Republican crossover votes-didn’t happen.”
Bloomberg is really an independent and in fact, Hillary did win the popular vote by quite a big and she also won a lot of independents. One reason she lost is because of low African-American turnout — which was helped by the deliberate policies by Republican governors to disenfranchise traditional Democratic voters and make it very difficult for them to vote. That had nothing to do with Bloomberg.
“Young people, if they had been energized for Hillary like they were for Bernie, could have given the Dems the win.”
I knew plenty of young people — young women — who were very energized by Hillary. Very energized. Young voters are always hard to get to come out and vote. If they were that energized, then Bernie should have won a lot more primaries. But getting young people to vote has always been a struggle regardless of the candidate.
Right now, I hear a lot of polls that say Biden will handily defeat Trump by a landslide and a candidate like Bernie might beat him, but it will be much closer.
I suspect you agree with me that a poll that compares two candidates who aren’t actually running against each other is not very accurate, especially when a candidate like Biden has not even begun to get defined by the Republicans and attacked in a way that he is not attacked by those in his own party. I suspect you agree with me that Biden is no more likely to win in a landslide than Bernie is despite such polls claiming that he will and therefore we should all vote for him.
So why do you believe that Bernie would have absolutely defeated Trump and won the electoral college when HRC did not? In my opinion, that kind of “fact”, based on polls taken long before a candidate is subject to the powerful Republican attack machine, is meaningless.
I reject anyone who tells me Biden would definitely defeat Trump. And I also reject those who tell me that Bernie would have definitely defeated Trump in 2016. Neither of them were subject to what every Democrat has to withstand in a general election. Kerry, Dukakis, Gore all looked like very strong candidates against weak opponents, until they become re-defined by the right wing propaganda.
I am going to vote – most likely for Bernie or Warren – but not because of any false belief that one or the other will defeat Trump and no other candidate will. Because whoever wins the nomination is going to be the victim of the same dishonest ugly smears and attacks that defeated HRC and Gore and Kerry. And no matter who wins the primary, I am going to do my best to call out those supporters of the losing candidates who help the Republicans win by repeating that right wing propaganda, as they did every time the Dem lost.
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If people vote for Trump in the next election, we know what America is.
Some who voted for him cited a hope for “change”, which meant they hoped for reduced economic uncertainty. They now know Trump’s changes increase payoffs to the rich.
The Republican talking points can’t be changed by Dems. But, the DINO’s who craft agenda, messages and responses for the Democratic Party can be replaced with competent people i.e., rid the party of Podesta, Tanden, and other elites who act solely in self interest.
Read CAP’s “Corruption Consultants”, note the glaring privatization omission. CAP wallows with anti-democracy tyrants.
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Trump voters got what they wanted: Supreme Court justices who are sure to reverse liberal legislation of the past 90 years.
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And those who refused to vote for HRC and claimed there was no real difference between the candidates made it absolutely clear that they believe that having a far right Supreme Court and federal judiciary is of no importance to them and having a moderate judiciary is something that they are willing to sacrifice because it just doesn’t matter much at all to them. They do not see any big difference between a neo-Fasicst candidate lifting up neo-Nazis and white supremacists and one who believes in people coming together.
The fact is that the average German citizen probably didn’t experience much change because Hitler and the neo-Nazi party imposed their anti-Semitic agenda. So they could easily say that there was no real difference between Hitler and the conservative government who opposed him. What they really mean is that they are in a privileged position and for their own families, they believe there is absolutely no difference. As long as you weren’t one of the groups targeted by Hitler, you could say that there was no difference or that those differences were not nearly as important as how they were so exactly similar in their policies.
Not many African-Americans are saying that there is no difference between Trump and the moderate Democrats (which is why Biden has support) but seems like some white progressives aren’t bothered much by things they consider unimportant.
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“He is still the only candidate with a thoughtful education agenda.”
He’s the only candidate with a pro-public school student agenda.
Which continues to shock me- that so few people on either side of the aisle offer anything positive AT ALL to public school families and students.
I was looking at news coverage of Ohio’s latest education bill. It’s amazing. Something like 93% of the kids and families in this state attend PUBLIC schools and all anyone in Columbus talks about are charters and vouchers. We literally cannot PAY these people to pay attention to our schools. I know this because we ARE paying them, a lot of them, and they refuse to do any work on behalf of our students.
The idea that doing NOTHING for public schools somehow doesn’t affect public school students is insane. If you’re not doing anything for public schools you are not doing anything for public school students. You cannot trash or neglect their schools without trashing and neglecting the students IN the schools. The two go together.
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Thank you so much, Diane! I’ve been a supporter of Bernie and you for years. Although I’ve noted positive comments you’ve made about him for some time, this was the unequivocal endorsement of his education policy I’ve been hoping for.
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And will the NEA or AFT endorse him?
Of course not…there will be some sad a$$ excuse…
That having been said, rank-&-file members: start pushing your state leadership & put some pressure on the nationals.
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MSNBC has pulled out all the stops to make sure that Sanders is driven out of the race.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/07/27/msnbcs-anti-sanders-bias-makes-it-forget-how-do-math
The people at MSNBC are nothing more than propagandists.
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From the article “Once again, the order of the names is descending by poll numbers”
But the poll results are listed not by numbers but by alphabetical order of the names: Elizabeth comes before Sanders, doesn’t it? ( : ) )
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Daily Kos is neoliberal lite and CAP is GOP.
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Bless you, Bernie!!! xoxoxxo!!!!
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“He is still the only candidate with a thoughtful education agenda.” A sad but necessary truth that emphasis must be put on the word ONLY.
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To all educational leaders and followers:
This is now and never to have time to criticized our previous naive trust in foreigners spies.
This is THE TIME TO UNITE and TO VOTE solidly, confidently and positively for our conscientious leader, Mr. SENATOR SANDER BERNIE.
Remember that we have only one chance that UNITED WE STAND TALL, DIVIDED AMONG US WE FALL. Yes, we need to stand tall for our children and for our own dignity.
I am sorry that I like Elizabeth BUT she did not stand a tall as Bernie in Public Education. So, all educators need to unite to vote for Bernie solidly, confidently and positively. May
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MSNBC is awful–Chris Matthews should have been yanked off a long time ago (not only did he have a huge conflict of interest in 2016–his wife was running for office {w/$$$ from the DNC/DLCC; trickle-down HRC $$$; wife lost}–& he was SUCH a Hillary cheerleader–so much so that, not only did he freeze Bernie out, he consistently bad-mouthed him &–even more unforgiveable {& this for which he should have been fired}, he called the CA Dem Primary for HRC the night before the actual primary, which would lead new voters or discouraged voters who didn’t know any better from voting).
&–well, let’s not get started on the network darling, Rachel (aren’t you all forever getting these stupid “Rachel Maddow OFF the air?” & “MSNBC to be taken off air” e-mails?!)
Maddow, who wouldn’t even answer Diane when she’d asked for an interview. & then she had her (what I call) “phony” interview w/Bernie at his house, where she asked some pointedly biased ???
I still like Chris Hayes (I’ll never forget his split-screen show when IQ45 came to that small Burlington, VT theater, & was throwing people out into the freezing cold, calling for his minions to take away their coats! While, across the street, Chris was interviewing Bernie supporters w/some clever guy {was it Jim Hightower?}) I also like Lawrence O’Donnell–&–of course–the bigwigs at the station were going to fire him, just as they did to Ed Schultz
(o.b.m.), which is why Ed ended up on RT. I would never watch MSNBC if O’Donnell had been fired; actually, I rarely do anyway, but I do tune in to hear the last 5 min. of
the show, because I want to hear the LAST word.
Oh, & don’t get me started on Brian Williams…
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most MSNBC listeners don’t like Sanders so MSNBC hosts are just giving them what they want to hear.
From the Daily Beast
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-war-between-bernie-sanders-and-msnbc-reaches-a-new-peak
“A recent Morning Consult poll found that Fox News viewers are more likely to support Sanders than those who prefer to watch MSNBC. According to the survey, 22 percent of Fox News viewers who identified as possible Democratic primary voters said they would back Sanders, as opposed to 13 percent of MSNBC viewers. That statistic was bolstered further by Sanders’ ratings during his own town hall appearance on Fox News, where more than 2.5 million viewers tuned in to hear Sanders make his case, according to Nielsen data. ”
Like Fox, MSNBC is not a news Network but an opinion network.
That is pretty well summed up by MSNBC “analyst” (sic) Mimi Rocah’s statement that “Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl” , even though she “can’t even identify for you what exactly it is,”
No facts in her claim that Sanders is not pro woman, either.
Pure unadulterated opinion — and lies.
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Thanx for the link, SDP. Waiting for Fox to moderate the debates (&, o, I’m not being my usual sarcastic self)!
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Oh, & BTW, they’re ALL giving Bernie as little coverage as possible–once again, a repeat of 2016.
& you all know that Google froze out Tulsi, disengaging her social media means for campaign contributions…
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Oh–& SDP–I also want to comment RE: Donny Deutsch’s derogatory ruminations on Bernie. He’s a known friend of IQ45. (I believe D2 was on The Apprentice more than once.)
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