Below I am posting an address given by Bernie Sanders at Benedict College, a historic Afrlican American college. Professor Cornel West introduced him. Sanders has spoken at the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, center for rightwing evangelical protestantism and made it clear that he stood firmly for women's reproductive rights, gay rights, the separation of Church and state, but that he wished that there might be common ground between himself and the Liberty University students on economic issues, on the role of poverty and inequality in the U.S.
In the bad old days that Donald Trump particularly wants to fully revive, Americans were prisoners of the "politics of social resentment," protestants against Catholics before the Civil War, older European immigrants against new European immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe during the period of rapid industrialization, grous like the anti-bellum "know nothings" and the post civil war KKK using terroristic violence to advance such policies while inequality grew. Of course color racism was the foundation of all prejudices
All of the Republican candidates are now invested in some version of that politics. Hillary Clinton seems to be invested in the construction of a patronage political machine that will give her the nomination and enable her to him the election(she hopes) by default, and then establish a business as usual administration.
Some say that the Sanders campaign will move Clinton to the left. Maybe in words, but what does that really mean. What kind of politics is based on making enough noise so that a power broker says something generally that makes the noise makers feel better. That is the politics of courtiers, of monarchy and aristocracy. Or simply a 21st century version of the old machine politics where everyone knew that nothing as a Tammany leader said famously more than a century ago, "If they want socialism we will give them socialism as long as they vote for us." What he meant of course is that we will promise anything to anyone and then do wha we want once we have won office.
If Hillary Clinton would come to Benedict College and Liberty University and say what Bernie Sanders has said, offering concrete plans for solutions to the social costs of poverty and inequality in legislation, I would be happy to apologize to her. So though she hasn't. Bernie Sanders has
Norman Markowitz
Jobs Not Jails, Sanders Says in South Carolina
14 September 15
.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday brought his campaign for the White House to three stops in South Carolina.
The day began at Benedict College here in the state capital where he was introduced by Dr. Cornel West to a crowd of about 1,000 students and others at the historic black college.
Calling Sanders “a brother of honor, of decency of integrity,” the leading American academic, author and activist urged the crowd to “get in on the movement” and join Sanders’ call for a “political revolution” in the United States.
“We’re going to turn this country around,” West declared.
In Sanders’ remarks, he told the students, college faculty and others that America must make education a priority. Instead, he said, the United States spends more money (about $50 billion annually) putting more people behind bars than are incarcerated in any other country in the world.
“We should not have more people in jail than any other country. We should have the best educated population in the world,” Sanders said. “It makes a lot more sense to invest in jobs and education rather than jails and incarceration.”
Sanders has proposed tuition-free public colleges and universities funded by a transaction tax on Wall Street speculators and hedge funds, he told the audience in the college gymnasium.
Sanders also called for the elimination of private prisons in the United States. He plans next week to introduce legislation in the Senate to put the incarceration industry out of business.
Saturday’s scheduled stops also included visits to the Florence Civic Center in Florence and Winthrop University in Rock Hill ahead of a Sunday rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Monday appearances in Virginia.
Sanders’ southern swing comes as he has taken leads in three recent surveys of New Hampshire primary voters and posted a narrow lead in the most recent poll of Iowa caucus goers. Nationally, a new poll by Reuters released on Friday showed Sanders narrowing the gap among all Democrats.
