Just one problem with this piece - or the header: ". . .Backfired." Thom, when I learn that WSJ and the others who parroted this crap have made public retractions where the rethugs do their reading/watching, THEN I'll believe it "backfired." Huff Post isn't paid any attention by the right.

About this, Robert Reich writes on Facebook...

I've had so many calls about an article appearing earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal -- charging that Bernie Sanders’s proposals would carry a “price tag” of $18 trillion over a 10-year period -- that it's necessary to respond.

The Journal's number is entirely bogus, designed to frighten the public. Please spread the truth:

(1) Bernie’s proposals would cost less than what we’d spend without them. Most of the “cost” the Journal comes up with—$15 trillion—would pay for opening Medicare to everyone. This would be cheaper than relying on our current system of for-profit private health insurers that charge you and me huge administrative costs, advertising, marketing, bloated executive salaries, and high pharmaceutical prices. (Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, estimates a Medicare-for-all system would actually save all of us $10 trillion over 10 years).

(2) The savings from Medicare-for-all would more than cover the costs of the rest of Bernie’s agenda—tuition-free education at public colleges, expanded Social Security benefits, improved infrastructure, and a fund to help cover paid family leave – and still leave us $2 trillion to cut federal deficits for the next ten years.

(3) Many of these other “costs" would also otherwise be paid by individuals and families -- for example, in college tuition and private insurance. So they shouldn't be considered added costs for the country as a whole, and may well save us money.

(4) Finally, Bernie’s proposed spending on education and infrastructure aren’t really “spending” at all, but investments in the nation’s future productivity. If we don’t make them, we’re all poorer.

That Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal would do this giant dump on Bernie, based on misinformation and distortion, confirms Bernie's status as the candidate willing to take on the moneyed interests that the Wall Street Journal represents.

It's hard to twist the truth... especially in the age of social media.

Wall Street Journal: Fox News=same owner: same lies, different liars.

Bernie's standing in the way of the intended neoliberal project for America and they've gotta take him down. Maybe more Americans are starting to get it.

Didn't Ben Carson break his teeth eating eggs?

Labor Unions need to transform into Ownership Unions. This would expand the mission of unions (whose private-sector membership has been steadily shrinking) to reach out to and represent all shareholders, including worker-owners of corporations. An Ownership Union is designed to work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments through Capital Homestead Accounts for all citizens. It is intended to represent a growing constituency of worker- and citizen-owners on governance rights issues as well as to help lower all barriers to accelerated and sustainable rates of growth, particularly green growth, in a more democratically accountable corporate and financial sectors. Ultimately, Ownership Unions will shift the source of worker incomes from inflation-inducing wage and benefit increases, to widespread distribution of growing profit and equity incomes to worker- and citizen-owners. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.

One of the proven financial mechanisms to transform workers from labor-only income to dividend-earning income is the powerful ownership-expanding technique, known as the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). An ESOP provides widespread access to capital credit to each employee in an incorporated company on a systematic basis. Technically, the ESOP uses a legal trust that is “qualified” under specific U.S. tax laws encouraging employee ownership. Fortunately, these laws are extremely flexible, so that each plan can be tailored to fit the circumstances and needs of each enterprise, and deficiencies in the design of an ESOP can easily be corrected.

Over twenty U.S. laws have passed Congress since late 1973 to make ESOPs more attractive to workers and owners. More are on their way. While less than a dozen ESOPs existed in the United States in 1965, today over 10,000 companies, mostly highly profitable small and medium-size firms, have already adopted the ESOP in one form or another, creating over 11 million employee-owners. A number of Fortune 500 companies have adopted ESOPs, including Proctor & Gamble, Texaco, General Mills, Hallmark Cards, and American Standard, thus planting the seed for significant expansion of worker ownership within the giant multinationals.

Overcoming the initial skepticism of organized labor toward employee ownership, the United Steelworkers, the Air Line Pilots Association and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers have strongly endorsed the ESOP concept, and have initiated several model ESOP buyouts.

Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers, expressed his open-mindedness to the goal of democratic worker ownership in his 1967 testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress as a strategy for saving manufacturing jobs in America from being outcompeted by Japan and eventual outsourcing to other Asian countries with far lower wage costs: “Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth, which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.

“If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing [through wider share ownership] cannot be said to have any inflationary impact on costs and prices.”

Unfortunately for democratic unionism, the United Auto Workers, American manufacturing workers, and American citizens generally, Reuther was killed in an airplane crash in 1970 before his idea was implemented.

An ESOP combines many elements into a single package. It is an employee benefit program. It is an incentive and productivity program for all employees. It is a retirement program. It is a reward system, working best when a modest base salary is supplemented with cash bonuses and equity shares, linked to the proceeds of the operation. It is a two-way accountability and communications system between management and non-management employees. It is a means for workers to participate both as workers and as stockholders in corporate direction. It is an in-house tax-exempt stock exchange, for both new equity issuances and repurchase of outstanding shares. It is a tax-deferred means for workers to accumulate equity. It can offer workers a source of current dividend incomes. An ESOP is all of these and more; but one of its most unique features is that it is a basic innovation in corporate finance.

An ESOP is so far the only tool in the world of investment finance that can generate new sources of capital credit for corporate growth or transfers of ownership, insulate its eventual owners from direct personal risk in the event of default, and allow repayment of its entire debt in pre-tax corporate dollars.

How The ESOP Works

The leveraged ESOP channels capital credit through a trust representing employees, from the same sources and subject to the same feasibility standards and corporate guarantees as direct loans to the corporation. The loan funds are used to buy stock for the workers, either from present owners (a leveraged buyout) or for financing expansion or modernization of the corporation. The ESOP can be used to purchase existing shares from present owners using credit, which is wholly secured by and repaid from future profits.

Normally, the workers make no cash outlay from payroll deductions or their savings, and none of their present savings is at risk. Shares of stock are allocated to the individual accounts of workers only as blocks of shares are “earned,” i.e., the company contributes cash out of future pre-tax profits to the trust. The cash, which is treated as a tax-deductible employee benefit, is used to repay the stock acquisition loan. Whereas traditional uses of leveraged corporate credit work only for present owners, the ESOP uses corporate credit to convert its workers into stockholders. Thus, the magic of self-liquidating capital credit can be used to lift more individuals into an expanding ownership system.

A well-designed ESOP clarifies subtle distinctions between “ownership,” “management,” and “worker participation.” Operationally under an ESOP, day-to-day control would remain in the hands of professional managers who, under a carefully designed system of checks and balances, would simply become accountable to a broader shareholder base, including other workers, and a more broadly representative board of directors. Employee stock ownership, therefore, would involve balancing continuity and efficiency of the firm with justice and accountability for the workers.

I support Labor Unions but they remain tied to a Democrat Party that joined with the Right twenty five years ago to get a piece of the massive economic support that Conservatives have long enjoyed from their private financial masters. I've supported Trumka since his rise to the leadership but he continues to ignore the fact that today's Democrat Party tends to keep the Union at arms length to avoid a confrontation with their new friends on the Right ! In general one might ask why the Democrat party has been unable or unwilling to strike down the Taft Hartley Act passed almost seventy years ago that severely limited the ability of the Unions to organize. In the early eighties when the Democrat party still had many of it's progressive pro-union stalwarts in positions of power in Washington, nothing was done to block Reagan's initial attack that sought to break up the Air Traffic Controllers union. Ten years later Clinton wasted no time rubber stamping NAFTA that opened the flood gates for the exporting of living wage manufacturing jobs to foreign low wage sweatshop economies. With friends like the current Democrat leadership, the decline of labor unions was a forgone conclusion !

There is NO political solution. The long term cycle of events that have altered society in the past is returning. If you want to understand the most influential cause for the climate, you will need to find the web site for Prof. James McCanney. He coined the term Electric Universe.

That...is why the globalist interests are deliberately destroying the environment, ( another seminar on advanced technologies you apparently seem unaware of ). as well as the global economy by means of fractional reserve fiat paper that can never be repaid. As of 1972 in Canada.

Under the law of the admiralty, the pope, in reality, is in charge of the money system. The law of the admiralty is going to be forced into a CHANGEOVER. People will mistake this to be a good thing, desparate for ANY solution to get food and basic needs.

This will be done to prepare for the cashless society, using QUANTUM parse syntax grammar mathematics code interface. This math code destroys all contracts, trusts, and treaties used for some 8,500 years in 5,000 languages. If you know law you understand articling. The pope will eventually announce his interaction with Alien life, prhaps at the UN and congress. In any case, this will be the reason used for the new quantum language, as already stated by the only man on earth that can write in quantum, which will then be combined with quantum computing.

The pope in asking for all manner of solutions, will back the green agenda as a part of the solution. The green agenda as in AGENDA 2030, Previously called Agenda 21 in the Report from Iron Mountain and other documents. You may know of these documents. If not I can direct you to these.

The new quantum language will be used in unison with the quantum cray five supercomputer array located underground at Falcon Colorado. These systems are connected to all data bases on the planet, and all communications systems and satellites, including foreign owned. You may have met with someone in your past who has had access to some of these facts, within their security clearance classification.

The interface to buy or sell upon eventual changeover, will be the RFID technology, as explained by several credable sources. This will be the cashless society, once enough people scream for ANY solution. Naturally this will require the biometric authentication for commerce. Given the alternative, populations will accept this in relative calm.

People will be paid from $500 to $1,00 per hour for writing without the use of adverb verb, depending on skill level. All populations will eventually not be given a choice if they want to buy or sell. Should you believe otherwise, you will have some studying to do in this area using a superior source I have available to provide. He also has proof, along with an IQ over 200 and a near photographic memory.

In any case, this is to introduce you to the worlds first credit based LBMA certified, vaulted gold backed currency. The framework already exists in 119 countries. Vendors seeking an online stable business model for commerce will not find it in one of the 11 type fiat Bitcoin solutions, as these are subject to a change in algorithm. Obviously those doing seminars for this are unaware of what I just told you.

Applications for acceptance of this new currency have begun. Suitable denominations for both small budget savings including an option for authmatic purchases and online commerce, has a serial number sealed inside. For triple security there is a non prime number unbreakable encryption being implemented.

The following are mutually exclusive. For web site owners as a method of payment to remain in business, or those simply wanting to save in a secure manner, and for business developers ( especially good in SEO ), will want to discover how they can use this as a means to get paid in gold, every Friday. Credit cards will also be used.

For more information on this now emerging parallel economy, simply send an email to techresult@hotmail.com

I also d/loaded the clip. I'm a bit suspicious though......never know when the opposition will strike.

1. The message was encouraging that maybe other Christians hold that view

2. What bothers me, is that this person goes by his first name only "Jim". If you are for all he says, then as a Christian, it would be "christ-like" to declare that. It could easily be a plant to discredit Bernie's campaign. Just saying......that everything goes in politics.

I will post what I researched after getting that clip at Daily Kos.

https://clyp.it/eusxalwe 16 min Audio clip

http://www.dailykos.com/story/...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Sande...

http://discussionist.com/10155...

LW

Very good article on Unions. I shared it with my union leadership and they forwarded it to staff. I work in a public office.

Regarding your comments on Bernie Sanders:

Give him a break. Bernie has been one of the few politicians who frequents talk radio shows and takes calls from callers directly. Most people DO know who he is. Turn that rhetoric around. Bernie is farly well known.