tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post5500774958464122936..comments2024-03-28T16:08:29.578-04:00Comments on Sardonicky: Wealthy Crime Pays, Even When It Doesn'tKaren Garciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15612731479365562803noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-61244315833600169762015-07-08T23:09:44.068-04:002015-07-08T23:09:44.068-04:00Off topic, but can't help posting, re Sanders ...Off topic, but can't help posting, re Sanders NYT coverage, criticized by 2 letters to editor---1 from his college roommate. see below. <br />I sent this to NYT. <br /><br />Re NYT article: “Bernie Sanders’s Revolutionary Roots Were Nurtured in ’60s Vermont”.<br />By SARAH LYALL JULY 3, 2015<br />Also titled: “Outsider Went Mainstream, but Message Changed Little.” <br /><br />Another article negative on Sanders. Page 1, this time with photo of dark wild hair in his youth. <br /><br />Congratulations NYT. It’s of historic journalistic significance to dig up a 50 year old college article where the candidate once only mentioned studies from Psychosomatic Medicine Journal linking cancer and too few orgasms (not organisms, but orgasms.) among other things. Great investigative reporting to dig that up, Ms. Lyall.<br /><br />Your article plants an image of Sanders as an isolated, radical hippie, with obsessive anti establishment views. Just what we need in 2015, hoping for some positive change at last! <br /><br />Comments show many wondering---does the condescending tone come from explicit instruction of higher ups? Or is that not necessary? Or just happenstance? <br /><br />Where’s serious discussion of Sanders’ positions pro/con vs the other candidates? Only tilt coverage to biggest fund raisers? <br /><br />It’s telling that Paul Krugman hasn’t yet breathed the word Sanders in print, yet their views would seem aligned. What are the reporters and columnists afraid of?<br /><br />How about some background on what Sanders did as a mature senator, after his hair turned white and thin. <br /><br /> Example:<br />Sanders held senate hearings last year on health care in other countries, with testimony from Canada, Denmark, France and Taiwan. NO Times coverage at all. I came across it on cpsan. That hearing would have offered actual operating models to debate here, if covered by media. <br /><br /><br />Below --- 2 letters to NYT editor, today, 1 from sanders’ college roommate, and 1 from the standpoint of the 60s---to counter Lyall’s article:<br /><br />Bernie Sanders in the 1960s: Serious, Not Wild<br />JULY 8, 2015<br />To the Editor:<br /><br />I roomed with Bernie Sanders, the presidential candidate, at the University of Chicago in 1963, and he was not the wild man you describe (“Outsider Went Mainstream, but Message Changed Little,” front page, July 4).<br /><br />At that time, 21 years old and about to enter his senior year at Chicago, Bernie Sanders was more serious than most undergraduates, even undergraduates at Chicago, who were and are more serious than most others.<br /><br />He was serious about political reform, supported the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and called himself a democratic socialist. He was reading Erich Fromm’s “Escape From Freedom,” a psychoanalyst’s evaluation of why insecure and frightened people embrace totalitarianism.<br /><br />He had a steady girlfriend, and they went to the beach on weekends in his jalopy. He did not touch drugs or alcohol. He had a Brooklyn accent. He was unusually earnest, moralistic, intelligent and keen in argumentation, but not self-promoting. He had friends.<br /><br />IVAN LIGHT<br />Inverness, Calif.<br />The writer is professor emeritus of sociology at U.C.L.A.<br /><br />To the Editor:<br /><br />The 1960s in America were a time when those of us with a brain and a conscience desperately sought to make things right.<br /><br />Our promising president was assassinated in front of our eyes, cities erupted in race riots and people who tried to assert that all men are created equal were being murdered.<br /><br />Churches with children inside were being bombed, and in Vietnam, monks were setting themselves on fire.<br /><br />The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; our soldiers dropped napalm and spread defoliant all over a small country and massacred the villagers in My Lai.<br /><br />The progress of the war in Vietnam was reported to us nightly in terms of a “body count,” and we were told that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”<br /><br />Most of us watched in a paralyzed horror. It seems that Bernie Sanders tried to do something, as he is trying to do now. He is a United States senator, and he deserves more than your bemused contempt.<br />JACK SWANSON<br />Norwalk, Calif.<br />Meredith NYCnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-974773076690597683.post-4496805801979377432015-07-08T22:04:15.111-04:002015-07-08T22:04:15.111-04:00Yikes I’d never heard of this --- “Goldman's m...<br />Yikes I’d never heard of this --- “Goldman's money was spent on privatized counseling services to young Rikers inmates in an effort to help them become responsible members of society."<br />Then if it fails, blame the Rikers inmates. But, where are the jobs? Where is trickle down? <br /><br />Is there some privatized counseling service to turn Goldman and other corporate sociopaths into responsible members of society? So they would stop taking from the country, and realize a duty to it? <br /><br />Matt Taibbi was on Democracy Now tonight saying that our regulatory agencies are increasingly being staffed by corporate lawyers who keep their bankster clients from jail. He discussed AG Holder particularly, now going back to his law firm, who said breaking up and prosecuting big banks would hurt the economy. <br />Meredith NYCnoreply@blogger.com