Camden Paillot is on fire in McSweeney's: "Indeed, one may 'like' Sanders’ populist, pro-working-class ideology that has enticed  —  let me be clear  —  millions of struggling Americans, but being dragged too far left means losing the vote of cartoonish top-hat-wearing-villains, phrenology-practicing conservative centrists, and Democrat-leaning billionaires residing on secret sex-predator-islands, whose only apparent mission is to make the biosphere collapse faster." (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (I am a donor to both Bernie Sanders' and Elizabeth Warren's campaigns) Read the rest

Modern Monetary Theory (previously) is an economic philosophy based on the idea that all state spending is "deficit" spending, since money comes into existence when the government spends it, and when the government raises taxes, it does so in order to take that money out of existence, both in order to control inflation and to limit the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders remains one of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential elections, but you'd hardly know it from the media narrative, which consistently downplays, ignores or misstates Sanders' campaign platform and his achievements in favor of establishment candidates and even other trustbusters like Elizabeth Warren. Read the rest

Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has been discharged from the hospital. Read the rest

Today's Bernie Sanders health update is good. Read the rest

Senator Bernie Sanders is off the campaign trail "until further notice" after physicians discovered a blockage in one of his arteries and inserted two stents. He had experienced "chest discomfort" last night. From CNN:

"Sen. Sanders is conversing and in good spirits," (said senior adviser Jeff Weaver.) "He will be resting up over the next few days. We are canceling his events and appearances until further notice, and we will continue to provide appropriate updates..."

Sanders, who is 78 years old, felt the "discomfort" during a campaign event. Despite his age, he has been one of the most active campaigners in the 2020 Democratic primary field.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders topped the charts, receiving more than $25 million dollars in Q3 fundraising. Sanders is also dropping in the polls.

Politico:

Bernie Sanders raised more than $25 million in the third quarter of the year, his aides announced Tuesday.

The large haul demonstrates the Vermont senator, despite slipping to third place behind Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden in national polling averages, remains a fundraising juggernaut. Sanders also recently revealed that 1 million people have donated to his bid for the White House — a milestone he reached faster than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.

This certainly helps demonstrate how little the numbers we use to forecast election results really mean. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders has pledged to eliminate the $81b in outstanding US medical debt if he is elected president in 2020. Read the rest

Thomas Piketty, the French economist behind 2014's game-changing Capital in the 21st Century, has a new book, Capital and Ideology (out in France now, coming in English in 2020), which uses the same long-run economic series that Capital 21C benefited from to understand the relationship between wealth and ideology. Central to Piketty's thesis: that it's not enough to use class to understand how people vote -- you also have to take account of peoples' beliefs about class (this is a neat way of resolving the tension between traditional left class analysis and contemporary "identitarian" theories of leftist politics). Read the rest

She's called Cardi B because her family nickname, Bacardi, couldn't get past the trademark defensebots on Instagram! Read the rest

All the Democratic frontrunners outpoll Trump, but Bernie beats him 50-42 in a new Surveyusa poll; Biden has the same margin, while Warren and Harris have leads that are smaller than the margin of error. (via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

Bernie Sanders has raised more money than anyone else standing for the Democratic nomination; more importantly, he's raised that money from more people than anyone else in the race, and even more importantly, he's raised that money from more people in swing states that the Democrats will have to flip or hold in order to take the presidency in 2020. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders' appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast was a gamble; the show has dabbled with some pretty reactionary politics in the past, but it has a vast audience (the Sanders episode has had nearly 5m views), and Rogan gave Sanders the space to expound both on policy specifics and wider "vision" questions, and Sanders nailed it. Read the rest

Propublica's 2020 Presidential Candidate Summaries breaks down the 2020 candidates' fundraising, Trump's massive war-chest and Bernie's pack-leading raise and his continued success with small-money donations. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders wants you to know who hates him: billionaire sociopaths like Andrew Pudzer, Kenneth Lagone ("This is the antichrist!"), Lowell McAdam ("contemptible"), Lloyd Blankfein ("dangerous"); Alan Greenspan; Third Way ("an existential threat"), Bernard Marcus ("the enemy"), and more! (via /r/LateStageCapitalism) Read the rest

Sydney Ember is a news reporter who covers Bernie Sanders for the New York Times; her coverage is consistently negative (part of the Times's overall pattern of negative reporting on Sanders, including "stealth edits" to make its coverage less positive, to the dismay of the paper's public editor). Read the rest

Bernie Sanders's latest campaign promise is a proposal to forgive all outstanding US student debt, and raising the $2.2 trillion needed over a decade to make lenders whole by taxing Wall Street speculators with a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% fee on bonds, and a 0.005% fee on derivatives. Read the rest