Donkees
Donkees's JournalBernie Sanders explains the unusual degree of cruelty of the Republican budget.
Sept 30, 2017
Today, the Republicans in the Senate just introduced a budget that is unusual in its degree of cruelty. Let me take a moment to explain what it does.
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Twitter Photo: Sen. Sanders taking in a little sportsball before heading down to ATL
https://twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/914193798892154880''I ran into Bernie Sanders at the Nationals game last night!'' (instagram quote)
Bernie Sanders chokes up when he learns about relative who died defying the Nazis
September 28, 2017 5:31pm
Excerpt:
(JTA) — In the upcoming season premiere of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” Bernie Sanders does more than look at a printout of his family tree: He gets emotional when he discovers a relative died while standing up to the Nazis during World War II.
In a clip released to JTA, the Jewish lawmaker is visibly moved as the show’s host, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., asks him how he feels after learning about the relative.
“I’m proud of his courage, and willingly going to his own death in order to protect innocent people,” Sanders says. “So I’m very, very proud that I have a family member who showed that type of courage and decency.”
“It’s one of the bravest acts I’ve heard of,” responds Gates, a historian who has hosted the show since it first aired in 2012.
https://www.jta.org/2017/09/28/life-religion/bernie-sanders-gets-choked-up-talking-about-relative-who-died-standing-up-to-the-nazis
Bernie Sanders' Health Care Debate Was a Good Idea for a Very Simple Reason
SEP. 26, 2017 11:39 AM
Excerpts:
When CNN announced last week that it would hold a debate on health care between Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham and progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar, the reaction in some Democratic circles was anxiety. “I’m not sure single payer vs Graham-Cassidy is the debate we want right now,” mused former Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor. With the Affordable Care Act once more on the ropes, the argument seemed to go, Sanders was choosing to advance his personal politics ahead of the priorities of the moment.
Those fears were unfounded. A Monday night cable news special was never going to be the make-or-break moment for health care reform, but more importantly, Sanders’ skeptics, and his Republican debating opponents, misunderstood his entire approach to health care reform—no one in the Senate has as much riding on Obamacare’s survival as he does.
Sanders and Klobuchar returned again and again to the Congressional Budget Office analysis that showed that Graham-Cassidy would throw millions off health insurance. In defense, Graham and Cassidy couldn’t really say what their bill would do, because the entire point of their proposal is to change Obamacare’s spending into block grants and let governors and state legislators decide for themselves how health funds should be spent. Sanders pointed out that governors and state legislators had all pretty much decided before Obamacare that people with pre-existing conditions were on their own. Graham didn’t have much to say about that. Instead, he and Cassidy frequently tried to make hay out of Sanders’ politics.
Sanders, of course, was happy to defend the principle of a single-payer system, but he never let that get in the way of the task on hand, nor did he reject the incrementalism the Senate sometimes lives and breathes by. Of course Medicare-for-all won’t be passing anytime soon, he said. But in the meantime, there were bipartisan fixes to made to Obamacare, and opportunity to act on prescription drug prices—an area of agreement, Sanders noted, between he and President Trump. They might even consider lowering the age of Medicare or offering a Medicaid or Medicare buy-in option—ideas his Democratic colleagues Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Chris Murphy of Connecticut are currently working on.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/bernie-sanders-health-care-debate-was-a-good-idea-for-a-very-simple-reason/
Bernie Sanders: Time is ripe for Medicare for all
Bernie Sanders Published 3:16 a.m. ET Sept. 25, 2017
Excerpt:
We now have the most wasteful, inefficient and bureaucratic health care system in the world. In fact, we are spending almost twice as much per capita as any other country, while our health care outcomes are often worse. Instead of providing quality care to all in a cost-effective way, our current system is designed to provide hundreds of billions in profits to insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry and medical equipment suppliers.
Moving to a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system would eliminate insurance industry profits and reduce waste, saving up to $500 billion a year on administrative costs. Today, about 21 cents of every dollar spent on private health insurance goes to overhead and profit in an incredibly complicated system of hundreds of different plans, each with different deductibles, co-payments and premiums. In contrast, Medicare spends only 2% on administration.
Under Medicare for all, the American people would be able to go to any doctor or hospital they wanted. The major difference is that instead of writing out large checks to private insurance companies, they would be paying substantially less into a Medicare trust fund saving middle-class families thousands of dollars a year.
The truth is that the only reason we, among all major countries, do not have universal health care has everything to do with politics and greed. Now is the time to tell members of Congress that their job is to protect the American people, not the insurance companies and the drug companies. Now is the time for Medicare for all.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/25/medicare-for-all-bernie-sanders-editorials-debates/105971268/
Video: Bernie Sanders urges GetUp members to join global 'resistance'
Uploaded on Sep 24, 2017
The US senator Bernie Sanders has called for a global movement to create 'equality and shared prosperity'. Sanders was speaking in a prerecorded message to the Australian activist group GetUp's PowerUp conference. 'Nothing happens or has ever happened unless people on the bottom at the grassroots level stand up and go forward. That is how change always takes place'
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Bernie Sanders urges GetUp members to join global 'resistance'
Monday 25 September 2017 03.44 EDT
Excerpts:
Bernie Sanders, the former US Democratic presidential hopeful, has called on members of the activist group GetUp to join a global “resistance movement” to fight the rise of intolerant political movements in the US, Europe and Australia. In a prerecorded video message, played at GetUp’s first national conference at the weekend in Sydney, Sanders encouraged the group to start working globally with like-minded activists, saying its progressive values were similar to his own. His message was played on Sunday, where 800 GetUp members had gathered to workshop new campaign tactics. “We need a globalised movement towards equality and shared prosperity,” Sanders said in his video.
Paul Oosting, GetUp’s national director, said the weekend conference marked a “significant shift” for the organisation and he welcomed Sanders’ words of encouragement. He said GetUp had been in close contact with key Sanders staff, particularly Becky Bond and Zack Exley – the organisers who pioneered efforts to get tens of thousands of Americans volunteering for Sanders – to learn everything they could about Sanders’ campaigning model.
“We’ve been learning a lot from them because they’re seen as global leaders in the ‘big organising’ model they’ve pioneered,” Oosting said. Sanders used his video message to call on GetUp supporters to be conscious of global political trends, saying progressives must confront the rise of intolerant and authoritarian political movements. He implored GetUp’s supporters to start organising globally.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/25/bernie-sanders-urges-getup-members-to-join-global-resistance
Photos: Sen. Sanders at CNA/NNOC Convention 2017
"Nurses are the most trusted profession in the US."
Bernie Sanders: Saudi Arabia is 'not an ally' and the U.S. Should 'rethink' its approach to Iran
September 21 2017, 12:28 p.m.
Excerpt:
“I consider Saudi Arabia to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism. … They are not an ally of the United States.” The Vermont senator accused the “incredibly anti-democratic” Saudis of “continuing to fund madrasas” and spreading “an extremely radical Wahhabi doctrine in many countries around the world.”
In a wide-ranging interview ahead of his set-piece speech on foreign policy in Fulton, Missouri, on Thursday morning, the independent senator said the United States is “complicit” in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and said he would be willing to consider voting to cut U.S. aid to the Jewish state. He also offered tentative support for a “face-to-face” meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un; described U.S. drone strikes against innocent civilians as one of the “root causes” of terrorism; and called for a re-examination of U.S. foreign policy “unilateralism.”
Asked if he agreed with ESPN’s Jemele Hill and The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who have both called Trump a “white supremacist,” Sanders said he preferred to use the word “racist” to describe the president.
“I think Donald Trump has strong racist tendencies,” he said. “And I say that not just because of his absurd and horrific remarks on Charlottesville, but because … when you lead the effort to try to de-legitimize … the first African-American president in our history, I think that’s racist. When you argue about the Central Park 5, I think that’s racist — so I think it’s fair to say he has strong racist tendencies.”
The Intercept will publish the full interview with Sanders on Friday.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, left, is interviewed by The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan, right, in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 20, 2017. Sound engineer Rachael London, middle, records the interview.
Bernie Sanders Just Gave the Progressive Foreign-Policy Speech We've Been Waiting For
The senator powerfully linked domestic and foreign policy in the context of massive global inequality.
By Stephen Miles TODAY 2:16 PM
Excerpt:
At the heart of his speech was the argument that the divide between domestic and foreign policy is not only artificial but also counterproductive. An expansive view of foreign policy—not merely as the idea of what happens over there, but also as part of who we are here at home—challenges us to enlarge our own thinking. Foreign policy, in Sanders’s argument, is not just about whether we go to war or not. It is about our democracy at home; it is about climate change; it is about global oligarchy; and it is about how American leadership can come together and solve the challenges we face through diplomacy.
Sanders rightly connects the dots between an exploding Pentagon budget and Republican attempts to take health care away from tens of millions of Americans in the name of fiscal responsibility. He makes clear that a progressive foreign policy also means that “We cannot convincingly promote democracy abroad if we do not live it vigorously here at home.” And in the way he does so well, Sanders reminds us that no progressive view of the world can tolerate the massive wealth inequality both here and around the world.
After reframing the issue, Sanders dives into the meat of the matter in a way that should ring true for every progressive. He reminds us that hundreds of millions live in poverty, dying of preventable diseases, while arms makers rake in trillions from weapons of war. He reminds us that America’s history of interventions—from Iran to Chile to right now in Yemen—have a habit of having devastating results. And he reminds us that there is a path between endless war and isolationism, that America’s greatest successes came when it helped support not just our allies but also our former enemies, as we did with the Marshall Plan.
To bring this all home, Sanders points to two diametrically opposed visions of American foreign policy that played out in recent years. In reminding us of the horrors of the Iraq War and juxtaposing it with the unbridled success of the Iran nuclear deal, Bernie helps make clear that this is not some esoteric debate. These are debates happening right now, here in Washington, about just what path our nation should choose to confront the challenges we face abroad.
https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-just-gave-the-progressive-foreign-policy-speech-weve-been-waiting-for/
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