Bernie Sanders’ Latest Move Proves He Is Staying In The Presidential Race For A Reason
Sanders has been staying in the race to keep the pressure on Clinton and the platform committee to adopt more progressive positions. That's a goal he has a chance to fulfill regardless of whether Clinton's email case goes any further. Thus, the FBI's recommendations won't be changing his mind.
And he's been partly successful. Though the drafting committee will debate once again before the convention, where the platform will be officially decided, the draft so far includes language to reverse Citizens United, break up big banks, abolish the death penalty, ban private prisons, and initiate automatic voter registration, among other important progressive positions. [….]
But Sanders' work isn't done. He wrote in an op-ed that the platform committee has still not adopted some of his central positions, including a $15 minimum wage and strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Sanders wants his delegates, both on the committee and at the convention, to remain strong in favor of a more progressive platform. And he wants Clinton's campaign to feel the pressure from his continued presence, as she works to appeal to Sanders supporters.
Video link: Cenk Explains the Internet to Out Of Touch Politicians
Millennials are ripe for socialism: A generation is rising up against neoliberal oppression
Few developments have caused as much recent consternation among advocates of free-market capitalism as various findings that millennials, compared to previous generations, are exceptionally receptive to socialism.
A recent Reason-Rupe survey found that a majority of Americans under 30 have a more favorable view of socialism than of capitalism. Gallup finds that almost 70 percent of young Americans are ready to vote for a “socialist” president. So it has come as no surprise that 70 to 80 percent of young Americans have been voting for Bernie Sanders, the self-declared democratic socialist. Some pundits have been eager to denounce such surveys as momentary aberrations, stemming from the economic crash, or due to lack of knowledge on the part of millennials about the authoritarianism they say is the inevitable result of socialism. They were too young to have been around for Stalin and Mao, they didn’t experience the Cold War, they don’t know to be grateful to capitalism for saving them from global tyranny. The critics dismiss the millennials’ political leanings by repeating Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s mantra, “There is no alternative” (TINA), which prompted the extreme form of capitalism we now know as neoliberalism.
But millennials, in the most positive turn of events since the economic collapse, intuitively understand better. Circumstances not of their choosing have forced them to think outside the capitalist paradigm, which reduces human beings to figures of sales and productivity, and to consider if in their immediate lives, and in the organization of larger collectivities, there might not be more cooperative, nonviolent, mutually beneficial arrangements with better measures of human happiness than GDP growth or other statistics that benefit the financial class. [….]
The current American election is one of the last of the rearguard actions by so-called progressives exploiting the notion that nothing better is possible. This antihumanism, masquerading as pragmatism, asks millennials to buy into the idea that we can only expect the false measures of happiness that capitalism has sold us on.
Cooperation is neither medieval nor tyrannizing; it is rather avant-garde, and it looks like the millennial generation is ready to ride the wave. Millennials are famously optimistic; socialism was designed for just such a breed.
Major Provisions in the Democratic Platform
Here are just a few of the accomplishments that we have already made in this platform.
It is now the policy of the Democratic Party that we will fight to:
- Break up too big to fail financial institutions, enact a modern version of the Glass Steagall Act, and make sure that the banking system is part of the productive economy providing loans to small-and-medium sized business to create good-paying jobs.
- Prohibit Wall Street from picking and choosing which credit agency will rate their products. As The Big Short reminds us, we cannot ensure the safety and soundness of our financial system without this needed reform.
- Make the Federal Reserve a more democratic institution by banning executives at financial institutions from serving on the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks or handpicking their members. During the financial crisis, it was absurd that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, was a director on the New York Fed, while his bank received over $390 billion in virtually zero interest loans from our central bank.
- Ban golden parachutes for taking government jobs and crack down on the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.
- Empower the Postal Service to offer basic banking services so that low-income Americans are no longer dependent on payday lenders who charge interest rates of over 300 percent and trap millions of Americans into a viscous cycle of debt.
- End corporate loopholes that allow large, profitable corporations to stash their cash in the Caymans and other offshore tax havens to avoid paying $100 billion a year in U.S. income taxes and use the revenue gained not to lower corporate tax rates, but to create millions of good-paying jobs.
- Make it easier for workers to join unions if a simple majority sign valid authorization cards and require binding arbitration to ensure a first contract. America is strong when unions are strong.
- Expand Social Security and extend its solvency by making those who earn more than $250,000 pay their fair share. At a time when more than half of older workers have no retirement savings, the platform recognizes that our job is not to cut Social Security. Our job is to expand it.
- Allow every American to gain access to health care through Medicare or a public option. This is not everything we wanted, not by a long shot. We will keep fighting for Medicare-for-all. But it is a step forward. Importantly, the platform also calls for an historic expansion in community health centers and the National Health Service Corps that could increase access to primary care, dental care, mental health care, and low-cost prescription drugs to as many as 25 million more Americans.
- Give Medicare the ability to negotiate lower drug prices; ban pay for delay; and allow Americans to get affordable drugs from Canada and other countries. The U.S. must no longer pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
- Fix a broken immigration system by providing a path to citizenship to 11 million aspiring Americans; end the inhumane and unjust raids and roundups of immigrant children and families; and ending the 3-year, 10-year, and permanent bars. We need an immigration policy that unites families and does not tear them apart.
- Repair our broken criminal justice system by abolishing the death penalty; ending for-profit prisons and detention centers; banning the box; and ending racial profiling.
- Strengthen the Postal Service by eliminating the disastrous pre-funding mandate that forces it to pay $5.5 billion a year for future retiree health benefits; reinstate strong overnight delivery standards; and protect 6-day mail and door-to-door delivery.
- Substantially increase funding for the National Housing Trust Fund to construct and rehabilitate millions of affordable housing rental units. At a time when millions of Americans are paying 50-60 percent of their limited incomes on rent we need to make affordable housing a right of all Americans.
- Make it easier to vote by establishing universal, automatic voter registration; make election day a holiday; and restore voting rights for those who’ve served their time.
- Fix a corrupt campaign finance system by overturning Citizens United, eliminating super Pacs, and moving to public financing through a small donor matching program. Working together, we will get big money out of politics.
- Make it clear that states should be allowed to decriminalize marijuana and provide certainty to legal marijuana businesses by granting them access to the same financial services as any other business.
- Expand the post 9-11 veterans caregiver program to include all veterans who are in need and make sure that all veterans get the benefits that they have earned and deserve.
- Establish a 100% clean energy system by mid-century.
- Support Justice Department investigation into fossil fuel companies that have denied climate change.
As important as these victories are, a lot more work remains to be done. Unfortunately, during the debate on the draft platform in St. Louis, we were not able to include a number of important provisions. Here are just a few.
We fought to make it the policy of the Democratic Party that:
Tell the DNC: Strongly Oppose the TPP in the Party Platform
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership should not receive a vote in Congress during the lame duck session of Congress and beyond. This disastrous unfettered free trade agreement would make it easier for corporations to ship jobs to low-wage countries, threaten the environment, increase the price of life-saving drugs, and reward some of the worst human rights violators in the world. It must be defeated.
- We need a carbon tax. Scientists have told us that a carbon tax is the best way to make sure our planet remains habitable for our children and grandchildren and that if we do not act soon there will be more droughts, more famine, more acidification of the ocean, more rising sea levels, and more extreme weather disturbances. The Democratic Party needs to be the party of science. It is not good enough to be better than Donald Trump on the most important issue facing our planet.
- We need a ban on fracking. Environmental regulators in New York have told us that no regulation, none, can make hydraulic fracturing safe. If we are serious about clean drinking water, clean air, and the future of our planet, we need a national ban on fracking.
- The federal minimum wage needs to be increased to $15 an hour and indexed to inflation. While the Democratic Platform includes language calling on all workers to make at least $15 an hour, it is silent on how much the federal minimum wage should be raised. That needs to change.
- Earned pension benefits must not be cut. If we do not act soon, the pension benefits of more than 1.5 million Americans in multi-employer pension plans could be cut by as much as 60 percent. When someone is promised a pension benefit we cannot allow that promise to be broken.
We will be fighting to include these provisions and more into the Democratic Platform when the full committee meets in Orlando on July 8-9.
Bernie Sanders requests rally on eve of DNC
Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign has asked permission to hold a rally in Philadelphia on July 24, the eve of the Democratic National Convention.
The permit application for the event — which would involve an estimated 15,000 to 40,000 people in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park — is one of ten applications filed with the Philadelphia mayor's office for pro-Sanders protests, marches and demonstrations during the convention.
Sanders stays quiet on FBI announcement about Clinton
On Tuesday afternoon, as much of the political world discussed the FBI's decision not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders's campaign blasted a text message to supporters.
"Tell the DNC Platform Committee to make sure they include Bernie's amendment to oppose the TPP," said the text. "Sign & share with #StopTPPNow."
That, not the FBI, is Sanders's focus for the moment. According to a spokesman for Sanders, the senator from Vermont will not respond to the FBI's decision and is not altering his plan to remain a presidential candidate until the Democratic National Convention nominates Clinton.
Throughout his campaign for the presidency, Sanders refused to attack Clinton over the email episode. He alternately ruled it out as a legitimate issue, and hectored the media for focusing on scandal instead of substance.
"You're not going to be the sixteenth writer who asks me about Hillary, are you?" Sanders asked Bloomberg News in March, after the scandal broke, and he was approached for a comment. "I know you would not do that. You want to ask me about the state of the economy, unemployment, poverty. You would not ask me about my views on Hillary Clinton."
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