silvershadow
silvershadow's JournalBernie Sanders: "We are the future of the Democratic Party
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday that no matter what happens now his campaign is the future of the Democratic Party and that the top issues of his campaign are now the Democratic mainstream.
"I think the ideas we are talking about, (are) what the American people and the people in the Democratic Party want to hear," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation," noting his campaign's strong support among younger voters. "We are the future of the Democratic Party, so I'm very proud of where we are and we look forward to fighting this out through California."
Whether he or former secretary of state Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, Sanders said he believes that the key issues of his campaign will be represented in the platform of the Democratic nominee. He named guaranteed health care, free college tuition, getting money out of politics, a $15 national minimum wage and climate change as top priorities that he believes have broad backing in the party.
"All of those issues are issues that I believe the vast majority of people in the Democratic Party support," he said. "I hope that if I do not win the nomination, that that will be part of Clinton's agenda."
more: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-we-are-the-future-of-the-democratic-party/
Sanders Says Staying in Race Good for Democratic Party - ABC News -
Sanders Says Staying in Race Good for Democratic Party - ABC News -
http://abcn.ws/1YOJgIu
Sorry. Best I could do. Wouldn't let me embed it.
Sanders Says Staying in Race Good for Democratic Party - ABC News -
Sanders Says Staying in Race Good for Democratic Party - ABC News -
http://abcn.ws/1YOJgIu
Sorry. Best I could do. Wouldn't let me embed it.
Sanders Says Staying in Race Good for Democratic Party - ABC News
Sanders Says Staying in Race Good for Democratic Party - ABC News -
http://abcn.ws/1YOJgIu
Sorry. Best I could do. Wouldn't let me embed it.
Hillary Clinton Is Wrong On Marijuana Research
Hillary Clinton said at a town hall meeting that “you can’t do any research about” marijuana because it’s a Schedule I drug. That’s false. Schedule I classification makes it difficult to conduct research on a substance, but not impossible.
At the event, which aired April 21 on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” a voter asked the Democratic presidential candidate whether she would vote for legalizing marijuana if such a referendum question appeared on the ballot in her state. Clinton did not say how she would vote, but she said she supports marijuana research.
Clinton, April 21: I think I would have to study that more to see how it was phrased because it’s been phrased differently in different states. But I will tell you what I will do as president, I’ve said I want to move marijuana off of Schedule I, which you understand means that you can’t do any research about it, you can’t do anything. I think that’s wrong. We have enough anecdotal evidence … about what marijuana can do for medical conditions, easing pain, and we need to be doing research on it because I am 100 percent in favor of medical uses for marijuana.
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, drugs and other substances are classified into five categories “depending upon the drug’s acceptable medical use and the drug’s abuse or dependency potential.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-marijuana-research_us_571b7a83e4b0d912d5fecf13?utm_hp_ref=politics
Where Bernie Sanders’ Health Care Crusade Might Go From Here
Bernie Sanders can make a real difference in the causes he’s championed, even if he doesn’t become president.
That’s particularly true for one of his signature issues: health care. No matter what happens with the Democratic presidential nomination, the Vermont senator can keep pushing to to fill in the holes of Obamacare, while creating the building blocks for the single-payer system he has advocated for his entire political career.
Health care has featured heavily in Sanders’ campaign. He’d scrap existing insurance arrangements and put in their place a new, universal insurance program that the federal government would administer. It’d be similar to “Medicare for all,” as Sanders likes to say, although the coverage would actually be considerably more generous than what even today’s seniors get. On paper, it would all but eliminate the private health insurance industry.
Versions of single payer exist in countries such as Canada, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Others countries, like France, provide insurance through quasi-independent organizations but operate more or less like single-payer systems. Progressives have long dreamed of creating such a system in the U.S., and it’s not hard to see why.
More, with video: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-single-payer_us_571a7af4e4b0d4d3f723504e?utm_hp_ref=politicsrmany.
Bernie Sanders Rips The Non-Partisan Mask Off Of Republican Money Man Charles Koch
Bernie Sanders Rips The Non-Partisan Mask Off Of Republican Money Man Charles Koch
By Jason Easley on Sun, Apr 24th, 2016 at 12:23 pm
Bernie Sanders exposed the truth about Charles Koch's extremist positions pro-Republican while the billionaire was trying to sell himself as non-partisan on ABC's This Week.
Charles Koch tried to fool the American people into believing that he is something that he is not. Sanders was correct. The Koch brothers are not only trying to undo every piece of legislation that helps the elderly, children, the poor, and American workers, but they are also pushing to take away healthcare from veterans by privatizing the VA.
The fact that Charles Koch almost said something nice about Hillary Clinton says more about how much the Koch brothers hate Donald Trump than like Clinton. The Koch brothers aren’t non-partisan. The Kochs only support Republicans. The Koch brothers have budgeted $900 million for beating Democrats this fall.
The corporate media is pushing the Koch agenda, but Bernie Sanders was there to push back with the truth that the Koch brothers are the enemies of progress and democracy for ordinary Americans.
more: http://www.politicususa.com/2016/04/24/bernie-sanders-rips-non-partisan-mask-republican-money-man-charles-koch.html
Clinton folks: If, God forbid, she is the nominee, a Unity ticket is the ONLY way
I see this going forward. He needs to be there with YUGE power and official duties. And that's just a fact. She'll desperately need some lacking credibility. That's even IF he's willing to loan it to her. And that is a big if at this point. In the end I don't actually think he would, but maybe? I'm still holding out hope for another outcome altogether.
On edit: Please read through the thread before posting a response for further clarifications. 
This third party would keep Hillary honest: Bernie Sanders backers must become a Tea Party of the
left
(snip)
Without that kind of movement, willing to work both within and outside the Democratic Party, willing to defeat Democrats in primaries or even to run against them in a general election, the status quo will continue: subservience to Wall Street and the policies favored by the 1 percent whose money shapes elections on the national and state levels, the false belief that terrorism can be defeated by our own brand of terror (war through drones), fossil fuels will continue to be extracted from the earth and accelerate global warming, millions of people languishing in our prisons (many for nonviolent crimes), social services (child care, health care, elder care, etc.) will continue to be sacrificed on the alter of “no new taxes,” the economy will continue to depend on endless “growth” with devastating consequences for the life support system of the planet, the U.S. will continue to have the most expensive and least successful health care and pharmaceuticals in the advanced industrial countries, the values of selfishness and materialism that are the “common sense of global capitalism will continue to pollute friendships and families causing psychic pain and family instability, and cynicism toward government and despair at the possibility of fundamental change will give new opportunities for racist, sexist, xenophobic and fascistic forces to gain public credibility.
Pessimistic? No, this is exactly what happened in the past seven years of the Obama presidency, and it will only worsen unless there is some ongoing political movement capable not only of speaking to the economic pain so beautifully articulated by Bernie Sanders but also capable of addressing the hidden psychic injuries of the globalization of selfishness that impact not only the poor but almost everyone in the society.
Such a movement would have to overtly challenge the capitalist system. Minimally, it would support the ESRA—Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which bans all money from elections except public funding and requires corporations to prove a history of environmental and social responsibility once every five years to a jury of ordinary citizens who would hear testimony from people around the world who have been impacted by the operations, policies, and advertising of that corporation (check it out at www.tikkun.org/ESRA). And this movement would reject the fantasy that “homeland security” can be achieved through (military, economic or cultural) domination of others around the world, and instead insist on a strategy of generosity manifested in a Global Marshall Plan and showing the people of the world that the US genuinely cares about their wellbeing (check out the details at www.tikkun.org/gmp).
There are tens of thousands of Sanders activists in states that have already finished their primaries. Bernie could call upon them to create statewide conventions in which they organize themselves into an ongoing movement, precisely what Bernie said needs to happen. Yet unless he explicitly articulates how folks can do that, provides a structure for doing so, and allows his supporters to access his supporter lists to build a movement, it is not likely to happen. In the aftermath of his large loss in New York, particularly in New York City which is usually the symbolic center of American progressivism, we at Tikkun magazine have already gotten many notes indicating despair and a desire to retreat from all politics, a reaction to the way that election seemed to systematically disenfranchise many thousands of voters and to the bare facts that Bernie’s trailing in the delegate count and in the popular vote makes them feel that there is little chance that we will have nothing to inspire us in the next eight years of American government. While Bernie himself will obviously concentrate on the remaining states that have not yet held their primaries, his followers should be urged to use this time to organize a new national organization.
more: http://www.salon.com/2016/04/24/this_third_party_would_keep_hillary_honest_bernie_sanders_backers_must_become_a_tea_party_of_the_left/
Gutless Democrats fear fights: Why triangulating neo-liberal Clintonites back big business over peop
As the Democratic primary heated up to the boiling point, one particular line of attack on Bernie Sanders had the distinctively Karl Rove-ian stench of attacking Sanders’ strength. Vox, Slate and AEI all bought the spin and struck the same theme: “If Bernie Sanders cares about poor people, how come he doesn’t want to trade with them?”
But even more than Rove, we can catch a distinctive whiff of Thatcherism here: There is no alternative; either we do trade on neoliberal terms or else we head back to caveman status. We can’t do things in a more equitable manner, we’re being told, even though history repeatedly shows that we can—replacing monarchy with democracy, abolishing slavery, getting rid of child labor, establishing equal rights for women. All these equalizing advances we’ve come to take for granted were unthinkable once: there was simply no alternative… or, again, so we were told.
Economist Dean Baker debunked the underlying argument on his “Beat the Press” blog as the attack on Sanders first appeared, and elaborated his critique more fully in a piece solicited by the Washington Post—which then declined to run it. Baker first noted that conventional economic theory calls for rich countries to run surpluses with developing countries—supplying the capital they need to develop—and that this pattern prevailed throughout most of the 1990s. “The United States had a modest trade deficit in these years, but Europe and Japan had large surpluses,” Baker recalled, but “This pattern was reversed in 1997 with the U.S.-I.M.F.’s bailout from the East Asian financial crisis.”
That bailout, “directed by the Clinton Treasury department and the I.M.F.,” came with very harsh terms, which led developing countries to decide they had to keep large foreign exchange reserves—meaning U.S. dollars—in order to avoid a similar fate. This in turn required running large trade surpluses, the exact opposite of what conventional, textbook economic thinking had previously assumed. “This was the period in which the U.S. trade deficit exploded, going from just over 1 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6 percent of GDP in 2005, a rise in the size of the annual deficit equivalent to almost $900 billion in today’s economy,” Baker noted. “This rise in the trade deficit coincided with the loss of more than 3 million manufacturing jobs, roughly 20 percent of employment in the sector.”
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/23/gutless_democrats_fear_fights_why_triangulating_neo_liberal_clintonites_back_big_business_over_people/
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