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Nanjeanne

Nanjeanne's Journal
Nanjeanne's Journal
January 29, 2016

Americans for Democratic Action Endorses Bernie Sanders

Another endorsement by advocacy group.

Who they are:

ADA was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger, and Reinhold Niebuhr shortly after FDR died. Its goal then? To keep the New Deal dream--its vision and its values of an America that works fairly for all--alive for generations to come.


Their statement:

ADA Endorses Bernie Sanders for Democratic Nomination

Posted Jan 29 2016 at 11:31 AM

The National Board of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the nation’s most experienced liberal advocacy group, announces today that ADA has voted overwhelmingly to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

The debate centered on policies, electability, and ADA’s mission. Perhaps our longtime friend, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, said it best in a recent blog post: “I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.”

“Since ADA’s beginnings over 68 years ago, we have fought for the political system that we as a nation should have,” noted ADA National Director Don Kusler. “Bernie, his policies, and the movement forming around them embody the spirit and tradition of ADA’s long struggle for justice and offer our best hope for a progressive future.”

In 1948, ADA activists gathered in Philadelphia around the Democratic National Convention and led a charge against the then existing political system that looked away as racism continued to tear apart our country. One of ADA’s founders, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey, gave the seminal speech in support of changing the Democratic Party’s positions on civil rights and ultimately won support for a system that we should have.

Now, ADA is embarking on an organizational expansion to bring our movement for equality and justice to a broader local and state network. ADA has the experience and plan to win. Connecting with people on a more personal level, building power for change, and enacting that change through education, policy, and more willing representative bodies is essential to our future and that of the nation.

The fight against inequality and for justice whether racial, economic, or gender is at the heart of ADA's mission and is at the core of the movement for change that Bernie Sanders stands for. Among our shared goals are universal health care, free college education, fair trade, and putting an end to military misadventures. ADA joins Bernie Sanders in the movement to change the rigged political system in order to reach these goals.

Between now and this summer, when the 2016 Democratic Convention gathers again in Philadelphia, Americans for Democratic Action will be supporting a movement for change once again in the spirit of equality embodied in Bernie Sanders’ candidacy.



http://www.adaction.org/pages/posts/ada-endorses-bernie-sanders-for-democratic-nomination1118.php
January 29, 2016

Policy Experts Destroy Kenneth Thorpe's Analysis of Senator Sanders' Single-Payer Reform Plan

David Himmelstein, Professor of Public Health at CUNY and Lecturer in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Steffie Woolhandler,
Professor in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College; Lecturer in Medicine, Harvard Medical School

destroy the "analysis" of Kenneth Thorpe that's been receiving so much media attention - as well as the many threads here on DU.

The details are all in the link - but the assumptions they dispute are:

1. He incorrectly assumes administrative savings of only 4.7 percent of expenditures, based on projections of administrative savings under Vermont's proposed reform.
2. Thorpe assumes huge increases in the utilization of care, increases far beyond those that were seen when national health insurance was implemented in Canada, and much larger than is possible given the supply of doctors and hospital beds.
3. Thorpe assumes that the program would be a huge bonanza for state governments, projecting that the federal government would relieve them of 10 percent of their current spending for Medicaid and CHIP -- equivalent to about $20 billion annually.
4. Thorpe's analysis also ignores the large savings that would accrue to state and local governments -- and hence taxpayers -- because they would be relieved of the costs of private coverage for public employees.
5. Thorpe's analysis also apparently ignores the huge tax subsidies that currently support private insurance, which are listed as "Tax Expenditures" in the federal government's official budget documents.
6. Thorpe assumes zero cost savings under single-payer on prescription drugs and devices.

Highly recommend reading the details. I've posted the bias I find in Kenneth Thorpe's history and connections in many threads so won't repeat but if interested, here's a link: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1086606


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-himmelstein/kenneth-thorpe-bernie-sanders-single-payer_b_9113192.html?utm_hp_ref=healthy-living&ir=Healthy+Living

January 29, 2016

Leading Latino Magazine in Iowa Endorses Bernie Sanders

Formal Statement (in English) from El Trueque Magazine:

Today we, not only as Latinos and Latinas, but as a nation, undoubtedly face one of the most significant choices in decades. First, we can see clearly the deterioration of the political system, specifically of the entrenched political class of the United States; and second, we can see some candidates who have forgotten that democracy is the people and resides in the people.

As a result, we see on one hand candidates obsessed with power using populist and even fascist language, pointing fingers and blaming others for what they themselves have caused. Today, as never before in the history of this nation, we see a direct, irrational, and inhumane attack on minorities. The discourse of hate and blame against a religion, a race, an ethnicity , or a sexual orientation, is a recurring theme in the speech of various candidates.On the other hand we see candidates that represent corporations and the wealthiest elites.

We firmly believe that this nation is strong and prosperous precisely because this is and must remain the land of freedom and tolerance, the land where everyone is welcome and where regardless of your skin color, your religion, or your social status you are free and can pursue your dreams and achieve happiness.

Given this reality, we are convinced that the best option at this time is Senator Bernie Sanders. Through this public letter we express our support and backing for Sanders and invite and urge you as Latinos to caucus based on the ideals of fellowship and social integration, instead of pragmatism, hate, and money.

We offer our support because we believe that participation in politics should be based on ideals and convictions, it should be based on seeking the well-being of all people, particularly of the most vulnerable groups. Senator Bernie Sanders has demonstrated in his record as a public servant that he holds true to these principles.

We as Latinos need to support a candidate with honesty, someone who is committed to promoting comprehensive and humane immigration reform, who has the willingness and solidarity with working people to raise the minimum wage, who will advocate for the environment, women's rights, and the freedom of religion and will recognize that education and health services are human rights. One person cannot solve every problem today, but Senator Bernie Sanders will start us down the long road towards solutions.

Senator Bernie Sanders has dedicated his life to the struggle for the welfare of all, and has shown himself as an activist, as a mayor, and as a congressman to be consistent with his words, and to have the experience and judgment necessary to be the President of the United States of America.

It is Senator Bernie Sanders who can ensure that this nation remains the most prosperous and powerful in the world.



http://www.truequemagazine.pressia.org/index.php/articulos/a-su-salud/153-el-trueque-endorses#.VqmC9UmC7W0.twitter
January 29, 2016

Sanders, Clinton, and the Big Lie of the “Possible” Pushing big ideas can lead to tangible results)

Wonderful read by David Dayen in New Republic. Really nails the fallacy being pushed by the incremental Democrats.

The highlights:

Lately, several mainstream liberal commentators have taken to siding with the pragmatist, painstakingly explaining to their readers the importance of preserving existing gains in a time of partisan warfare, and dismissing Sanders’s ambitious platform as misplaced and foolish. Incrementalism is a reasonable ideological preference. But the hot rhetoric and the need for Manichean imperatives that characterizes campaign season has intensified the attacks on Sanders, painting him as a political dilettante who doesn’t understand how Washington works—and, by extension, suggesting that anyone in government with big ideas is doomed to failure and would be better off going along to get along.

That’s where this otherwise typical campaign back-and-forth strays into dangerous territory. When you saw off every policy to what falls into the immediate range of possibility at the present moment, you give supporters little reason to organize behind your ideas. More important, you neglect the creative ways in which those seemingly unrealizable goals can be realized, no matter the situation in Congress.


(bolding mine)
Maybe you’ve heard the one about the community health centers.

Originated in 1965 as a Great Society reform from the Office of Economic Opportunity, these neighborhood medical clinics provide integrated medical treatment and dental care to low-income and rural patients nationwide, regardless of the ability to pay. No two community health centers look exactly alike. But in general terms, they look more like the socialized medicine of Great Britain’s National Health Service than a single-payer program like those of Canada or France. Federal, state, and local grants fund the doctors and clinic personnel; the clinics refuse nobody for insufficient funds or lack of insurance; some even pick up and drop off patients at their residences.

From two demonstration projects, community health centers have grown to 1,300 networks in 9,200 locations, serving 23 million patients in 2014. As the National Association of Community Health Centers puts it, “In communities fortunate enough to have a health center, fewer babies die, emergency room lines are shorter and people live longer, healthier lives.”

And why do community health centers represent such a robust part of the health safety net today? Bernie Sanders.


In a well-known incident confirmed this week by Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo, Sanders made community health centers his cause in the Affordable Care Act debate, ultimately securing $11 billion in mandatory funding—instantly doubling the appropriation, which was previously made only through the discretionary budget. The number of patients served jumped from around 10 million in 2000 to today’s 23 million.

The way Sanders made this happen demonstrates how pushing big ideas outside the bounds of the possible can lead to tangible results, in ways that cautious centrism cannot.


The Affordable Care Act process, at least in the Senate, involved individual senators carrying certain pieces of the bill. Those senators could use the leverage afforded them by the razor-thin margins required for passage to force their favored items into the final product. Some used this power for ill (see Joe Lieberman scotching the Medicare buy-in), some for parochial needs (like Chris Dodd getting a grant for a medical school in Connecticut). But others insisted upon what became fairly vital pieces of the ACA’s infrastructure. Al Franken was synonymous with the medical loss ratio, mandating that insurance companies spend a fixed amount on actual care rather than overhead or executive salaries. And Bernie Sanders made increased community health center funding the condition for his vote.

The relatively small $11 billion investment—a rounding error in the overall bill—gave a lifeline to millions of new patients, now able to obtain primary care (not to mention creating tens of thousands of health-care jobs). Community health centers actually save the overall system money, by limiting the use of emergency rooms as primary care locations and increasing take-up of preventive care. Without the funds, patients in states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA would find it difficult to access care because of doctor shortages and because many don’t take Medicaid; community health centers increase the supply of providers willing to see Medicaid users. The upshot: one of the nation’s bigger socialized medicine programs (which include Tricare and the V.A. system) helps sustain one of the bigger single-payer programs.

The program has been so successful, in fact, that several Republican senators, opponents of the concept of universal health care, have quietly requested additional funding for community health centers. When community health centers faced a funding cliff in 2015, Republicans Roger Wicker (MS), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), Mark Kirk (IL), and James Lankford (OK) fought to fix it, alongside Sanders. President Obama just added $500 million in funding this past September, with funding set at the Sanders level through 2017.

Among other things, this little story should put to rest the hyperbolic complaints about Bernie as a hippy-dippy dope shouting into the wilderness, with no ability to advance his hopes and dreams. Sanders, then and now, preferred full-blown single-payer; he tried and failed to get a vote on it during the ACA debate. But when he saw an opportunity to use his power, he exploited it—building a program that accords very well with his social democratic principles, despite all the countervailing forces in American health care that compel reformers to aim low. If anything, progressives should want a proliferation of lawmakers with the same perspective as Sanders—striving for big change with the skills to recognize advantages and actualize them.

Whether Sanders’s successes in the Senate translate into the skills needed to be president is a question for voters. But who wins the nomination matters far less to me than keeping the promise of big change alive. The recent flood of savvy takes about the dangers of Sanders’s “revolutionary” ambitions dampens any outbreak of inspirational politics, and tells hopefuls that possibilities for beating the entrenched system can never and do never exist. It plays to a kind of hard-bitten realism, but it creates a box around hope, narrowing the range of acceptable policy ideas to an absurd degree. And as the community health center story reveals, it’s just wrong as a factual matter.

There’s a point at which you can manage the base into oblivion, and jump from dismissing Bernie Sanders to dismissing the largest wing of the Democratic Party. What’s more, telling a new crop of progressive legislators, from Zephyr Teachout to Elizabeth Warren, that they must content themselves with the art of the possible, and back off big ideas, is not only bad politics. It’s bad policy.





https://newrepublic.com/article/128464/sanders-clinton-big-lie-possible
January 29, 2016

Economist Dean Baker "Washington Post Wild Swing at Sanders"

http://us10.campaign-archive2.com/?u=8c573daa3ad72f4a095505b58&id=b909c340c7&e=330a70f55a

It’s not surprising that the Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos) would be unhappy with a presidential candidate running on a platform of taking back the country from the millionaires and billionaires. Therefore the trashing of Sen. Bernie Sanders in an editorial, “Bernie Sanders’ Fiction-Filled Campaign” (1/27/16), was about as predictable as the sun rising.


The whole article is well worth reading.

January 29, 2016

Michelle Alexander - author of New Jim Crow & Remembering Clinton & the Damage They Have Done

If anyone doubts that the mainstream media fails to tell the truth about our political system (and its true winners and losers), the spectacle of large majorities of black folks supporting Hillary Clinton in the primary races ought to be proof enough. I can't believe Hillary would be coasting into the primaries with her current margin of black support if most people knew how much damage the Clintons have done - the millions of families that were destroyed the last time they were in the White House thanks to their boastful embrace of the mass incarceration machine and their total capitulation to the right-wing narrative on race, crime, welfare and taxes. There's so much more to say on this topic and it's a shame that more people aren't saying it. I think it's time we have that conversation.


https://www.facebook.com/Michelle-Alexander-168304409924191/

And the hits just keep coming..,
January 29, 2016

Peoples Organization for Progress to endorse Sanders

The General Assembly of the People’s Organization for Progress announced that it would support Bernie Sanders for president.

Organizers say the decision came after a rigorous debate and careful consideration.The organization has rarely departed from a long-standing policy of not supporting candidates for office. In 2008 and in 2012, the group voted to endorse Barack Obama and in 2014, the organization endorsed the campaign of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.

Sanders, who had a campaign rally stopped by young Black Lives Matter activists, has by far, the most left leaning stance on all of the issues, especially the economic and racial justice issues that matter most to the organization.

“Bernie Sanders is the first self-described socialist to ever have gotten this close to the Presidency of the United States,” said founder and chairman Lawrence Hamm.

“While we should be deeply concerned by how Republican candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have taken the Republican Party so far to the right, we, on the left, should be just as active as they are and should give serious consideration to how the Sanders campaign could possibly take the Democratic Party from the center right to the left"

http://njtoday.net/2016/01/29/peoples-organization-for-progress-supports-bernie-sanders/

About POP from their website http://njpop.org/wordpress/

The People’s Organization for Progress has been formed for the following purposes:
To educate the people about relevant social, economic and political issues.
To continuously organize and mobilize the grassroots community so that it can effectively solve its problems and fight for its needs.
To improve the social and economic conditions in our community.
To work for the total elimination of racism and sexism.
To further develop and increase the political power of working and poor people.
To strive for a more just and equitable distribution of wealth in our society.
To serve as an advocate of human and civil rights.
To support the struggles of people at home and abroad against oppression and exploitation.
To promote world peace.
To build unity with other organizations and individuals whose goals are similar to our own.

But but but ... Bernie has a problem with people of color.


January 29, 2016

Chamber of Commerce President assures people Clinton will support TPP if she wins Presidency

Ain't that just sweet.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/28/1476527/-Chamber-of-Commerce-Lobbyist-Tom-Donohue-Clinton-Will-Support-TPP-After-Election

From article:

Reporting on the interview, Inside U.S. Trade noted:

The Chamber president said he expected Hillary Clinton would ultimately support the TPP if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president and is elected. He argued that she has publicly opposed the deal chiefly because her main challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has also done so. "If she were to get nominated, if she were to be elected, I have a hunch that what runs in the family is you get a little practical if you ever get the job," he said.


It's just a hunch doncha know. But it's all about being pragmatic. Sort of like the wink-wink to Wall Street.
January 29, 2016

Clinton Campaign Saying Sanders May Bus In Young People - and Bernie is Fuming

Much more serious than Button & Logogate

You need to watch this video from Bloomberg.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-28/sanders-says-he-ll-struggle-to-win-iowa-with-low-voter-turnout

“The Clinton people say that they are, in places like Ames and Iowa City, that they are very worried that a number of out-of-state young people may try to show up to the caucus and they’re going to make a major effort to make sure that that’s not the case,” Hunt said.

“Really? Is that what they’re saying?”, Bernie erupted. And then it goes on from here.

But being the nice guy, even at the end Sanders says he doubts it's coming from Hillary herself - but from Brock.

This is the crap the Clinton campaign does that is way more dishonest than some people putting on a union button so they can access a restricted area and talk about their candidate. She pulled in against Obama too in 2008 . . . it's a shame it's not remembered by Obama supporters.

Wonder if the media will put this all over TV? HAHAHAHAHA I crack myself up sometimes.

January 28, 2016

Bernie's New Wall Street Ad

Video is in article . . .

the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/28/bernie-sanders-releases-tough-ad-on-wall-street-speaking-fees/?smid=tw-share

Bernie, being the gentleman he is, doesn't mention Clinton or her ties to Wall Street. Hopefully voters can make their own connections.

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