Donkees
Donkees's JournalBernie Sanders Sets His Sights On The Foreign Policy Establishment
09/20/2017 08:24 pm ET
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON ― Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will use a major foreign policy address Thursday to set out his view of how politicians on the left should discuss the U.S role in the world and why voters at home should pay close attention to America’s actions abroad.
The senator will focus on the value of international cooperation and less U.S. reliance on hard military power to pursue its goals around the world, rather than going into specific policy recommendations for hot spots like Syria, North Korea and elsewhere.
Sanders will deliver his speech at noon eastern time at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The location is laden with symbolism. Westminster hosted Winston Churchill not long after the Allies won the Second World War. It’s there that, in 1946, the British-American icon delivered the epoch-defining “Iron Curtain Speech,” the origin of the concept of the Soviet Union trapping much of Europe behind an Iron Curtain and the idea of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Sanders has acknowledged the strengths of the post-war international order that Churchill and others developed. But he’s also spent years publicly warning that America’s leadership of that order has inspired excessive military adventurism in Washington ― and helped create the conditions, economic and otherwise, that turned Americans toward a man who sees little value in the current order, President Donald Trump. Sanders will focus on contemporary history to explain what he recommends in foreign policy, the aide said.
“There are two things he’s going to compare and contrast: the Iraq War, which most now agree was a disaster, and the Iran agreement, which is an example of how American leadership should work, where we used diplomacy and mobilized international consensus to address a shared challenge,” the aide continued.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-establishment_us_59c2ee8be4b0c90504fb65cb
Photo: Senator Sanders raises his fist as health care rally attendees chant "BERNIE" at the Capitol
Sept 19, 2017
Here is the LIVE-Stream Link to Bernie's Westminster College Speech on Sept 21 at 11AM CT
*Their youtube page goes 'LIVE' when events start:
https://www.youtube.com/user/westminstercollegemo
''WESTMINSTER LIVE STREAMING
Next live stream event: 2017 Hancock Symposium and Green Foundation Lecture feat. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders
Scroll down to view the schedule of sessions to be streamed live.
Thursday, Sept. 21
11:00 AM-12:00 PM: John Findley Green Foundation Lecture: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, former presidential candidate and longest serving independent member of the United States Congress''
Democrats Bullish on Bernie Sanders and Single-Payer Health Care
SEP 14 2017
Excerpt:
On Wednesday, Sanders said, “I have no doubt, none whatsoever, that this nation, sooner than people believe, will pass a Medicare for all, single-payer system." He was surrounded by multiple top-tier 2020 contenders.
Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, compared the event to “a product launch,” with "Medicare for All" more of a brand at this point than a specific bill. In public and private negotiations, Sanders has given his colleagues leeway, insisting it's not a "litmus test" for him no matter what his allies outside say.
Sanders is better known for operating as a lone wolf, but he brought 19 other Senate offices into a working group to solicit input and earned goodwill by holding rallies to defend the Affordable Care Act and giving colleagues a pass to abstain on a single-payer amendment Republicans put on the floor to try to jam Democrats.
“To our Republican colleagues, please don’t lecture us on health care,” Sanders said. “You, the Republican Party, have no credibility on the issue of health care.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/democrats-bullish-bernie-sanders-single-payer-health-care-n801146
Universal healthcare in America? Not a taboo now, thanks to Bernie Sanders
Thursday 14 September 2017 06.00 EDT
Excerpts:
Sanders is an unusual politician because he’s been willing to lead on an issue before its broad popularity was established. For decades, he has roamed the political wilderness crying out for European or Canadian-style single-payer healthcare. He has done it through Democratic and Republican administrations, no matter the electorate’s political orientation at any given time. It is something he believes in. But most politicians, as gay marriage proved, have few firmly held convictions beyond what they assume the public expects of them. If the people seem to cry out for war, we go to Iraq. If enough people say marriage is between a man and a woman, it stays that way. Few politicians are willing defy conventional wisdom. Politics is a game of self-preservation. Polls determine values.
The movement towards single-payer is humane and sensible. It is also a reflection of the changing zeitgeist and the power of the Sanders movement, which represents the future of the party. As the nation’s most well-liked politician and the hero of millennials, he is now the ringmaster.
There is an argument, valid in its own way, that the safer approach is to just repair Obamacare. Offer a public option to compete with private insurers. Increase subsidies. Watch premiums fall, insurance companies cry. Yet a party so moribund as the Democrats needs a worthwhile goal, and single-payer is it. There should be others, like a massive jobs program to halt the erosion of stable work that automation and globalization is killing for good.
In the meantime, freeing healthcare from the clutches of predatory insurance companies is what all Democrats should be thinking about. Better to have Democratic groupthink about guaranteeing healthcare than going to war or keeping people from getting married.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/14/universal-healthcare-america-bernie-sanders
LIVE Now: The Bernie Sanders Show with Dr. Danielle Martin
https://www.facebook.com/senatorsanders/videos/vb.9124187907/10156323289527908/?type=3&theaterThe Bernie Sanders Show with Dr. Danielle Martin
Explaining Medicare for all: join me and Dr. Danielle Martin, Vice President of Medical Affairs and Health Systems Solutions at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, to talk about the Canadian single-payer health care system and Medicare for all.
https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/908356227582881793
Video: We Can Make Health Care A Right
Change never comes easily, but in America, we've made progress that was once unimaginable and can do so again. We can make health care a right to all people.
Bernie Sanders Is Still Not a Democrat. He's Just the Party's Maestro.
09.13.17 1:00 AM ET
Excerpt:
The Democratic Party of today is wildly different from the one that existed when Obamacare was put together. It is, undoubtedly, far more progressive. Its elected ranks are also far smaller. Within this political context, support for Sanders’ bill has grown and the Overton window of the debate over health care has irrevocably shifted. Currently, the compromise proposals being proposed by Democrats are the progressive ideals that were scrapped during the passage of Obamacare—such as Sens. Chris Murphy’s (D-CT) and Sherrod Brown’s (D-OH) proposals for Medicare buy-in measures.
“It moves the conversation more to the left, which you know puts pressure on Republicans to come up with an alternative,” Conrad said of Sanders’ bill. “And the alternative might be some variation on the status quo or some other alternative they so far have not been able to come up with.”
The question facing Democrats is whether the Sanders approach can help expand their ranks or shrink them. Republicans are already gearing up to capitalize on the Medicare for All push, though the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—a group charged with electing Democrats to the Senate and supporting the party’s incumbents—brushed off those concerns.
“Look, I encourage everybody to support legislation that they think is important for the country. And everyone's going to be taking a close look at the proposals that are out there,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told The Daily Beast. “No, I don’t think it hurts the party’s chances. There are lots of ideas out there.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sanders-is-still-not-a-democrat-hes-just-the-partys-maestro
Bernie Sanders: Why We Need Medicare for All
By BERNIE SANDERS SEPT. 13, 2017
Excerpt:
On Wednesday I will introduce the Medicare for All Act in the Senate with 15 co-sponsors and support from dozens of grass-roots organizations. Under this legislation, every family in America would receive comprehensive coverage, and middle-class families would save thousands of dollars a year by eliminating their private insurance costs as we move to a publicly funded program.
The transition to the Medicare for All program would take place over four years. In the first year, benefits to older people would be expanded to include dental care, vision coverage and hearing aids, and the eligibility age for Medicare would be lowered to 55. All children under the age of 18 would also be covered. In the second year, the eligibility age would be lowered to 45 and in the third year to 35. By the fourth year, every man, woman and child in the country would be covered by Medicare for All.
Needless to say, there will be huge opposition to this legislation from the powerful special interests that profit from the current wasteful system. The insurance companies, the drug companies and Wall Street will undoubtedly devote a lot of money to lobbying, campaign contributions and television ads to defeat this proposal. But they are on the wrong side of history.
Guaranteeing health care as a right is important to the American people not just from a moral and financial perspective; it also happens to be what the majority of the American people want. According to an April poll by The Economist/YouGov, 60 percent of the American people want to “expand Medicare to provide health insurance to every American,” including 75 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of independents and 46 percent of Republicans. Now is the time for Congress to stand with the American people and take on the special interests that dominate health care in the United States. Now is the time to extend Medicare to everyone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/bernie-sanders-medicare-single-payer.html
Pelosi declines to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders' single-payer healthcare bill
SEPT. 12, 2017, 8:43 A.M.
Excerpt:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declined Tuesday to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders' single-payer healthcare bill, saying her immediate goal is to protect the Affordable Care Act from President Trump's efforts to dismantle it.
Pelosi made it clear that her distance from the bill, which Sanders expects to unveil with top progressives this week, creating something of a litmus test for Democrats, had little to do with its contents. Rather she is working on more incremental gains to preserve and expand coverage for as many Americans as possible, despite Republican opposition to Obamacare.
"Right now, I’m protecting the Affordable Care Act," Pelosi told a small group of reporters at a meeting Tuesday in her Capitol Hill office. "None of these other things, whether it’s Bernie’s (bill), can really prevail unless we have the Affordable Care Act protected."
http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-pelosi-declines-to-endorse-bernie-1505230000-htmlstory.html
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