Showing posts with label Bernie Sanders. Show all posts

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Sanders Defends Middle Class, Calls For Help

Published on Thursday, February 10, 2011 by In These Times

Organizing Help Wanted

We must defend America’s middle class before millionaires and billionaires own the entire country.

There is a war going on in this country and I am not referring to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. I am referring to the war waged by the wealthiest people in America on the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country. The nation’s billionaires are on the warpath. They want more, more, more. Their greed has no end and they are apparently unconcerned for the future of this country if it gets in the way of their accumulation of power and wealth.
On the floor of the Senate, we discuss a lot of things. But one thing we fail to talk about is who is winning in this economy and who is losing, and what that means for parents struggling to survive while working longer hours with lower wages, and worrying about whether their children will have the same kind of standard of living they have.
Right now, the top 1 percent controls more than 23 percent of all income earned in America. The top 1 percent controls more than the bottom 50 percent. It’s not only that the rich are getting richer. The very, very rich are getting richer. In the last 25 years, we have seen 80 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent.
On top of all this, while the millionaires get richer and there are more and more billionaires, as a result of the Citizens United decision, what we are beginning to see in elections is unbelievable—a group of billionaires getting together and deciding where they are going to spend their money. Billionaires are going to flood states with all kinds of negative, dishonest ads in an effort to defeat people defending the middle class and to elect people who will stand up for right-wing billionaires.
The Republicans’ goal—and to their credit, they have been pretty honest about it—is to bring this country back to where we were in the 1920s. All of the progressive legislation that started with FDR is on the chopping block. Despite the great successes of Social Security over the last 75 years, despite the fact that Social Security today has a $2.6 trillion surplus, they are targeting Social Security. They are targeting Medicare. In Arizona today, people on Medicaid who need transplants are no longer able to get them—that is a real death panel.
Right now, according to a number of studies, we are losing about $100 billion every year because corporate America and the very wealthy are stashing their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. We should be aware that in 2009, ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits and not only did the company not pay anything in taxes, it got a $106 million refund from the IRS. We should also be aware that since 1997, we have almost tripled funding for the military. So if we are serious about reducing the deficit, those are things we need to look at—not at Social Security, not programs everyday Americans need.
Our job now is to rally Americans to put pressure on a handful of Republicans—to tell them, go into your hearts, talk to your constituents and tell me if it is appropriate to hold hostage the future of this country for an agenda that benefits only the very rich.
If we act, we can win this fight. It is crucial that we do, because if we don’t—if they roll over us now—there is no stopping them. It is time we organize.
Your help is wanted.

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt., by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont's at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Read more at his website.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

.Hands Off Social Security

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Published on Thursday, September 30, 2010 by The Nation

Hands Off Social Security

by Bernie Sanders

A White House deficit commission is reportedly considering deep benefit cuts for Social Security, including a steep rise in the retirement age. We cannot let that happen. The deficit and our $13 trillion national debt are serious problems that must be addressed, but we can and must address them without punishing America’s workers, senior citizens, the disabled, widows and orphans.

First, let’s be clear: Despite all the right-wing rhetoric, Social Security is not going bankrupt. That’s a lie! The truth is that the Social Security Trust Fund has run surpluses for the last quarter century. Today’s $2.5 trillion cushion is projected to grow to $4 trillion in 2023. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, experts in this area, say Social Security will be able to pay every nickel owed to every eligible beneficiary until 2039. Got that? In case you don’t, let me repeat it. The people who have studied this issue most thoroughly and have no political bias report that Social Security will be able to pay out all benefits to ever eligible beneficiary for the next 29 years. It is true that by 2039, if nothing is changed, Social Security will be able to pay out only about 80 percent of benefits. That is why it is important that Congress act soon to make sure Social Security is as strong in the future as it is today.
The hatred of Social Security from the right-wing anti-government crowd is based on the fact that Social Security, a government program, has been enormously successful in accomplishing its mission. For 75 years, in good times and bad, Social Security has provided financial security for tens of millions of Americans.
Despite this outstanding record, Social Security has become a political football. For ideological reasons, some in Congress believe that government should not be in the business of providing benefits to seniors or the disabled. They want to privatize Social Security. Others say, incorrectly, that Social Security is going bankrupt, so benefits should be reduced and the retirement age set at 70. I strongly disagree with both assertions.
While the critics profess concern about Social Security’s financial future, their fuzzy math ignores the fact that this highly successful program has not added a dime to our deficit. From the day when the first check landed in the Ludlow, Vt., mailbox of retired legal secretary Ida May Fuller on Jan. 31, 1940, Social Security has more than paid for itself.
With regard to the future of Social Security, there are some really dangerous ideas out there, and one proposal that makes a lot of sense.
One of the worst ideas is to privatize Social Security. After the greed and recklessness of Wall Street caused markets to collapse in 2008, does anyone still seriously believe it would be a good idea to turn the retirement security of millions of Americans over to Wall Street CEOs whose dishonesty and irresponsibility have no end? Their administrative fees alone would take a 15 percent bite out of workers’ retirement investments, not to mention the real threat of another stock market collapse. In sharp contrast, administrative costs for Social Security are less than 1 percent of the program’s budget. Most importantly, despite economic conditions and the ups and downs of the stock market, Social Security has never failed to pay full benefits to every eligible beneficiary.
Another horrible idea is to move the retirement age up to 70. That would cheat today’s young workers out of about 15 percent of their retirement benefits over a lifetime. The proposal also ignores the reality that millions of workers in demanding professions simply cannot continue to work until they are 70. The upshot for them would be reduced lifetime benefits for retiring “early.” Lower-income workers, those less likely to have other savings, would be hurt the most.
In the midst of all of the destructive rhetoric and ideas out there with regard to Social Security, there is one proposal which is simple, sensible and would keep Social Security strong and solvent in a fair and just way. Under the law today, the Social Security payroll tax is levied only on earnings up to $106,800 a year. That means millionaires and billionaires get off scot free on all of their income above that amount. In other words, an individual who earns $106,800 pays the same Social Security tax as a multi-millionaire. That’s wrong. Applying the Social Security payroll tax on those with the most income, say over $250,000 a year, would correct this inequity. According to CBO, applying the tax to all income would provide all the revenue that Social Security needs for the foreseeable future – for our kids and grandchildren and great grandchildren.
As we mark the anniversary of Social Security, now is the time to pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. For 75 years, Social Security has lifted millions of people out of poverty and has provided stability and dignity for the elderly and for other vulnerable Americans. Our goal today must be to make sure that Social Security will be as strong and stable 75 years from now as it is today.

Bernie Sanders, a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, is the longest-serving Independent in US Congressional history.

by Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders, a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, is the longest-serving Independent in US Congressional history.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Sanders Reaches Agreement With Dodd On Audit Of Fed

Image by origamidon via Flickr

Published on Friday, May 7, 2010 by TalkingPointsMemo
Unwashed Masses 1, Fed 0: Sanders Scores

by Dean Baker

The effort to audit the Fed got a big boost last night when Senator Bernie Sanders reached an agreement with Chris Dodd, the chair of the banking committee. Under the deal, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) would undertake a full audit of the special facilities created by the Fed since December of 2007. GAO would make the findings from its audit available to the Congressional leadership. It would also make most of the details of the Fed's transactions available to the public.

To cope with the economic crisis, the Fed created 13 different special lending facilities. At their peak last year, these facilities had lent out more than $2 trillion. The Fed has only disclosed aggregate data about these facilities, telling us how much each one lent out month by month. It has refused to disclose any information about the specific loans and beneficiaries. This means that we have no way of knowing how much Citigroup, Goldman Sachs or anyone else benefited from these facilities.

Under the terms of the deal, by December 1 of this year the Fed will have posted on its website all the loans that were part of these facilities. Any interested journalist, academic, blogger or generic snoop can read through the data and find exactly how much money Goldman Sachs got, at what interest rate, with what collateral and when they paid it back. This is a big victory.

The Fed had previously argued that disclosing this information would compromise its independence. It complained that the having their borrowings made public would put a stigma on dealing with the Fed, so that banks and other financial companies would be reluctant to use special lending facilities in future crises.

Of course these arguments made no sense. This is why a majority of senators stood behind Sanders and why the House of Representatives attached an audit bill sponsored by representatives Ron Paul and Alan Grayson to its financial reform bill. The basic point is simple: this is our money; we have a right to know what the Fed did with it.

Sanders did make some compromises. The audit has an arbitrary cutoff date of December 2007. The special facilities date from the summer of 2007. It also only has the audit as a one-off proposition, rather than establishing GAO audits of Fed operations as an ongoing principle. The compromise also explicitly exempts open market operations - the Fed's daily buying and selling of short-term assets to control interest rates - from GAO scrutiny.

These concessions are unfortunate, the Fed is a creation of Congress and for that reason it should be subject to the same investigative procedures as any other federal agency, but they certainly are secondary compared with getting a full accounting of the money lent out through the special facilities. It is also important to note that in one very important way the Sanders compromise goes beyond the original Paul-Grayson language. Under the compromise, the information about the lending facilities will be made fully public where everyone can scrutinize it. The original bill would just have this information made available to the relevant congressional committees. They would then have to make a further decision about what information, if any, would be made public.

There has been a long ongoing battle with the Fed over its policy of excessive secrecy. Over the years, Congress has pushed back at efforts to treat the Fed as a holy temple outside of democratic control. It has made progress at holding the Fed accountable through measures like requiring the semi-annual Humphrey-Hawkins testimony by the Fed chair before Congress, the release of full transcripts of Fed open market meetings (with a 5-year lag), and now this public audit of its special facilities. There will be further battles and we have a long way to go before the Fed is as democratically accountable as it should be, but the Sanders compromise is a big step forward.
© 2010 TPM Media LLC

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Senate Fails at Reforming Health Care

'Party of No' Blocks Debate on Bernie Sanders' Real Reform

by John Nichols

The Senate almost debated health care reform this seek. No, not the tepid tinkering proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, in the compromised for demanded by Senator Joe Lieberman, I-Insurance Industry. We're talking real reform.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has always understood that the real reform involves a lot more than enriching insurance companies with massive new infusions of federal money.
The real reform takes the insurance companies out of the equation and replaces them with a single-payer Medicare-for-All system that provides care to all Americans and cuts costs by eliminating corporate profiteering.
The Medicare-for-All reform has always been the right fix. Barack Obama, as a U.S. Senate candidate in 2003, said as much.
"I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program," he told a crowd of union activists. "I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what (reformers are) talking about when (they say) everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see."
Obama was right six years ago. Unfortunately, he has opted for compromise and the result is the unfocused, lobbyist-driven, spin-defined debate over so-called "reform."
Sanders has kept to the real reform path and, on Wednesday, he was supposed to get a vote on a proposal to amend the Senate health-care reform bill to replace all the compromises with a single-payer plan that would provide health care and dental coverage for every American, save money, and improve health care results.
"In my view, the single-payer approach is the only way we will ever have a cost-effective, comprehensive health care system in this country," explained the independent senator from Vermont. "One of the reasons our current health care system is so expensive, so wasteful, so bureaucratic, so inefficient is that it is heavily dominated by private health insurance companies whose only goal in life is to make as much money as they can."
Like many of the amendments proposed by Democratic and Republican senators during the current wrangling over health-care reform, the Sanders amendment was not going to pass. But the prospect of the debate on it offered a rare opportunity for the Senate to engage in real debate about what needs to be done to provide care for all and eliminating unnecessary costs.
The Sanders amendment offered senators a chance to get serious about the fiscal responsibility they are so very inclined to discuss but so very disinclined to embrace.
As Sanders and his aides explained in their argument for the amendment: "The 1,300 profit-making private insurance companies administer thousands of separate plans and waste about $400 billion a year on administrative costs, profiteering, high CEO compensation packages, and advertising. Health care providers spend another $210 billion on administrative costs, mostly to deal with insurance paperwork. As a result, the United States spends $7,129 per person on health care, almost double the amount spent by nearly any other industrialized country. Nevertheless, 46 million Americans lack health insurance, 100 million Americans cannot access dental care, and 60 million Americans do not have access to primary care."
Compare that $7,129 per person figure for the U.S. with per capita health spending figures for countries with genuine national health care plans, such as Canada's $3,895 and Austria's $3,763 on health care costs. Both of these countries provide fuller care for people who live longer and healthier lives than do Americans.
Those are the facts, and those facts terrify "Party of No" Republicans and the many Democrats who imagine that they represent the insurance industry rather than constituents who need more care at less cost.
How terrifying?
Rather than allow the Sanders amendment to be debated as every other proposal to improve a fundamentally flawed Senate proposal, Republican senators engaged in extreme obstructionist tactics to block consideration of the amendment. Rejecting Senate tradition and standard practice during the current debate, several conservatives demanded that the clerk of the Senate read every word of the 767-page amendment Sanders proposed.
Recognizing that the move would stall action not just on health care reform but on a host of economic issues that are critical to unemployed Americans, Sanders had no choice but to pull the amendment off the floor. But he was not happy about what happened.
"The fact that 17 percent of our people are unemployed or underemployed, one out of four of our children are living on food stamps, we've got two wars, we've got global warming, we have a $12 trillion national debt, and the best the Republicans can do is try to bring the United States government to a half by forcing a reading of a 700 page amendment. That is an outrage," Sanders said. "People can have honest disagreements, but in this moment of crisis it is wrong to bring the United States government to a halt."
Opponents of real reform made the sad and frustrating spectacle that is the current debate all the more sad and frustrating.
But Sanders still has history on his side.
"At the end of the day -- not this year, not next year, but sometime in the future -- this country will come to understand that if we are going to provide comprehensive quality care to all of our people, the only way we will do that is through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system," the senator says.
That is the truth, uttered by an honest reformer, in the midst of a debate on which Americans will one day look back in anger. Real reform is not coming this year or next. But it will, it must, come. And when it does, it should be remembered that Bernie Sanders tried to get the Senate to do the right thing.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Time for us to Call Our Senators

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Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Before You Carve that Turkey: All In for Bernie Sanders

by Donna Smith

Those millions of us who support a Medicare for All, single-payer, reform for the healthcare crisis in this nation have some work to do over the next few days. Senators are on their way to their home states for the one-week Thanksgiving recess - and they need a little up close and personal constituent attention before dinnertime on Thursday.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a stalwart supporter of doing the right thing for his state, our healthcare system and this nation - and he has said repeatedly that moving toward a just and economically sound system is possible through Medicare for All, single-payer. In the purest sense of giving patients control over their own healthcare, single-payer gives us all control over our choice of providers - and it gives our healthcare professionals the freedom they need to advise us on the basis of health rather than payment source.
So, even though the current Senate bill is not what we want - Senator Sanders will offer an amendment that would be a substitute for that bill and is mirrored on S. 703, The American Health Security Act.
We need to make it clear before our Senators are immersed in their own holiday events and then in traveling back to Washington, DC, that we want them to support Senator Sanders' amendment.
Call today, call tomorrow and keep calling until the home offices of the Senators close for the holidays - and many will stay open until Wednesday at noon. Tell the staff you want to talk turkey about the Senate effort.
Time is drawing short for our Senators to hear from us. Debate will begin on November 30 on the current Senate bill. Senator Sanders needs support. He has already told us that he does not expect a win on his amendment. But we are all laying groundwork for this nation to move in the right direction before long - we know that the current bills do not "bend the cost curve" enough and we know they certainly do not bend the death or bankruptcy curve nearly enough to make the bills what this nation needs.
Additionally, we want the legislation to contain language that will allow states that opt in to a single-payer system to be able to do so with the appropriate waivers from federal legal provisions which might otherwise present obstacles to doing so.
So, the ask of our Senators - each and every one, liberal, centrist or conservative - is two-fold and urgent:

1. Vote with and for Sanders' S. 703 substitute amendment; and
2. Support state single-payer enabling language in the final bill.

Calls to DC won't be effective this week. We can all return to that effort next week. Thanksgiving week calls must go to your Senators' offices in your state. Look them up here, using your zip code: http://www.votesmart.org/
Tell friends, neighbors and relatives. This year, talk a little turkey about healthcare. Ask folks how thankful they would be to have healthcare as a basic human right for their neighbors and for themselves. And then help them look up their Senators' contact information and tell them how easy it really is to call and log your concerns and your expectations for an affirmative vote for the Sanders' amendment.
Oh, and don't forget to thank one another for caring enough to join in the struggle. It matters. Everybody in, nobody out. Thank you all for believing that together we can change this, because we can.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for the California Nurses Association and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.

Some Single Payer Advocates To Oppose Health Bill

Published on Monday, November 23, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Single Payer Activists to Congress: Defeat Democratic Health Bill

by Russell Mokhiber

The Democratic health care bill is a massive bailout of the private health insurance industry.
It is convoluted and complicated.
And it should be defeated.
That's the take of a number of leading single payer activists.
They will hold a press conference the day before Thanksgiving.
And call on Congress to defeat the more than 2,000 page bill.
Start from scratch.
And pass single payer, Medicare for all, national health insurance.
The press conference will be held in the Murrow Room at the National P ress Club in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10 a.m.
The press conference is being organized by Single Payer Action.
Speakers include:

Russell Mokhiber, Single Payer Action.
Dr. Margaret Flowers, Physicians for a National Health Program.
Kevin Zeese, Prosperity Agenda.
Dr. Carol Paris, Physicians for a National Health Program.

Mokhiber, Flowers, Zeese and Paris are four of the Baucus 8 - the eight protesters who were ordered arrested and charged with "disruption of Congress" by Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) in early May 2009 after they rose to ask Baucus why single payer was taken off the table by the Democrats.
Baucus had scheduled 41 health care experts to testify over three days of hearings of the Senate Finance Committee.
Not one of the 41 experts was an advocate for a single payer system.
This despite national polls showing a majority of Americans and a majority of doctors support a Canadian-style, Medicare-for-all single payer system.
On Wednesday, the Baucus Four will call on single payer supporters in the Congress - like Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) - and the 88 members of the House who are sponsors of HR 676 - the single payer bill - to stand with Congressmen Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Eric Massa (D-New York) - and vote against the pending legislation.
HR 676 is about 30 pages in length.
It's simple.
It covers everyone.
And it saves money.
Kucinich and Massa were the only single payer supporters in the House who voted last week against Obama and the Democratic leadership.
Kucinich called the Democratic bill "a bailout under a Blue Cross."
Massa said the bill would "enshrine in law the monopolistic powers of the private health insurance industry."
"The Obama health care legislation is a 2,000-page turkey," said Mokhiber. "It should be defeated and served up to the American people as an example of what happens when corporate lobbyists hijack Congress."
Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, earlier this month called on Congress to do nothing instead of passing the Democratic bill.
"Is the House bill better than nothing?" Angell asked. "I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right."
Healthcare-Now! - a coalition of labor unions and other single payer activists - adopted a resolution earlier this month at its national strategy conference in St. Louis - calling on Congress to defeat the legislation.
The Healthcare-Now! board is co-chaired by Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers Union, Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, Dr. Quintin Young of Physicians for a National Health Program, and Jim Winkler of the United Methodist Church.

Local Bias

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Sanders Defends Middle Class, Calls For Help

Organizing Help Wanted

We must defend America’s middle class before millionaires and billionaires own the entire country.