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Sen. Bernie Sanders challenges Pentagon official over defense contractor CEO pay

Nobody spends money on defense like the United States, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wants to know why so much of taxpayer dollars are going to the CEOs of defense companies.

“I think the elephant in the room here is the relationship of the DoD to defense contractors. I think that’s the area that needs the most research,” Sanders said during a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday on the Department of Defense’s business operations.

The Pentagon requested one of the largest budgets in history with its recent proposal of $686 billion and an additional $30 billion for non-defense agencies including the Department of Energy, which maintains the country’s nuclear weapons.

For perspective, the U.S. allocates more money to the military than the next 10 highest spending countries combined.

Sanders hit on two points during the session:

*Roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget goes directly to defense contractors.
*The CEOs of the top five defense contractors in the U.S. earned a cumulative of $96 million in compensation last year.

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Essentially, Sanders said, “Lockheed Martin is a government agency, a private one, but a government agency virtually fully funded by U.S. government.”

Sanders, Leahy back party’s infrastructure plan

Both Vermont senators joined a slew of Democrats pitching a proposal that would invest $1 trillion in infrastructure initiatives.

Senate Democrats offered the proposal as a response to an infrastructure plan President Donald Trump released last month.

Trump’s plan would use about $200 billion in federal funds with the intention of leveraging a total of $1.5 trillion from private companies and state and local governments.

The proposal Democrats rolled out Wednesday would undo some key parts of the tax overhaul package Republicans passed last year and use the funds to pay for infrastructure initiatives.

They would restore the top income tax rate, the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax — all of which were cut in the new law. They propose to invest $1 trillion in projects including improving roads, bridges, train service, and water and sewage systems.

The plan also would appropriate $40 billion to build out universal access to high-speed internet connections.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., ranking member of the Budget Committee, said there’s a major need for improving infrastructure in the country.

“We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world,” Sanders said. “And yet from Vermont to California, people look around them and what they’re finding is their roads and their bridges and their water systems and their wastewater plants are falling apart.”

Bernie Sanders tells Democrats to back off primary attacks

Bernie Sanders is warning the Democratic Party not to attack its own candidates in primary battles, as happened in a Houston-area congressional race.

The Vermont senator said it’s “appalling” that the party’s congressional campaign arm targeted Laura Moser ahead of Tuesday’s primary election. Moser, an activist, is endorsed by Sanders’ Our Revolution group.

Sanders told The Associated Press on Wednesday that such attacks are “not acceptable.”

Moser advanced to a runoff with Democratic front-runner Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, despite the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee publishing an opposition research memo calling her “a Washington insider who begrudgingly moved to Texas” to run for Congress.

A Houston native who attended high school there, Moser was also targeted by the campaign arm for joking that she’d “rather have my teeth pulled out without anesthesia” than live in small-town Texas.

“What these organizations should not be doing is doing negative attacks on Democratic candidates,” said Sanders. “That just continues the process of debasing the Democratic system in this country and is why so many people are disgusted with politics.”

What issue do you think got more coverage on CNN today, the effort to deregulate the major banks or Donald Trump and a porn star? Think hard! pic.twitter.com/zVHuZk2kjB

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 8, 2018

Keith Ellison takes over the Democrats’ universal health-care bill

Rep. Keith Ellison, the deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has replaced former congressman John Conyers Jr. as the sponsor of the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act. Early Wednesday afternoon, Ellison asked for and received unanimous consent to take over H.R. 676, the single-payer health bill that has become a focus of left-wing energy and is supported by most of the Democratic caucus.

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His pitch: He could and would lead a campaign for the legislation, separate from his DNC role but building on the success he’d had as a far-traveled advocate for the party.

“Until the platform committee of the DNC adopts this, it’s really more of a congressional effort and a community effort, so we respect the difference,” Ellison said. “But I am going to talk about it as a member of Congress. We’re going to be working on this thing as a team. One of the consistent applause lines we’re all hearing is: We need Medicare for all. There’s a lot of folks who feel that it’s time for us to organize around that. It’s a better policy, at a better price. People in labor, people all over the country, they’re going to be driving the public conversation, raising the dialogue about this.”

On Tuesday night, as Texans voted in the first round of primaries, supporters of the Medicare-for-all approach made gains. In the 23rd and 32nd districts, both of which saw crowded Democratic races, the candidates who made it to May 22’s runoff were all supporter. Ellison wasn’t surprised.

“Here’s the problem: We’re at a point in American history with more income inequality than at any point since the Gilded Age,” Ellison said. “So you’re seeing more support for Medicare for all. Of course you are. If you run to the center, you’re not meeting the needs of the average voter. Millennials are the most screwed voters out there, and the last thing they want is a giant debt load from health care coming on top of their debt load from college. What some people think is a really progressive position is just what the rest of the industrialized world does.”

Pretty sure Fararakhan is mentioned in this article more than single payer… but its the WAPO so wouldn’t expect much different.

How to see Sen. Bernie Sanders this weekend at his downtown Phoenix rally

Bernie Sanders, the left-leaning independent U.S. senator from Vermont who gave Hillary Clinton a spirited challenge for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, is set to rev-up his fellow progressives Sunday in downtown Phoenix.

Sanders will be joined at the noon rally at the Orpheum Theatre, 203 W. Adams St., by Democratic U.S. Reps. Ruben Gallego and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and former Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, who is now president of the Sanders-aligned organization Our Revolution.

Per Sanders’ website, Sanders intends to address various topics, including “the need to move forward and pass comprehensive immigration reform that will allow people to come out of the shadows and will unite families — not divide them — and the urgent need to ensure health care as a human right.”

Doors open at 10:30 a.m. Admission is first-come, first-served, and the Sanders team encourages RSVPing online at BernieSanders.com.

Here is why I am opposing the bill being voted on in the Senate now to deregulate some of the largest banks in America. pic.twitter.com/bF85IPDPrN

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 6, 2018

Bernie Sanders: Trump Diagnosed the Problem on Trade. But His Solution Doesn’t Work.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) believes Donald Trump may be on to something.

The Independent Democratic-Socialist from Vermont, known as one of the Senate’s immoveable progressives, says he has found a patch of ideological common ground with a man who progressives bemoan on a daily—no, hourly—basis. But as the president prepares to announce on Thursday new tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from overseas, Sanders isn’t sure that he is going about addressing their mutually-agreed-upon problem in the right manner.

“We need to fundamentally rethink our trade policies and move to fair trade rather than just unfettered free trade,” Sanders told The Daily Beast in an interview on Wednesday afternoon. “So Trump is identifying a problem. Certainly China’s role in dumping an enormous amount of steel, not only in the United States, but all over the world, is very very clear. It has to be dealt with.”

“In my view though, what you need is a comprehensive, a more comprehensive approach than Trump is laying out,” Sanders continued. “So what I would like to see is Congress begin to rethink our trade policies and hopefully we will have a president supportive of that. So he is identifying the problem correctly but I’m not sure that his particular solution at this moment is exactly the right one.”

This 28-Year-Old Progressive Helped Bernie Sanders Win Rhode Island. Now He Is Running for Lt. Gov.

Two-term Rhode Island State Representative Aaron Regunberg is still in his 20s, but already has a long pedigree of organizing for social change.

At 20, Regunberg co-founded the Providence Student Union, a group dedicated to empowering high-school students to “win a fair say in the education system.” At 24, Regunberg was elected to the Rhode Island State House after running on a strong progressive platform. At 26, he helped organize Bernie Sanders’ come-from-behind victory in the state’s Democratic primary. At 27, he sponsored a successful effort to pass paid sick leave legislation. Now, at 28, he’s running for lieutenant governor, backed by organized labor and the Ocean State’s growing activist community.

Regunberg, a Brown University graduate, is challenging one-term incumbent Dan McKee in the September Democratic primary. McKee is widely considered a conservative-leaning Democrat and has close ties to the state’s charter school lobby. Unlike in other states, lieutenant governor candidates in Rhode Island do not campaign as running mates but rather are popularly elected every four years.

The race fits into a broader nationwide pattern of progressive candidates challenging moderate and conservative Democrats in party primaries, with many of these challengers inspired by Bernie Sanders’ historic 2016 presidential campaign.

Regunberg’s campaign has won the support of organized labor, and is being powered both by the growing anti-Trump resistance movements as well as Rhode Island’s progressive statewide infrastructure.

Regunberg sees his candidacy as a challenge to corporate control over Rhode Island politics. “I’ve been in the statehouse since 2014, so I’ve been in government long enough to see that the system needs change” Regunberg tells In These Times. “I’ve seen firsthand how lobbyists paid for by Walmart payday lenders are ever present in the capitol, while everyday Rhode Islanders get ignored. I’m running for lieutenant governor to be an independent public advocate. That means that it’s my job to be the voice for people who can’t afford a lobbyist.”

Texas Progressive Laura Moser Is Beating Democratic Insiders by John Nichols

The defining characteristic of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for too many years now has been its well-honed ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Drowning in conventional wisdom, disconnected from realities on the ground, and instinctively inclined to react to Republicans rather than to set its own agenda, the DCCC is such a bumbling enterprise that even the chairman of the Democratic National Committee recently distanced himself from its so-called “strategies.”

When DNC chair Tom Perez was asked his opinion of a ham-handed move by the DCCC to circulate selectively edited and disingenuously framed opposition research against Texas Democrat Laura Moser, a popular progressive running in the party’s crowded primary in the Houston area’s 7th Congressional District, he replied: “I wouldn’t have done it.

That was a wise response, as grassroots Democrats are figuring out that taking advice from the strikingly inept folks in DC might not make as much sense as following their own instincts in districts like the seventh, where Republican incumbents are vulnerable to defeat. After Moser answered the DNC attack by urging primary voters to reject the counsel of “Washington operatives trying to tell Texans what to do,” the voters did just that.

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Decrying the “Republican-lite hacks at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,” [DFA’s Jim Dean] said: “The same gutless, corporate playbook that has lost Democrats nearly 1000 elected offices over the last decade isn’t our party’s path to retaking the House in November.”

“Candidates like Laura Moser, who are building smart, grassroots campaigns and mobilizing the New American Majority by fearlessly standing up for inclusive populist priorities like the reproductive rights, gun reform, and Medicare for All, are showing us a way out of the cycle of losses we’ve been stuck in since 2008,” added Dean, who argues that “it’s time that those currently occupying the DCCC’s revolving door to either figure that out, or get the hell out of the way.”

#Teamsters Pres. Jim #Hoffa sat down today with @SenSanders to discuss the top issues facing the #union including the looming pension crisis, trade and the threat that the Supreme Court case of #JanusvAFSCME poses to public employees across the nation. pic.twitter.com/yB5ubkrMN3

— Teamsters (@Teamsters) March 7, 2018