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Bernie Sanders Sets His Sights On The Foreign Policy Establishment

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.

Even as the popular lawmaker built a national reputation and attracted millions of fans during his unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, he frequently faced criticism for talking too little about how he would tackle global affairs as president. Now seen as a leader among liberals and a strong 2020 candidate, Sanders is poised to show that he can be a leader in the foreign policy conversation as well.

“He wants to start this debate, in some ways similar to Medicare-for-all, in which he really wanted to broaden the debate on what is possible… and say, here’s some basic progressive values that should guide our thinking about foreign policy,” an aide told HuffPost on Wednesday, referencing Sanders’s move earlier this month to propose expanding Medicare. 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.

Developments in the health care policy world have demonstrated the power Sanders and his progressive movement now have over the Democratic Party. Sanders’s idea of government-provided health insurance for all Americans was viewed as a pipe dream even by the Democrats’ last presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, and he received no support from his colleagues when he introduced a similar bill in 2013. This year, he already has more than a third of the Senate Democratic caucus on board.

Bernie Sanders leads in 2020 Democratic primary poll

A new Zogby Analytics poll puts Hillary Clinton’s former primary rival ahead of other key Democrats to face Donald Trump in 2020.

The survey found that Bernie Sanders is the number one favourite among Democratic primary and caucus voters.

Poll respondents were presented with a hypothetical range of candidates and were asked to pick who they would vote for.

Progressive giant and independent senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders came out best, with 28% of respondents choosing him.

In second place, came Elizabeth Warren on 12% followed by former Vice President Joe Biden.

Mark Zuckerberg, who has been talked about as a future presidential candidate, was chosen by 7% of the respondents, and is followed by Kamala Harris, a new senator from California. CNN reports that Harris has co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ progressive single-payer healthcare plan.

How Bernie Sanders is cultivating California for 2020

Bernie Sanders can’t get enough of California.

Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, barnstormed the Golden State ahead of the June 2016 primary like no presidential candidate in recent memory. The front-runner in the party’s nascent 2020 field has returned regularly to campaign for a drug price initiative and to urge support for a universal health care bill similar to one he’s proposed in Washington. His next public event comes Friday in San Francisco at the invitation of the nurses union, among his most vocal supporters.

Sanders’ persistent appearances in the nation’s most populous state – a deep-blue bastion whose leaders bill it as the crucible of the resistance to President Donald Trump – underscores California’s possible significance in the party’s upcoming presidential winnowing process that begins with Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

While California has long served as the largest watering hole for Democrats in search of campaign contributions, the increasing possibility that its primary will be moved up to March from June, combined with a new generation of homegrown potential contenders such as U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, further raise its significance for Sanders.

“California could be outcome-determinant in 2020,” said Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist and publisher of the California Target Book, a data-driven compendium on elections. “If you are thinking about running for president, you should operate on the strong assumption that what happens here is going to matter a whole lot.”

With Popular Single-Payer Plan, Bernie Sanders Enters New Territory: A Wealth Tax

When he introduced his Medicare-for-all bill last week, Bernie Sanders also put down on paper the idea he’s been talking about, sometimes loudly, sometimes with caution, other times not publicly at all, for more than 20 years: a “wealth tax” in the United States.

In 1997, in his book, Outsider in the House, he declared it “high time to establish a tax on wealth similar to those that exist in most European countries.” Nine years later, during his first race for U.S. Senate, his opponent quoted the passage online, printed it on brochures, and pushed it in statements: “Sanders’ European-style wealth tax,” on “everything they own every year. Every tractor, cow, and acre.” In response, the Sanders campaign argued that he had never formally proposed a wealth tax, just floated the idea.

During the Democratic primary in 2016, the Sanders campaign did consider an official wealth tax, two former officials said, but the idea died over concerns about the reality of implementation and that the tax plan would be perceived as far out of the mainstream.

Now, nearly a year after the election, the 76-year-old Vermont senator is one of the most popular politicians in America. Ahead of his Medicare-for-all announcement last week, a total of 16 senators backed the bill, putting about one third of the chamber’s Democrats behind single-payer health care, an almost real-time shift in the party’s baseline.

But few American lawmakers have embraced a wealth tax — an annual federal tax on the net assets of the very rich — though economists and academics, both liberal and conservative, have made the case for one before. Others have argued that any wealth tax would be dauntingly complicated, and potentially unconstitutional. Sanders has described it as one way to spread the concentration of wealth.

Last week, he outlined a wealth tax policy for the first time in a white paper released alongside the single-payer bill, with a list of 10 ideas for how to pay for such a program.

The benefits of Bernie Sanders’ ‘Medicare for All’ plan

Bernie Sanders is right. Given the growing costs and shrinking benefits of Obamacare, and the flame-out of “repeal and replace,” America should transition to Medicare for All. Last week he introduced his Medicare for All Act of 2017, which would do exactly that, while retaining and improving Obamacare during a four-year transition.

Medicare, the current program for Americans over age 65, is a single-payer system, which means it is financed and overseen by the government, even though most providers are private. It is by far the most popular and efficient part of our health care system. In fact, many 64-year-olds can hardly wait to be 65 so they are eligible for it. Unlike private insurers, it doesn’t pick and choose which patients it will cover and for what medical conditions. All seniors are covered for the same package of benefits.

But Medicare isn’t perfect. Benefits aren’t comprehensive (for example, there is no dental coverage), copayments are rising, and there is profiteering by providers. Sanders’ plan would introduce reforms that would help with those problems. It would expand benefits greatly, and out-of-pocket costs would be eliminated except for a small copay for prescription drugs.

Republicans tweak Sanders over health care, but Cassidy-Graham could open a path for his bill

The momentum for Graham’s bill, and the surprise reanimation of a repeal effort that has been declared dead twice before, has sparked one of the Capitol’s most cherished traditions: panicky Democrats taking shots at each other. Egged on by Graham, and by a snarky Republican National Committee, a few liberal analysts and Democratic pols have asked whether Sanders bears some responsibility for the 11th hour repeal fight.

“I thought that anyone who believed that you should take your eye off the ball before Sept. 30 wasn’t being smart,” Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), one of 30 Democrats who did not endorse the Sanders bill, told Politico.

Sanders, who since his presidential bid has become judicious about talking to reporters in Senate hallways, was particularly tight-lipped at Tuesday’s lunches, saying only that single-payer was “where the American people want to go.” He had, after all, delayed the release of his bill several times, partially to get more input from Democrats, but largely to avoid confusing the Democratic caucus’s united stance against repeal.

But did he crack the door open for Republicans this time? Most of his colleagues say no; those who don’t reject the idea outright acknowledge that the GOP was never going to let the Sept. 30 reconciliation deadline pass without another run at health care. One pointed out that the Sept. 30 deadline itself came after Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Budget committee, got the Senate parliamentarian to clarify that Republicans could not drag the issue out forever — a development that Democrats considered to be a win.

“As soon as the parliamentarian’s ruling came down, they were going to do something,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).

As Warren and Sanders Jockey for Support, One Takes a Road More Traveled

The two liberal senators are often spoken of in the same breath as if there is scarcely any difference between them. But as Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders work to expand their constituencies ahead of possible runs in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, they are making very different wagers about the electorate.

Ms. Warren has taken steps that reflect a traditional and practical course. She joined the Senate Armed Services Committee to attain national security credentials. She is privately hosting monthly dinner seminars with policy experts to expand her command of the issues (last week was on Afghanistan and Pakistan and featured Barnett R. Rubin, a New York University-based scholar on the region).
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And, as she demonstrated here with a reminder to King’s old congregation that “there’s Jesus in every one of us,” she is opening up about herself to satisfy the electorate’s hunger for personal connection. Maybe even more striking than invoking Scripture, the scourge of Wall Street is spending some time with bankers: She attended a party fund-raiser in July at the summer residence of a former UBS executive, and also this summer she met privately in Washington with JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon.

Mr. Sanders, however, appears to believe that no such nods toward pragmatism or convention are necessary in today’s Democratic Party. He is still surrounded by the same coterie of advisers, is remaining a political independent and is as convinced as ever that people will respond to his well-honed pleas to confront the billionaire class, provide health care for all and offer tuition-free access to college.

To the frustration of some of his advisers, Mr. Sanders has shown no willingness to veer from his social justice catechism to tell voters the personal details of his life’s journey, banking that an electorate that could elect Donald J. Trump to the White House no longer needs such political rituals.

Is Centrism A Viable Political Strategy? It Sure Doesn’t Look Like It

While this relative handful of election results does support the contention that there’s no reason we can’t have a viable third-party, the fact that none of these movements lasted much beyond a single election, and that most of them were built around a single issue or individual, does demonstrate the institutional barriers that exist in our political system that make the rise of any third-party, much less a “centrist” one, highly unlikely. There’ very little history, for example, of a viable third-party movement at the state level, and only a handful of times that we’ve seen members of Congress who represent a true third party rather than being nominal independents who end up voting predominantly with one party or the other. In no small part, of course, this is because Congress itself is structured in such a way that encourages the existence of just two major parties. The rules of both the House and the Senate basically presume the existence of a majority party and a single minority party, for example, meaning that anyone who is elected to Congress as an independent or a member of a third-party has to choose between caucusing with either Republicans or Democrats if they’re going to get access to things such as committee assignments that would actually allow them to get anything done. Finally, as OTB’s own Steven Taylor has noted on several occasions over the years, the structure of our political system, which includes everything from the Electoral College to our first past the post voting system, encourages the existence of only two major parties. Unless that changes, we’re unlikely to see the rise of a truly viable third party of any kind.

Beyond the structural issues, though, there’s the question of whether or not the kind of “centrism” that the No Labels movement is championing could really form the basis of a viable national political movement in today’s environment. The sad conclusion I must reach is that, notwithstanding polling that continues to show that Americans want more centrist results from their government, the answer to this question is a pretty firm “no.”

Howard Dean: Both Parties Driving Younger Voters to Be Independents

Dr. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, and a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, recently had some sobering words for the two major political parties in the United States.

On a Washington Post podcast, Dean said, “The most reliable demographic of our voters are the young people across the board, across racial and ethnic lines,” but added that this is a major problem for the DNC, because: “These people are not Democrats.”

Dean went on to explain:

“They’re very independent-minded. They don’t like politics. And they mistrust institutions. I think our problem as Democrats is, we’re the head of the oldest party in the West, and this party is an institution that looks incredibly unattractive; not because of our ideology, ’cause that is attractive, and that is why they always vote for Democrats. But the Democratic Party means nothing to them because it’s an institution built by people like me who’s 40 years older than them.

”

Dean, who Democratic Party primary voters and caucus goers admired for his fierce anti-establishment rhetoric and independent streak in 2004, went on to essentially affirm support for independent voters and independent candidates for office in response to a question about Bernie Sanders’ affiliation:

“Who cares if he’s in the Democratic Party or not? Bernie can call himself whatever he wants, but functionally, he is a Democrat.”

Just two days after the podcast, the Citizen Times reported that unaffiliated voters in North Carolina have surpassed the number of registered Republicans in the state for the first time.

Meanwhile, he Bashes Bernie every chance he gets.

Far away from any witnesses, my small town is being poisoned by fracking waste

In a tiny south-eastern Ohio town in the Appalachian foothills, the Hazel Ginsburg Well is holding waste from out-of-state fracking operations – a sludge of toxic chemicals and undrinkable water

Gun Stocks Surge as Trump Pushes to Ease Export Regulations for Assault Weapons

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to ease export rules to allow American arms manufacturers to sell more weapons, including assault rifles, to foreign buyers, despite concerns that weakened oversight will fuel global conflict and threaten national security.

Aides to President Donald Trump are completing a plan to shift oversight of international non-military firearms sales from the State Department to the Commerce Department,” Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing four U.S. senior officials at various agencies. The plan is part of a broader revision of the nation’s weapons export rules that officials said is nearly finalized.

Currently, the State Department treats civilian arms exports as military sales, subjecting them to the same scrutiny as weapons like fighter jets. Under Trump’s plan, handguns and assault rifles would be moved from the State Department’s Munitions List to the Commerce Control List, which would enable quicker licensing for sales to foreign buyers.

Because the Commerce Department focuses on increasing trade, the shift is expected to significantly boost firearms and ammunition sales. Notably, following the Reuters report on Tuesday, gun stocks surged, with multiple arms companies posting their best days in several months.

“There will be more leeway to do arms sales,” an anonymous official said. “You could really turn the spigot on if you do it the right way.”

New Poll Shows Nearly Half of Americans and 2/3 of Democrats Back Single Payer

As Senate Republicans launch a last-ditch attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Democrats flock to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill, new polling reveals nearly half of the country wants a national single-payer healthcare plan.

While 49 percent of voters surveyed by Politico/Morning Consult said they supported “a single-payer healthcare system, where all Americans would get their health insurance from one government plan,” only 35 percent opposed it and 17 percent had no opinion.

A government-run plan is even more popular among Democrats, with two-thirds supporting a single-payer system.

The poll also found that healthcare is an influential topic when Americans consider casting votes for representatives in Congress. Among those polled, 58 percent said passing healthcare reform should be “a top priority” for Congress, and healthcare was the second-most popular topic when respondents were asked which issues were on their minds when heading to the ballot box for federal elections.

This new data comes just a week after Sanders, supported by 16 Senate Democrats, introduced a bill that would guarantee healthcare for all Americans by expanding the Medicare program to every U.S. resident.

Covering All People With Single Payer, Says GOP Senator, Is Not Money ‘Properly Spent’

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) announced his intention Tuesday to introduce four amendments to the Graham-Cassidy bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), one of which would forbid states from using the law’s block grants to provide residents with a state-run single payer healthcare system—provoking some to question his commitment to the perennial Republican issue of “states’ rights.”

@SenJohnKennedy, if you care so much about states' rights, why does your amendment block states from enacting single-payer health care?

— sociabledistance (@shannonholman) September 19, 2017