Category Archives: Policy

Bernie Sanders at ISNA

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Bernie Sanders talks tough in well-received address to US Muslims

On subjects such as Uighurs and the Saudi war in Yemen, presidential candidate makes an impression at the Islamic Society of North America convention

Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the leading candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, received a rousing welcome at a special event at the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention, where he was given a standing ovation and made his presidential pitch to Muslims of America.

Organisers said some 6,000 people attended the event on Saturday evening, which also saw fellow Democrat candidate Julian Castro address the close-to-capacity crowd at the George R Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas.

 

US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders with Debbie Almontaser, founding principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, at the Islamic Society of North America’s Convention in Houston, Texas, on Saturday (Reuters)

 

Sanders and Castro were the only two Democratic candidates to accept ISNA’s invitation to attend the event for a community that has felt increasingly marginalised under the presidency of Donald Trump. Attendees made no bones as to who they had come to see.

“I feel strongly that the divisiveness and bigotry that Trump has introduced in the country can only be counteracted by a person like Bernie Sanders,” said Moosa Khan, who stood up to applaud the Vermont senator a number of times during his address.

 

“He made an effort to come here and talk and listen. He is showing his support for our community and he definitely has my vote.”

 

In contrast to Castro, Sanders’ address and policy talking points seemed to have been tailored to appeal to some of the pressing concerns of the American Muslim community.

 

Sanders also said that, as US president, he would hold China to account for its persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. He also described India’s unilateral decision in August to revoke the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir and impose a communication blockade and military siege on the valley as “unacceptable”.
He then chastised “political elites in both the Republican and Democratic parties” for pursuing “endless wars and interventions”.

Sanders said that, unlike Trump, who has “an affection for authoritarian regimes around the world,” he “would make democracy and human rights a priority for the United States of America”.

Castro, Harris, Warren declare support for reparations. What does that mean in policy terms?

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Here’s America’s first black president talking about reparations for slavery and systematic discrimination. Obama: Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is … Continue reading →

Capitalism + Socialism = Democratic Socialism

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I’m going to try and make this somewhat succinct so it can be shared as a primer if needed since the establishment is trying to confuse everyone by forcing a binary view between Capitalism and Socialism. In reality they are the two sides of the same spectrum and except in the extreme cases are always blended to some degree, so by trying to pick one or the other, the Overton Window is being pushed to the two endpoints and ignoring the entire spectrum between. The reason this is being done is because we aren’t choosing between the two end points, … Continue reading →

Feb 1 Open Thread

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Hello my friends! Can’t have the first day of the month that includes Valentine’s Day go by without a thread, can we? 😉 Lots going on today, wow. I’m going to pop in a story in a min – gotta go for just a few, but wanted to say hello. Back. Some positive news. My bill to explore single-payer universal healthcare in Hawaii is moving forward. #SinglePayer pic.twitter.com/iwohusU8Jw — Kaniela Ing (@KanielaIng) January 31, 2018 It always makes me happy to see stories of people pushing forward, especially on “single-payer universal healthcare”. Honestly? I just want what Canada has. Here … Continue reading →

The progressive quest for better healthcare & education gets ally from an unexpected place – the AEI, sort of

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Former Military Leaders Want to Expand and Improve Child Care — to Increase Future Recruitment The American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., organized an event this week with the provocative title, “Military readiness and early childhood: What is the link?” (“right-leaning”, lol, the AEI is very much hard-right. ‘During the George W. Bush administration, AEI was regarded “as the intellectual command post of the neoconservative campaign for regime change in Iraq,” Vanity Fair noted.’) It turns out that it’s hard to keep a huge military going when: the Department of Defense estimates that 71 percent of … Continue reading →

GOP Tax Bill & Thanksgiving Open Thread

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Frankly, I would hope that the GOP tax bill doesn’t come up around your Thanksgiving table. Personally, I prefer just enjoying each other’s company, catching up, good food, and as much laughter as possible. But, if talk around the table does turn to the tax bill, here are some talking points/facts to counter the misinformation and perhaps give someone pause who is buying the GOP’s selling of it. Although corporate tax cuts are frequently touted as a good thing, something that would ‘Benefit Ordinary Americans’. That just doesn’t pan out in real life. Sure, the corporations COULD use their windfall to raise … Continue reading →

Would Medicare For All cause millions of people to lose their jobs?

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And would those lost jobs disproportionately affect women? Even worse, low-income women? From Bernie’s Sept. 13, 2017, editorial in the New York Times titled, ‘Why We Need Medicare For All’: The reason that our health care system is so outrageously expensive is that it is not designed to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way, but to provide huge profits to the medical-industrial complex. Layers of bureaucracy associated with the administration of hundreds of individual and complicated insurance plans is stunningly wasteful, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year. As the only major country not to … Continue reading →

Repatriation

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One of the pieces of Trump’s tax plan will ‘offer’ repatriation to companies with offshore cash to entice them to bring home some of the moolah they’re been hoarding. The tax rate being floated is 10%. Another official said Trump would propose a repatriation tax on offshore earnings of 10 percent, compared with the current 35 percent, the report said. What would those tax-dodging..I mean qualifying companies do with all of that incoming money? They have choices. They could: -invest in their core businesses (talk about vague wording! major wiggle room) -give out dividends to stockholders (the taxes on which … Continue reading →