Welcome to the BERN, your one-stop survey of Bernie Sanders 2020 Election and Revolution news items. Why “Revolution”? Well, we needed an “R”, for one, but in all seriousness, now more than ever do we need a political revolution to overtake this country from the left, roll back the damaging policies and appointments of the Trump administration, and plow ahead with a truly progressive agenda that can address our increasing existential crises as a society and, I’m not being hyperbolic in saying, as a species.
Before I begin, we have a big, fantastic team behind this effort, too many to thank individually, but we do want to acknowledge a big debt to the 2016 work of kossack (and The Progressive Wing blog founder) LieparDestin, for our creative vision. Our goal is to hit the ground running where the BNR left off.
Hitting the ground running where we left off in 2016, btw, is already a major theme of this entire campaign, and is driving a ton of prime coverage: for example, on Monday, the New York Times reported that Bernie had already raised $10 million in small contributions ($26 avg.) in less than a week, with another over $1 million recurring monthly, from 359,914 donors, 40% of whom had never donated to him in the 2016 campaign! That’s huge, because of course, beating Trump will be easiest with an army of grassroots supporters to counter his fake narrative as a populist outsider who is taking on the establishment. WE’RE TAKING ON HIM, THE ESTABLISHMENT!
To start, Bernie has announced his first public event, and my wife, our 2 month-old firstborn son, Lucas and I are so excited to attend! Here are some details:
Please RSVP at the link above, and if you see us, say hello! We’ll look like this, only with more Bernie swag:
The Saturday rally will be big, if the last one in the Prospect Park Nethermead is any indication; that rally was pretty amazing, which included a performance by the excellent Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear, and an audience of around 30,000 (video from Stereogum).
So these rallies are really a blast, is what I am saying, and I can’t WAIT to see what he has in store for the 2020 kickoff!!
After the Brooklyn rally on Saturday, Bernie's flying to Chicago to hold a rally at Navy Pier at 7 pm:
But enough of the fun stuff, let’s get down to what Bernie cares most about: THE ISSUES. As I mentioned above, there is a lot of coverage right now. In order to filter the torrent of coverage into an organized and logical news roundup, I will take the following reasons I am supporting Bernie, and choose for each of them an exemplary piece or two of recent journalism to exhibit, that showcases who Bernie is and where he stands on the issue.
REASON 1: BERNIE HAS A STRATEGY TO DISCREDIT TRUMP WITH HIS OWN VOTERS
It is imperative for so many reasons that our 2020 nominee be able to articulate fully just what is so f*#%^d up about Donald Trump, not just so that Democrats understand (cuz we already do), but so EVERYONE understands. Per the New Yorker, Bernie is the only candidate in the Dem field so far who has been willing to call Trump out and confront him, regularly, personally, directly, and by name. And he thinks that we must if we are to win back some of Trump’s share of the independent electorate. Here is what he said at the CNN town hall in response to a question about “how… [he] plan[s] to have a productive discussion with someone who is unwilling to accept facts”:
Sanders, standing on the stage, nodded. He first addressed Trump’s attacks on the media. “Understand what that means,” he said. “This is an attack on the very fundamentals of American democracy.” Then he turned to how he will approach the campaign. The discussion wouldn’t be with Trump, he said, but with his supporters. “I go not only into communities which are progressive or Democratic—we head out to Trump country,” he said. “And we are going to talk to those people, and we are going to expose Trump as the liar and fraud that he is. Trump told working people that he was going to be on their side. He is not on their side.” By the end of the campaign, Sanders said, “I suspect that a number of people who voted for Donald Trump will understand that he is not their friend.”
At other points in the Town Hall, Bernie attacked Trump viciously over his disastrous health care proposal and racism, which Politifact has fact checked and says is “half true”, only because it states the case a little too aggressively, even though the math works. I for one like the aggression, and want to see more of it from our 2020 candidates:
"It's not only that we have a president who wanted to throw 32 million people off of the health care they had, after promising that he'd provide health care to everybody," said the Vermont Independent Feb. 25. "This president is the first president in the modern history of our country who is trying to divide our people up, based on the color of their skin, the country they were born in, their sexual orientation, their gender, their religion."
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the whole town hall:
REASON 2: BERNIE HAS MOVED/WILL MOVE/IS MOVING THE OVERTON WINDOW
As we all know, the 2020 Dem field has largely adopted Bernie’s 2016 campaign platform, from Medicare for All to progressive taxation to refusing corporate, PAC to, if you’re Elizabeth Warren, refusing special access to large sum contributors. All of those are amazing, but an even clearer indicator of the impact Bernie’s work since 2016 has had on our political landscape is on healthcare. The House of Representatives Medicare for All Act actually goes quite a bit further than the Senate’s Medicare For All Act, which Bernie authored, creating political space for the passage of a better bill in the reconciliation process!!
I don’t think this would have been possible without Bernie creating a narrative around democratic socialism that ties funding these programs to taxing the super rich and corporations. There is no other politically popular way to fund these schemes, and it is also the moral way to do it in our unprecedentedly unequal society. So here for example was Bernie’s response to the question of how he would pay for his proposals:
QUESTION: Many of your policies have been met with speculation about how they're going to be paid for. What would you propose as solutions to pay for your ambitious policy ideals?
SANDERS: Great. Great question, thanks.
In the United States right now, we have more income and wealth inequality than any other country on Earth. We have three people who own more wealth than the bottom half of America. We have the 1 percent owning more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. We have 46 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent. OK?
So what we have in America today is a whole lot of wealth, but that wealth and income increasingly goes to the very, very wealthiest people in this country.
So what I believe that any democratic, civilized society, health care, yeah, is a right, making sure that our kids can get a higher education is a right, that we rebuild our crumbling infrastructure is a basic need. That's going to cost money.
But at a time when the people on top have so much, while the middle class shrinks and we have so many people living in poverty, if your question is am I going to demand that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes? Damn right, I will. All right?
(APPLAUSE)
And let me give you -- you know, people say where are you going to get the money? Where are you going to get the money? Amazon, owned by the wealthiest guy in the world, made $5 billion last year in profits. Anyone here know how much they paid in taxes?
AUDIENCE: Zero.
SANDERS: That's right. That's where we're going to begin getting the money.
BLITZER: But tax experts caution...
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
... and you know this, Senator -- tax experts caution that the rich will likely look for various ways to avoid paying these taxes. How will you ensure that the wealthy actually go ahead and pay these taxes?
SANDERS: Well, that's what they do right now. Look, we got a -- we have an economy today that works very well for the 1 percent. And what these guys do -- and we have to deal with this. They stash billions and billions of dollars in profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens. And we have veterans sleeping out on the streets, public schools that are falling apart. We've got 20 percent of senior citizens of this country trying to live on $13,500 or less. So we have -- when I talk about a political revolution, I know this may sound radical to some people, but we are going to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.
So to answer your question, we are going to do away with those outrageous loopholes that allow large corporations, owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country, to pay nothing in taxes. We're going to end their ability to put their money in the Cayman Islands under the tax havens.
Bernie has also gotten top Senate Democrats to do radical things like tie stock buybacks--which corporations used in lieu of new hiring or employee raises to line the pockets of their boards with the new windfall profits from Trump’s tax heist--to treatment of workers, or ban them outright. Writing this month in the New York Times with Senator Chuck Schumer, Bernie said:
...It’s no coincidence that at the same time that corporate stock buybacks and dividends have reached record highs, the median wages of average workers have remained relatively stagnant. Far too many workers have watched corporate executives cash in on corporate stock buybacks while they get handed a pink slip.
Recently, Walmart announced plans to spend $20 billion on a share repurchase program while laying off thousands of workers and closing dozens of Sam’s Club stores. Using a fraction of that amount, the company could have raised hourly wages of every single Walmart employee to $15, according to an analysis by the Roosevelt Institute.
Walmart is not alone. Harley Davidson authorized a 15 million share stock-repurchase around the same time it announced it would close a plant in Kansas City, Mo. And Wells Fargo has spent billions on corporate stock buybacks while openly plotting to lay off thousands of workers in the coming years.
At a time of huge income and wealth inequality, Americans should be outraged that these profitable corporations are laying off workers while spending billions of dollars to boost their stock’s value to further enrich the wealthy few. If corporations continue to purchase their own stock at this rate, income disparities will continue to grow, productivity will suffer, the long-term strength of companies will diminish — and the American worker will fall further behind.
That is why we are planning to introduce bold legislation to address this crisis. Our bill will prohibit a corporation from buying back its own stock unless it invests in workers and communities first, including things like paying all workers at least $15 an hour, providing seven days of paid sick leave, and offering decent pensions and more reliable health benefits.
In other words, our legislation would set minimum requirements for corporate investment in workers and the long-term strength of the company as a precondition for a corporation entering into a share buyback plan. The goal is to curtail the overreliance on buybacks while also incentivizing the productive investment of corporate capital.
…
The time is long overdue for us to create an economy that works for all Americans, not just the people on top. Our legislation will be an important step in that direction.
And speaking of Corporate tax dodging, Wolf Blitzer, Bernie also hit Amazon had this week over its 0% US federal corporate tax rate on $11 billion in profits, making him basically the only 2020 Dem candidate to do so:
when news broke that Amazon – the world’s third-most valuable company, run by the world’s richest man – paid zero federal corporate income taxes on its $11.3 billion in U.S. profits in 2018, what did these candidates have to say about it?
...
No statements, no speeches, not even a tweet. In fact, 2018 was the second year in a row Amazon avoided paying U.S. corporate taxes and actually got a $129 million refund in 2017. Progressives like Warren, Booker and Harris have issued public statements on a wide array of topics lately, from Jussie Smollett to support for using paper ballots in elections, but not a single note about Amazon’s zero-dollar tax bill.
Some campaign observers are wondering why. In a political moment dominated by economic populism and calls for class warfare, why aren’t progressive presidential candidates making Amazon the poster child for corporate greed?
A notable exception is Sen. Bernie Sanders, who tweeted: “If you paid the $119 annual fee to become an Amazon Prime member, you paid more to Amazon than it paid in taxes.”
REASON 3: BERNIE WILL KEEP US OUT OF WAR WITH A SOUND FOREIGN POLICY
Bernie has a humanitarian vision of the world, one that is not about war or hard power, natural resource coveting or intervention, but rather about alleviating human suffering. Here is Bernie’s foreign policy Matt Duss with a very illuminating interview with Business Insider on some of Bernie’s priorities for the future of US foreign policy:
INSIDER: There are strong anti-interventionist sentiments on both sides of the aisle right now. Barack Obama was fairly critical of the US in a similar way back in 2008, but faced accusations of being unpatriotic as a result. Could Sanders face similar attacks?
Duss: He certainly will. We're seeing it right now with some of the attacks he's getting even from some Democrats on Venezuela.
But there are shared concerns amongst progressives and conservatives about American militarism, the costs, and many unintended consequences of this kind of interventionism that has guided our approach certainly since 9/11, but even before that.
The Yemen resolution, the fact that [Sanders] introduced it with Republican Mike Lee as an original co-sponsor as well as Democrat Chris Murphy — that's an illustration of this, right? Sen. Sanders and Sen. Lee don't agree on a great deal, but they strongly came together around this idea that not only do we need to take a hard look at some of these interventions we're supporting, but we also need to take a hard look and reassert Congress' constitutional authority over these interventions.
This is where you see a sharp difference between Trump's approach and Sen. Sanders' approach. Trump and a lot of the conservatives who support him see international relations in very zero-sum terms: If someone else is winning the US is losing; the US needs to dominate all these relationships.
Sen. Sanders does not see it in those terms, he sees it in very much a positive-sum way: We can all gain when we are working together, multilaterally. We have shared problems and challenges, so we need shared solutions.
INSIDER: You recently told The Nation what it meant to you when in 2008 you heard Obama say he didn't just want to end the Iraq War, he wanted to end "the mind-set" that got the US into the war in the first place. But once he entered the White House, Obama encountered a reality that made it difficult to deliver on his campaign's idealistic foreign policy vision. If elected, could Sanders face a similar reality as president?
Duss: That statement [from Obama] meant a lot to me and a lot of other young progressives that I know for a reason — it really captured something.
But let's remember that when Obama came into office he had a financial crisis. There was a lot going on and Obama had an idealistic idea of turning the ship on a number of things, including foreign policy. I don't ding him too hard for some of the decisions he made, they made a great deal of sense at the time. In retrospect, some of the decisions led to really problematic outcomes now, such as the decision not to investigate fully the use of torture or other things like that.
Any president has to deal with the world as it is when they take office. But what Sen. Sanders recognizes is building that kind of movement around this idea, and starting a much more robust conversation and a real political consensus about what America's role in the world should be.
Now that's challenging, right? Because foreign policy is not something that is very immediate to a lot of Americans for obvious reasons, but grounding it in this discussion about how we treat ourselves, how we treat our own society, what kind of society we want it, how that is reflected in our foreign policy is the way to go about it.
...
INSIDER: Does the Yemen resolution have a realistic shot in the Senate? Does Sanders' forceful criticism of Trump jeopardize the fate of the resolution?
Duss: It does have a realistic chance. We have 51 of the 56 who voted with us in December — they're still in office. Plus we have two new members of the Democratic caucus, both of whom have indicated that they will vote with the caucus, which puts us at 53. We only need 51 votes to move through every stage of this process.
The Trump administration will put a lot of pressure on Republicans to peel off this thing. But it's the same resolution that passed two months ago. The humanitarian crisis [in Yemen] has only gotten worse.
...
INSIDER: Sanders has been accused of being too soft on dictatorial leaders like Fidel and Raul Castro, Daniel Ortega, and more recently Nicolas Maduro. Is any of this criticism fair?
Duss: There are times where he's definitely pushed back on some of the reflexive hawkishness of the establishment. But he's always been consistently for human rights and self-determination.
His statement on Maduro, if you go back to what he initially said, reflects that. He's very clear about Maduro's abuse of his population and the corruption.
But that doesn't mean that we endorse Trump's approach here. It's making sure that the approach is consistent and grounded in a set of principles — human dignity, human security.
INSIDER: Sanders is also facing criticism for not recognizing Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader in Venezuela, including from Democrats in Congress, as the US and many of its allies take a stand against Maduro. From the senator's perspective, how should the US approach the crisis in Venezuela?
Duss: No one is defending Maduro — the senator certainly is not doing that.
But coming out as Trump has done and sort of putting the US in the lead — just completely recognizing Guaidó as the president— and putting the US four-square behind the opposition, has the potential to create some possible outcomes that the US is not quite prepared for.
There are also other people the US could be talking to. It's unfortunate that the Trump administration did not pursue the opening with Cuba that the Obama administration started, because talking to Cuba right now could actually be really useful.
INSIDER: That's an interesting point because Trump is clearly open to dialogue with North Korea, and has defended the notion of talking to your enemies, even as he went after Obama over reopening dialogue Cuba and Iran. What's Sanders' view on this?
Duss: Sen. Sanders was perhaps the only member of the Democratic office to actually compliment Trump's last summit with Kim Jong Un for that reason. Talking is better than threats.
...
INSIDER: Trump has a record of praising dubious world leaders and Sanders has referred to the president as an "authoritarian." Do you agree with the senator?
Duss: [Trump] is certainly behaving in authoritarian ways. There's some ways in which he is being constrained.
But certainly using the bully pulpit, the huge megaphone that he has on Twitter and elsewhere, to attack the press, to attack progressives, to attack all kinds of people — these have consequences.
We've seen violence against the media. We saw this guy who was just arrested planning this huge attack.
Leaders in other countries take notice of what the president of the US says. In talking to activists in other countries, there is no question in their mind that they feel that their oppression and [their leader's] use of these tools to control, oppress, and persecute their own people is being affirmed by the president of the US. That's a huge problem.
INSIDER: If you had to summarize Sanders' worldview as succinctly as possible, what would you say?
Duss: He sees the US as a kind of global facilitator by virtue of our enormous economic, diplomatic power. The US has the ability to bring parties, states, and people around tables to address common challenges that really no other country has.
That doesn't mean that the US needs to run to the head of every parade or be in charge of everything — certainly not. But the US does have a role to play in facilitating multilateral cooperation, conversation, and innovation.
REASON 4: BERNIE HAS HAD IT RIGHT SINCE 1991 ON PRISON REFORM
This issue will be a hot button topic for sure in 2020. From Vox:
Bernie Sanders was arguing against mass incarceration as early as 1991
Sanders questioned the wisdom of mass incarceration while both Republicans and Democrats embraced it.
...his history as an independent voice unafraid of criticizing the Democratic Party from the left also made him an early critic of mass incarceration and punitive criminal justice policies — a position that made him stand out when both political parties were racing to look “tough on crime” in the 1990s, even if such criticisms are more in line with many Democrats’ beliefs today.
In 1991, Congress was debating a punitive crime bill that would have, among many other steps, widened the use of the death penalty and ramped up prison sentences. The final bill — a compromise after Democrats and Republicans went back and forth to see who could look tougher — was sponsored by Democrats, actually getting more votes from Democrats than Republicans in the House.
Sanders, then Vermont’s representative in the House, argued the bill was “not a crime prevention bill” but “a punishment bill, a retribution bill, a vengeance bill.” He criticized it for expanding the use of the death penalty as other developed nations were reeling it back or ending its use altogether. Then he focused on mass incarceration:
What we’re discussing now is an issue where some of our friends are saying we’re not getting tough enough on the criminals. But my friends, we have the highest percentage of people in America in jail per capita of any industrialized nation on Earth. We’ve beaten South Africa. We’ve beaten the Soviet Union. What do we have to do, put half the country behind bars?
Sanders’s skepticism of mass incarceration was ahead of its time
At the time, Sanders was not just speaking out against conservative or Republican “tough on crime” priorities by criticizing mass incarceration. He was taking on Democrats, too, who during the 1980s, ’90s, and even the 2000s were trying to compete with the GOP to look as if they were just as “tough” on crime.
In fact, the 1994 crime law was one of Bill Clinton’s big legislative achievements at the time, something the then-president boasted about it in campaign ads. Joe Biden, who was then a senator, wrote parts of the 1994 law.
The drive to lock up more Americans had its roots in crime waves fueled by racial and economic disparities, the crack epidemic, distrust in government, and other factors. Those crime waves led to massive increases in crime that consumed the public’s attention. In the early 1990s, based on Gallup’s polling, crime was among Americans’ top concerns.
…
Sanders’s record during a previous crime wave suggests that he would not, at the very least, use the bully pulpit of the presidency to call for more incarceration. That record sets him apart from some of his presidential primary opponents...
Thanks all!!! see you at a rally on Saturday if you’re in NYC! If not, why not take a moment and kick in a few bucks for the campaign: