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How Bernie Welcomed Pope Francis:
The very minute that Pope Francis set foot on American soil Tuesday, Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) stood on the Senate floor hailing his arrival, in a quick demonstration of the political dimensions of the papal visit.
Sanders, a presidential candidate and one of the most liberal members of Congress, spent 11 minutes praising the pope for "speaking out with courage and brilliance about some of the most important issues facing our world" — mainly, matters of economic inequality.
He went on to quote several of Francis's statements in "Evangelii Gaudium," his 2013 exhortation critical of a global economic system that favors the rich over the poor.
Among them: "We have created new idols. The worship of the Golden Calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal."
Said Sanders, "I think the pope is right in saying that that is not something that we should be doing."
Bernie & Daraprim Pricing:
Call it a win for Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers. After a whirlwind start to the week, Martin Shkreli may soon shed the dubious honor of being dubbed “The Most Hated Man In America.” Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, incited outrage far and wide when he recently announced that his company had purchased the rights to produce the drug Duraprim, which treats a life-threatening condition associated with AIDS. After the transaction, Shkreli gleefully announced that Turing would raise the price of the drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill. While the 32-year-old businessman initially defended the price increase in the face of massive backlash, he seems to have finally bowed to a legion of critics, including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
Sanders rose to the forefront of the political reaction to Turing’s shenanigans, joining Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings in calling on Shkreli and his company to reconsider their current path. As noted by Newsweek, the men sent a letter to Turing, criticizing their maneuvers as “the latest in a long list of skyrocketing price increases for certain critical medications.” According to U.K.-based news outlet the Independent, Sanders also set things in motion to look into the situation with Daraprim via Congressional inquiry.
Now, just a short time after the controversy kicked into overdrive, Martin Shkreli appears to have relented to pressure from Bernie Sanders and others. On Tuesday, he announced that Turing Pharmaceuticals will lower the price of Daraprim. Speaking to NBC News, Shkreli confirmed that the decision was a direct result of the popular outcry regarding the above-noted price hike.
Sanders Joins Striking Workers Ahead Of Popes Visit:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) threw down the gauntlet for Congress and President Obama Tuesday morning, joining hundreds of low-wage contract workers from federal buildings who are striking in advance of Pope Francis’ visit to Washington, D.C.
Speaking to the assembled workers at a nearby Catholic Church, Sanders urged U.S. lawmakers to take seriously the pontiff’s message on “social and economic justice.” He also challenged President Obama to sign an executive order raising the wage for federal contractors to at least $15 an hour and allowing them to unionize.
“There is no justice in America when the largest low-wage employer is not McDonads, it is not Burger King, it is not Wal-Mart, it is the United States government,” he told the cheering crowd. “The United States government has got to become a model employer.”
Sanders told The Hill that as “one of the great moral forces on earth today,” any statement by the Pope on the issue of wealth inequality during his trip to D.C. would be influential.
The rallied workers later marched to the steps of the Capitol, where they held a prayer service asking for lawmakers to listen to the Pope’s words. Some workers also organized a brief sit-in at the Senate cafes.
The strike, organized by Good Jobs Nation, had been planned as early as last week to coincide with the Pope’s visit, whose various statements on inequality, neoliberalism and economic justice have pegged him as an ally of the labor movement. Striking workers had written a letter to Pope Francis asking him to meet with them in addition to those in power.
ASU Students Held A Mock Election:
The votes are in: Arizona State University students want Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Jeb Bush to go head to head in the 2016 presidential election. Or at least hundreds of them do.
More than 500 students voted in a mock presidential-primary election on ASU's Tempe campus Tuesday afternoon, and hundreds more registered to vote in the event marking National Voter Registration Day.
Near the mock election was a tricked-out trailer where passers-by could step into a photo booth and record 15-second videos of themselves asking questions they want presidential hopefuls to answer.
Called the Campaign Camper, the trailer is a collaboration between CNN and Facebook that’s stopping in about a dozen states before Oct. 13, when it will be in Las Vegas for the first Democratic presidential debate sponsored by, you guessed it, CNN.
10 Times Bernie & The Pope Sounded Alike:
Standing before a crowd of mostly evangelical Christian students at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, last week, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders admitted, “I am not a theologian, I am not an expert on the Bible, nor am I a Catholic.”
Still, the presidential candidate wanted to quote Pope Francis: “I agree with Pope Francis when he says, and I quote, ‘The current financial crisis originated in a profound human crisis, the denial of the primacy of the human person,’” Sanders said. “Now those are pretty profound words, which I hope we will all think about.”
The moment was an exception. Sanders, an independent, arguably talks about faith on the campaign trail less than any other 2016 candidate; which is to say, he almost never talks about it. And when he does, he says a candidate’s religion should not be a factor for voters.
But the teachings of Pope Francis, 78, and campaign messages from the Brooklyn-born Sanders, 74, have a lot in common. Both men share a deep frustration about the status quo and, speaking on a range issues from climate change to wealth inequality, their words echo each other:
ON POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
1. Pope Francis: “I ask you to be builders of the world, to work for a better world. Dear young people, please, don’t be observers of life, but get involved.” (July 27, 2013)
Bernie Sanders: “We have to be engaged. We have to get involved… And millions of our friends and neighbors who don’t vote, who have given up on the political process, they have got to get involved.” (Seabrook, N.H., Sept. 20, 2015)
Part Of Bernies Appeal Explained:
A study of Yale law students helps explain why economic inequality persists in the United States and why there are “populist insurgencies” in the presidential race, according to the study authors.
The study shows a gap between economic choices of the “extreme elite”—represented by Yale law students—and other groups in society. Ars Technica has a story, while two of the study authors warn in a Slate article that the findings foreshadow “a coming class war” in American politics.
The Yale law students overwhelmingly identified themselves as Democrats, yet they were more likely to make economic choices in a role-playing game that promoted greater wealth overall rather than equal distribution of the payout.
“Even when they self-identify as progressive Democrats, elite Americans value equality less highly than their middle-class compatriots,” according to the Slate article by two of the study authors, Yale law professor Daniel Markovits and Boston University economics professor Raymond Fisman.
Students For Sanders Rally:
The first student-led political rally of the year took place yesterday, and it was held in support of Bernie Sanders.
Nearly 250 students came out to the Student Union Mall, the lawn behind the Student Union, to listen to student speakers articulate their reasons for backing Sanders. Information about voting and voter registration forms were also dispensed, as well as email lists to try to gather volunteers to campaign for Sanders.
The event was run by Students for Bernie Sanders. The group is technically unofficial.
The rally began at 5:15 p.m., after stickers, signs, and issue pamphlets had been handed out. Students assembled in a semi-circle to hear their peers speak.
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Haadiyah Ali, a 3rd-semester political science and Africana studies double major, was the next student guest speaker. Ali spoke eloquently on the issue of race.
“If you didn’t notice, I’m kind of black, and Bernie Sanders is the only president in this election who cares about black people,” Ali said. “If we are going to have a country, a diverse country, where black and brown children can grow up and not be shot in the streets, Bernie Sanders has to be the next president of the United States.”
More Grassroots Student Support:
Although Bernie Sanders isn't leading in the presidential polls, he remains a popular candidate among college-age students.
Sanders is the only candidate so far with a Ball State student group campaigning for him — The Progressive Student Alliance.
Formerly known as College Students for Bernie at BSU, the group is a branch of the Muncie for Bernie Sanders Group, which is run by former political science major Michael Mahoney.
“Being a political science major, I think politics are important to focus on every single day," Mahoney said. "If we ignore politicians until election season, who knows what they’re gonna do? We have to keep an eye on what’s going on and pay attention.”
Bernie Would Be A Big Winner With Public Funding:
What would it take to make the White House wannabes stop chasing after big donors? From 1975 to 1999, the answer was federal matching funds — money that candidates could get by raising more money from small donors and spending less time schmoozing with the well-heeled.
Now, the U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) Education Fund, an advocate of more limits on campaign money, has produced a model of how that would affect the early stages of the 2016 race. The analysis assumes a 6-to-1 match, so the match would turn a $200 contribution into $1,400 for the candidate.
First the results, then the caveats.
The results:
The big winner — Sen. Bernie Sanders. In the first half of 2015, he got 77 percent of his money in small contributions, that is, $200 or less. Hillary Clinton raised about 3 1/2 times as much as Sanders, but just 13 percent came from small contributions. With matching funds, Sanders would end up with $83 million, Clinton with $89 million.
Bernie: 'We Must End For-Profit Prisons:
The United States is experiencing a major human tragedy. We have more people in jail than any other country on earth, including Communist China, an authoritarian country four times our size. The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate about a quarter of its prisoners – some 2.2 million people.
There are many ways that we must go forward to address this tragedy. One of them is to end the existence of the private for-profit prison industry which now makes millions from the incarceration of Americans. These private prisons interfere with the administration of justice. And they’re driving inmate populations skyward by corrupting the political process.
No one, in my view, should be allowed to profit from putting more people behind bars – whether they’re inmates in jail or immigrants held in detention centers. In fact, I believe that private prisons shouldn’t be allowed to exist at all, which is why I’ve introduced legislation to eliminate them.
Here’s why.