Bernie Sanders, who has staked his presidential campaign on fighting poverty and income inequality in America, on Thursday took his message to one of the poorest counties in America.
In the first stop of a day-long swing the Sanders motorcade careened along a two-lane road in rural McDowell County, West Virginia -- the state's southernmost point -- on its way to a "community conversation" at Five Loaves & Two Fishes Food Bank.
The Vermont senator's remarks focused on poverty in America. He and a group of panelists spoke and listened to residents for more than an hour in what he called an "informal hearing, informal discussion."
"We want to talk about the problems so that I and the American people can understand what's going on," he said. Sanders drew from familiar refrains in his campaign stump speech, reshuffling things a bit and refraining from mentioning his Democratic opponent, front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Sanders also lambasted the current campaign finance system, a cornerstone of his presidential platform.
"Anybody put $350K into a super PAC recently?" Sanders asked the crowd, who chuckled in response. "That's another world."
He drew parallels between his home state of Vermont and West Virginia in opiate addiction and abuse, a topic that ended up being a large focus of the discussion.
Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday vowed to invest billions of dollars in coal-mining communities to create jobs, seizing on the issue as Hillary Clinton faces a backlash for promising to put coal companies out of business.
The Vermont senator brought up the future of coal miners while campaigning across West Virginia, which holds its primary on Tuesday, and spoke about poverty at a food bank in Kimball. Though he trails Mrs. Clinton by hundreds of delegates, Mr. Sanders has said that he hopes to close that gap in the remaining contests and has presented himself as more dedicated to helping the middle class than her. On Thursday, Mr. Sanders promised to fight to make sure communities that lose jobs because of his environmental policies would get help rebuilding their employment base.
“While I strongly believe we need to combat climate change to make our planet habitable for our children and our grandchildren, let me be clear: We cannot abandon communities that have been dependent on coal and other fossil fuels,” he said, according to prepared remarks of his speech. “In my view, we have got to invest $41 billion rebuilding coal mining communities and making sure that Americans in McDowell County and all over this country receive the job training they need for the clean energy jobs of the future.”
He added that West Virginia had lost more than 30,000 manufacturing jobs and that he would push for new trade agreements so that American corporations create jobs in the United States rather than abroad.
A crowd over 1,000 was on hand for Bernie Sanders’ second stop in the Mountain State in South Charleston Thursday afternoon.
Sanders had just come from an invitation-only event in poverty stricken McDowell County, and he used the visit to further his message on income inequality, telling the crowd that poverty is a death sentence.
“In the wealthiest country, America, we have a life expectancy gap between McDowell County and Fairfax County, Virginia of 18 years. 18 years!,” exclaimed the Vermont Senator.
Sanders said it was time to have a discussion about what poverty really is in America.
“What poverty means is the stress of trying to determine how you’re going to feed your family and your kids that week,” he said. “How you’re going to have enough money to put gas in the car to get to work.”
One of Sanders key messages Thursday afternoon, and one of the trademarks of his campaign, was that the American economy is rigged.
“A rigged economy is when the wealthiest family in this country, the Walton family, of Walmart, has $149 billion in wealth. One family, more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people,” Sanders said.
Before more than 3,000 people on Morgantown’s waterfront, Bernie Sanders, democratic presidential candidate, spent significant time with an energetic and responsive audience.
“I’ve seen him so many times on the news. I believe so much in what he says. I knew he’d be saying the same things over, but to see him in person is just a different experience,” expressed David Tennant, Fairview resident and North Marion High School coach.
The Vermont senator’s visit to Morgantown was his third and final stop in West Virginia Thursday following a focused discussion in McDowell County on poverty.
For many who stood in a line that wrapped the hotel and stretched down the Monongahela River’s rail trail, they came to hear about Sanders’ social policy suggestions and beliefs.
“In my mind he’s very much like a European politician for the community, someone who is capable of leading others in a program to support all of our citizens rather than a few,” shared Larry Schwab, a Morgantown resident, doctor and Vietnam veteran.
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With five days to go before the May 10 primary election, there were many among the rally attendees still looking for a candidate to earn their vote.
“You know, you have to take it all with a grain of salt, but I feel like it’s the first time I’ve heard a candidate that is speaking to a lot of things I find to be important for me and my family,” shared Katharine Dubansky, a Garrett County, MD mother who brought 4 of her children to see and hear Sanders speak.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday slammed the GOP’s aggressive foreign policy for repeatedly stranding America in conflicts abroad.
“You can’t keep track of the number of wars they want to get us into,” he said of Republican lawmakers at a rally in Morgantown, W. Va. "They want to go there, they want to go there, they want to go there."
“Let me tell you – it’s not their children who will go into those wars, it is the children of working class American families,” the Democratic presidential candidate added.
“It goes without saying that ISIS must not only be defeated, ISIS must destroyed. But the United States military should not be sucked into a never-ending perpetual war.”
Sanders said that the Iraq War offers one bloody, costly example of why a hawkish foreign policy does not help voters.
“The most important foreign policy decision in our country’s modern history was the war in Iraq,” he said. "I knew how important that vote was.
“I knew there were kids in my own state and here in West Virginia who would go off to that war and not come back. I not only voted against the war, I lead the opposition.”
The lingering race for the Democratic presidential nomination is moving to an unlikely battleground this week: the tiny island territory of Guam.
Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are running radio advertisements on the Western Pacific island, costing each candidate more than $10,000, before Democrats cast their ballots in the island’s caucuses this Saturday.
Clinton went up on the airwaves first, according to data provided by the media-monitoring company The Tracking Firm. She reserved about $22,000 on a number of stations on the island, beginning Tuesday and running through Saturday.
Sanders responded on Thursday, making a $12,000 outlay through Saturday on many of the same stations.
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Guam will send 12 delegates to the Democratic convention this summer — seven pledged delegates and five superdelegates.
The candidates themselves won’t be traveling to Guam — they are focused on the primary in West Virginia next Tuesday, and the May 17 primaries in Kentucky and Oregon.
Voting in Guam will be conducted Saturday from 10 a.m. through 8 p.m. local time at a shopping mall in the capital of Hagåtña. The caucus is closed to non-Democrats, but already-enrolled voters can register with the party at the caucus site.
More than 2,000 physicians announced their support Thursday for a single-payer national health care system, unveiling a proposal drafted by doctors that appears to resonate with Bernie Sanders' call for "Medicare for All."
In an editorial and paper published in the American Journal of Public Health on Thursday, the doctors call out the "persistent shortcomings of the current health care system." They warn about the risks of continuing along the path laid out by the Affordable Care Act: "down this road, millions of Americans remain uninsured, underinsurance grows, costs rise, and inefficiency and the search for profits are abetted."
The future of health reform has been widely discussed in the presidential campaign, and for years health reform has sparked a raging and divisive political debate among politicians. The proposal, however, is endorsed by hundreds of physicians who have an inside view of the effects of the law on patients and medical care. It grew out of discussions in late 2014, when a small group of physicians began to assess the effects of health reform and found it coming up short.
"Those discussions led us to feel that we needed to put out in public, first of all, a clear statement that problems haven’t been solved," said David Himmelstein, an internist who practices in the South Bronx and a professor at the City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College.
Himmelstein and his colleagues call the right to medical care "a dream deferred," despite health reform.
With Donald Trump more or less wrapping up the Republican nomination on Tuesday night, the fact that Bernie Sanders also scored a big victory in Indiana was somewhat overlooked. The Vermont senator overcame a sizable deficit in the opinion polls to finish ahead of Hillary Clinton by almost seven percentage points in a heartland state that she carried in 2008. It was his biggest upset since he won in Michigan, in March.
In a series of interviews on Wednesday, Sanders confirmed that he will stay in the Democratic race until at least June 14th, when the final primary will be held, in Washington, D.C. Sanders also said that he would try to win over Democratic superdelegates who are currently committed to his opponent, a strategy that could extend the contest until the Party Convention, in Philadelphia, at the end of July. “I think we have got to make the case that the superdelegates, who in many cases were onboard [with] Hillary Clinton even before I got in the race, that they should take a hard look at which candidate is stronger against Donald Trump,” Sanders said to NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “And I think we can make that case.”
Sanders’s determination to press on is causing consternation in the Clinton camp, and in the Democratic Party establishment. Eager to avoid alienating Sanders’s large body of supporters, most Party figures have avoided publicly calling on him to quit, but some are citing Trump’s victory as a reason to unify behind Clinton. “If [Sanders] wants to stay in and discuss the platform, that’s obviously his right,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served in Bill Clinton’s Administration, told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “But at this point, we’re on the verge of a choice between someone eminently sensible and qualified, and someone who is a real wild card. It’s a little frightening having him out there trying to take down the sensible candidate.”
In the weeks ahead, the calls for Sanders to wrap up his campaign are likely to become more explicit. He seems certain to ignore them, and he has at least four reasons to do so. First, most of his supporters want him to keep going. Second, he still has a (very) slim chance of obtaining the nomination. Third, there isn’t much evidence that his dropping out would affect the result in November. And fourth, back in 2008, Clinton herself did something very similar to what Sanders is doing now, extending her primary contest with Barack Obama well beyond the point at which most commentators had concluded that she had no chance of winning.
If Bernie Sanders wants to upend the Democratic National Convention, he'll likely have all the tools he needs.
The Democratic nomination increasingly seems Hillary Clinton's for the taking. But the number of pledged delegates Sanders will have collected by the time the convention begins July 25 should give him a sizable presence on convention committees and a strong voice in shaping the Democratic Party's rules and platform to include some of his top priorities.
Tad Devine, one of Sanders' top advisers and a veteran of contentious convention battles, said he expects “good will” at the convention between Sanders and Clinton, and agreement on a number of issues. But he raised the possibility that Sanders will play hardball if negotiations fail.
Devine said Sanders should have enough committee votes to file “minority reports” — dissents from positions held by the majority of delegates at the convention. Using that tool could mire the proceedings in debate and votes if Clinton won't agree on issues important to Sanders.
Democratic Party rules allow for minority reports at the request of members representing 25% of total votes on the convention’s Platform, Credentials and Rules committees. Sanders has won about 45% of the pledged delegates awarded in state primaries and caucuses so far. Most committee members are awarded to candidates based on the results of those contests.
An organization of Bernie Sanders volunteers will host a statewide training session and rally starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 7, at Quarry Brewing, 124 W. Broadway St., Uptown Butte.
Amanda Curtis of Butte and Margot Kidder of Livingston said in a Facebook posting that the training is designed to introduce Sanders supporters to the goals of the campaign, provide an orientation on how to be a state and national delegate, and enable supporters to participate in a neighborhood canvass in Butte.
The day-long event will conclude with a rally of supporters to "Have a Beer for Bernie" at the Silver Dollar Saloon, 133 S. Main St.
"Grassroots organizing has played a significant role in Butte's history," Margot Kidder said, "so we are excited to initiate the statewide campaign there. This is particularly important because we believe Bernie's campaign complements Butte's history, where working people have organized for the rights of everyday Montanans against a rigged economy and corrupt political system."
Supporters will knock on over 1,000 doors "as part of our training and taking Bernie Sanders' message to the people of Butte," Curtis said. "And then we'll be taking his campaign to the rest of the state before the primary on June 7."
Back when Bernie Sanders' campaign was just ramping up, and he was still giving speeches under covered picnic shelters to small groups of Democrats, he was talking about a political revolution.
"The only way we bring change to this country — and I'm the only candidate, I think, who will tell you this — is when we develop a strong, grassroots movement that tells the people who today control America they can't have it all," Sanders said in June to a crowd of about 50 in a park outside of Des Moines, Iowa. "This country belongs to all of us."
The speech hasn't changed much, but the venues have gotten bigger — much bigger. And now, it actually looks like a movement.
"You know, oftentimes in politics we talk about a candidate rising to meet the moment," says Neil Sroka with the progressive grassroots group Democracy For America, which has endorsed Sanders. "But in this case I think what we've seen in this election is the moment meeting a candidate: Bernie Sanders, who has literally been fighting on income inequality issues from the very start of his career."
NPR found tape of a 1976 gubernatorial debate where Sanders talked about income inequality — about "the richest one-half of 1 percent" earning as much as the bottom 27 percent.
Sanders' statistics have changed — the gap between rich and poor has grown — but today he gets thunderous applause making the very same case.
Ask which ethnic group has the shortest life expectancy, the highest major disease rates, the highest incarceration rates, the fewest education opportunities or the smallest per person investment by the federal government and the response will very likely be incorrect.
Bernie Sanders will get it right. Every time.
Why does Senator Bernie Sanders know these things about Native Americans?
He knows because he cares enough to know.
All across the United States Native American Tribes and their citizens are standing up to be counted as supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders for the next President of the United States.
Why? Because Bernie Sanders respects and values tribal members as Americans and as people with rich heritage who have made enormous contributions to this country, but who have been mostly abused and neglected in return.
Senator Sanders believes the United States needs to support and work with us to help us improve our standard of living. He agrees with the principles established in the U.S. Constitution, which clearly support the right of Indian Nations to self-govern and have sovereign jurisdiction over our lands. He actively promotes measures to achieve justice for our people.