Bernie Sanders for President

Dear Friends,

Bernie Sanders is my choice for President of the United States.  His policies are exactly what this country and the world need now.  The media, many pundits and a number of my friends say he cannot be elected, he is too far left, he is a socialist and he is impractical.  I want to encourage everybody, including the media, to look beyond labels and examine his policies and positions.  Since I believe his policies are the ones that we need now, I intend to work for his election.

Bernie Sanders is not new to his positions.  He has been espousing them for years.  They are not focus group tested policies.  They are what he truly believes.  In the weeks to come, I will focus more on the policies in detail.  For now, these are just summaries of some of his positions and policies that I think are great.

Democracy

Our democracy is being destroyed by big money and voter suppression.  Bernie Sanders has been clear that we need to stand up to the billionaire class who are spending billions of dollars to impose their will on the country.  That is not democracy.  We need to reverse the Citizens United case and provide for government funding of campaigns.  Bernie Sanders is a strong advocate for both of these positions.    We also need to stop the Republican efforts at voter suppression.  Bernie Sanders wants to reinstate the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that require pre-approval of voting rights changes in states with histories of racial discrimination.

Economic Justice

Bernie Sanders, along with Elizabeth Warren, is at the forefront of the movement for economic justice - imposing higher taxes on the rich, having a $15 an hour minimum wage, increasing workers' wages, rebuilding the infrastructure of this country providing thousands of middle class jobs, providing better educational opportunities, focusing on increasing the incomes and opportunities for the poor and middle class, and the list goes on and on.

Bernie Sanders is an outspoken critic of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other similar "trade" agreements that are negotiated in secret by the government with the help of big business but with no input from economic justice advocates or environmentalists.

Racial Justice

Bernie Sanders has issued a detailed plan to work to eliminate institutional racism in this country, including police and criminal justice reforms.  In addition, all of his economic justice initiatives will help alleviate the lack of economic racial justice in the country.

Privacy

Bernie Sanders is a strong advocate for protecting the privacy of the American people from government spying.

Women's Rights

Bernie Sanders is a strong advocate for women's rights and has been for years.  As mayor of Burlington, VT he passed some of the first legislation to advocate for women's economic rights and he has always been a strong supporter of women's health care rights.

Foreign Policy

Bernie Sanders voted against President Bush's Iraq war and has been consistently in favor of diplomacy over military action.  He is in favor of the Iraq nuclear agreement.  When Bernie Sanders says that war should be the last resort, he means it.

Environment

Bernie Sanders is and has always been an environmental activist.  He is opposed to fracking and the Keystone XL Pipeline and other environmentally dangerous fossil fuel development.  He is a long time supporter of alternative energy options.

Regulating Capitalism

Bernie Sanders understands that capitalism must be regulated.  If left alone the market will destroy capitalism and create an oligarchy as we have seen in recent years.  He is in favor of breaking up the banks that are too big to fail and curbing the abuses of Wall Street and making sure that all businesses have to account for all the costs of their activities including pollution, paying wages so low the government must subsidize the workers, etc.

Immigration

Bernie Sanders has been criticized by some progressives for his immigration position.  While his immigration position is more complicated and nuanced than other Democrats, I think it is very consistent with his guiding principles.  He supports immediately bringing all undocumented people out of the shadows and giving them a real path to citizenship.  He is, however, not in favor of many of the open border and guest worker programs.  His overriding concern is to protect American workers.  If anybody thinks that Republicans and big business want guest worker programs and more legal immigration because they are concerned about providing opportunities to immigrants, they are crazy.  They want those programs for an ongoing supply of cheap labor.  That is the reason that Bernie Sanders has objected to those programs.  Ultimately, he voted for the 2013 immigration reform bill but only after he was able to secure an amendment that provided significant funds for jobs for American workers.  Immigration is important to our success as a country, but we should not bring people here to be cheap labor.  We should bring people here because they want to come and be full participants in our country which will make us a better country.

Education

Bernie Sanders is a strong advocate for education.  Consistent with his core beliefs, we will not be able to achieve economic justice, to reduce the wealth and income gaps between the rich and the poor, to eliminate institutional racism, to compete in the global economy or to achieve economic prosperity for all without a great educational system.  That system has to be truly available to all at no cost.  Bernie Sanders is the leading proponent of making college free and affordable.

Healthcare

Bernie Sanders has been pushing for a universal single payer health system for years.  We are the only developed country in the world that views healthcare as a privilege not a right.  While for those that can pay, we have a great healthcare system.  The system overall costs significantly more than in other developed countries and has significantly poorer results.

I look forward to more detailed discussions of the issues in this election and whether or not Bernie Sanders has the best policies and positions.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal

Three Threats to Our Democracy

Dear Friends,

Our democracy is facing three significant threats, which I believe are interconnected.  They are control by a small economic elite, voter disenfranchisement and declining education.  These three threats create a vicious circle of declining opportunity, centralized control among a few, increasing economic disparity and voter suppression.

A recent study by Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern (here) entitled "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" raises the spectrum that America is more like an oligarchy than a democracy.  I have to admit that I did not read the entire report and perhaps did not fully understand all that I read.  Nevertheless, I did understand this paragraph from the abstract.

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. 

I also did read completely an article in The New Yorker by John Cassidy entitled "Is America an Oligarchy?" (here).  That article ends with the following paragraph:

Me, too. There can be no doubt that economic élites have a disproportionate influence in Washington, or that their views and interests distort policy in ways that don’t necessarily benefit the majority: the politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The only debate is about how far this process has gone, and whether we should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.

Of course our democracy has faced this threat many times in the past.  Doris Kearns Goodwin's book entitled The Bully Pulpit contains a wonderful history of the immense economic and political control of a few people in the heyday of the trusts before Teddy Roosevelt began to break them up.  After a period of time where anti-trust laws were obeyed and enforced, we are once again in an era where political and economic power are concentrated in the hands of a very few.

Voter suppression is also on the rise in the United States.  We have of course faced voter suppression in the past and been able to overcome it.  But clearly it is on the rise again today.  Norm Ornstein wrote an article in The Atlantic entitled "The U.S. Needs a Constitutional Right to Vote" (here).

In his article, Mr. Ornstein points out that the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee the right to vote.  I will simply quote a couple of paragraphs from his article.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, is leading to a new era of voter suppression that parallels the pre-1960s era—this time affecting not just African-Americans but also Hispanic-Americans, women, and students, among others.

 Voter suppression is nothing new in America, as the pre-civil-rights era underscores. But it is profoundly un-American. The Texas law, promoted aggressively by state Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP choice for governor in next year's election, establishes the kinds of obstacles and impediments to voting that are more akin to Vladimir Putin's Russia than to the United States.

The effort should be accelerated. We need a modernized voter-registration system, weekend elections, and a host of other practices to make voting easier. But we also need to focus on an even more audacious and broader effort—a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote.
Many, if not most, Americans are unaware that the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote. To be sure, such a right is implicit in the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth amendments that deal with voting discrimination based on race, gender, and age. But the lack of an explicit right opens the door to the courts' ratifying the sweeping kinds of voter-restrictions and voter-suppression tactics that are becoming depressingly common. 

I could not have said it better.  I am proud to point out that my Representative in Congress, Keith Ellison, and another Representative have introduced a Constitutional amendment.  Of course, it will go nowhere with the Republicans in charge of the House.

The third threat is the decline of education in the United States.  Thomas Jefferson was very clear that we needed an educated electorate for our democracy to thrive.  Here are just a couple of his quotations on the subject.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

If you do not believe that education is rapidly declining in the United States just Google "decline of education in the United States".  You will find no shortage of studies and articles documenting the decline.  Clearly, Jefferson was right that you need an educated populace.  If we are to provide anything that approaches equality of opportunity, we need to provide a great education to people.

The problem is that even if we can take back the power from the economic elite (or oligarchs if you want to be more direct) and even if we can assure the right to vote, without an involved and educated electorate our democracy will fail.  Just as we have overcome threats from the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few and voter suppression.  We can overcome the threat of the decline in education too.

We need to elect politicians that have the courage and the conviction to fight for all the people, and that will require getting people to vote.  So do whatever you can to get out the vote.  You will be helping to save our democracy.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal