Progressives (Liberals)

But you have to try harder than the previous leaders. As far as more people having insurance, Texas did not sign into Obama care. We are not much better off now than before it got instigated. My wife has had the same employer insurance for nearly 40 years, plus she is on Medicare, but we still can't afford medical care. Look how many die just from want of insulin. I am not in the slightest impressed with Obama care. I also don't like centrist (read Warren, Biden) on foreign policy. Anything the military wants they get.

You couch the announcing of detailed plans as part of a strategy, and I don’t doubt for a moment that it was and is indeed - for Liz Warren. Indeed, her “I’ve got a plan for that” meme is part and parcel of her candidacy. So in one way she invited increased scrutiny.

What Biden, Sanders and the rest of them are doing vis-a-vis explaining their plans (practically nothing) - I wouldn’t characterize that as part of any strategy. If no one’s freaking asking me to explain a complicated, detailed plan, I am surely not bringing it up. That’s all they’re doing.

Someone should be asking them harder questions.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-calls-to-break-up-ice/
Bernie Sanders Calls to Break Up ICESen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. (Shelly Prevost / Flickr)
With the goal of creating a “welcoming and safe nation for all,” Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday unveiled a sweeping plan to fundamentally overhaul America’s inhumane immigration system by reversing President Donald Trump’s xenophobic executive orders, placing a moratorium on deportations, ending ICE raids, and confronting root causes—including “decades of disastrous foreign policy decisions”—that have destabilized and impoverished Latin American nations.

If elected president in 2020, Sanders vowed to use his executive authority to “overturn all of President Trump’s actions to demonize and harm immigrants” on his first day in the White House.

But Sanders’ proposal, detailed on his website, makes clear that decades of U.S. foreign and trade policies that long predate Trump must be addressed in concert with Latin American nations in order to tackle “the root causes of migration.”

Sanders also pointed to the climate crisis as a key factor in driving migration and said the U.S. must do its part in combating the emergency and welcoming those displaced by it.


“No parent would take their child and travel thousands of miles on foot except under dire, dangerous circumstances,” Sanders’ plan states. “Decades of disastrous foreign policy decisions in Latin America and bad trade deals have caused destabilization and poverty in South and Central America. We must end global inequality and the international race to the bottom so that no human being needs to migrate for survival.”

Sanders said, if elected, he will “immediately call a summit of leaders from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and other countries.”

The proposal states that Sanders as president will also “acknowledge the history of U.S. intervention in the South and Central American region, as well as overseas, often in support of authoritarian regimes that brutally repressed their own people, and engage with human rights defenders throughout the hemisphere to promote freedom and dignity for all.”

The Vermont senator’s plan—which he described as “the most progressive immigration proposal put forth in presidential history”—also calls for:

Breaking up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP);
Decriminalizing immigration and demilitarizing the border;
Pushing Congress to establish a “swift, fair” pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people currently living in the U.S.;
Immidiately extending “legal status to the 1.8 million young people currently eligible for the DACA program”;
Closing for-profit detention centers;
Ending the separation of families; and
Bolstering immigrant worker protections by ending workplace raids and enacting a “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” that would include at least a $15 minimum wage and collective bargaining protections.
“My father came to America as a refugee without a nickel in his pocket, to escape widespread anti-Semitism and find a better life,” Sanders said in a statement. “As the proud son of an immigrant, I know that my father’s story is the story of so many Americans today.”

“We will end the ICE raids that are terrorizing our communities,” Sanders added, “and on my first day as president, I will use my executive power to protect our immigrant communities and reverse every single horrific action implemented by Trump.”

Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund, praised Sanders for articulating “a vision in which everyone, regardless of where they were born or how much they make, can pursue their full human potential.”

“Sanders’ plan would roll back some of the greatest threats coming from the Trump administration,” said Hincapié, “and it addresses laws predating Trump that have criminalized and locked up immigrants for decades, while also protecting the rights of immigrants in our schools, workplaces, and healthcare system, and in our communities.”

“These protections are long overdue,” Hincapié said, “and it’s encouraging to see a policy proposal that sends such a strong message that immigrants are central to the future of our country.”

I'm not sure that is so, at least in the present. Campaigns can and will get fractious and harsh things will be said. But up the road, either following a Sanders' loss in the nomination process or following his win and even following a presidential win, if this level of absolutism continues then that will be destructive as he's going to have to compromise in countless ways. What then?

11,000,000 to 1. You don't win on that, edgar.

Please prove your statistic.

Nobody believes this stuff falls like mana from heaven. But defeatism keeps the status quo rolling down the road. Why do so many centrists sound like they are saying, it can be instant, so get a centrist to go by increments? The same increments that have ceded the nation's governments to the far right.

Tell that to the dead and dying hundreds of thousands.

I think that is almost always true in reporter/politico interactions.

In this case, it is far easier for most news people to avoid such questions. First, to ask the right sorts of questions they are going to have to get some substantial familiarity with the subject in question. Second, policy is clearly deemed a big bore to audiences and splashy, dramatic conflicts a better means to get clicks.

In the debate over health care, politicians bankrolled by insurance companies like to vilify Bernie’s Medicare for All plan by claiming it would destroy an existing system that lets Americans keep their current private insurance. But polls continue to show Bernie is the most trusted candidate on the health care issue.

Perhaps that has something to do with a taboo truth that Medicare for All critics never acknowledge, but that was mentioned in an Axios report today:

Americans currently have no right to keep what they have — insurers and/or employers can and will abruptly throw workers off their coverage if corporate executives decide that workers’ health needs are cutting into profits.
If you think that sounds like an exaggeration, think again. Here’s Axios:

Anthem executives admitted on their earnings call that the company is dumping some employers with workers who had medical needs and costs that were too high.

CVS Health, which now owns Aetna, previously said some middle-market clients had employees that it thought were getting too many services and drugs…

The bottom line: Health insurance companies closely track their medical loss ratios and aim to hit those targets most often by charging higher premiums, denying care, forcing people to use lower-priced providers or declining to cover people they deem to be too expensive.

These companies are completely uncaring and unsentimental about throwing workers off their health coverage. On the recent Anthem earnings call, one executive just made casual reference to “large groups that we'll be terminating later this year.”

Insurance-bankrolled politicians don’t mention these facts — and they are rewarded for their silence by a corrupt campaign finance system. Indeed, Anthem, CVS and other health insurers funnel big money to politicians, and in exchange, those politicians vilify Medicare for All, tout private insurance corporations and never mention that millions of Americans lose their employer-linked private insurance every year.

They don’t mention such inconvenient facts because they know that Americans are rightly enraged by them: a recent Emerson poll found 70 percent of voters now oppose a health care system that continues to allow employers “to change or eliminate an employee’s health insurance against the employee’s wishes.”

You know what kind of health care coverage will never be taken away from you? Bernie’s Medicare for All plan.

Bern after reading,

Sirota

11 million now with med insurance has zero moral value because not everyone is covered. Come on edgar. That's just daft.

A program that successfully gets millions to quit smoking is worthless if there are people still smoking.

New research reveals a cancer cure that works for 40 percent of sufferers is worthless because it is only 40%.

Apparently this question and answer came up somewhere today

That's very sharp.

Sharp like a baseball bat.

When you can't go to the doctor and get needed medicine it may be no biggie to you, but it is to the ones suffering in no small numbers.

Only because the right often wins elections and when they don't they effectively play the obstructionist card. Driven by resentment, anger, and fear, they turn up at the polls — even in the midterms. If the hapless Democrats had bothered to vote their support for Obama and the ACA in 2010 we might actually have a functioning and fair health insurance system which we'd be in position to improve — incrementally. Either side can benefit from incremental change; the question is whether we engage in the destructive or the constructive kind.

Here's the thing. If you go in banging the drums of revolutionary change, depending on the voters to back you, and manage to get elected, the wholesale implementation of radical policies cuts both ways. It spurs reaction, and the greater the attempted change, the more intense the counter-revolution. If you promise implementation over a much longer time, you'll disappoint the people who voted you in and probably get thrown out in the next election cycle and the reactionaries will undo what little you've managed to accomplish.

Hard to see how we successfully mount and maintain a political revolution without a truly revolutionary party. All it takes is a few mistakes, some blips in the economy, a fickle electorate, and an off-year election and the old regime is restored. That ain't hardly what I'd call a "revolution".

Well, that's precisely my point. If Sanders wins the primaries, he will need allies to win the general. If he loses the primaries, he will support the winner. In both cases, the fake bernites will cry us a river...

A continuing curiosity to me is this faith in a broad and sustained political revolution in the US that is now underway and will 1) get Sanders into office and 2) continue and grow once he's there to the extent that all significant opposition will be overrun and disappear or become toothless.

It is delusional. Even if Sanders turned out to be Jesus, the evangelicals wouldn't be on his side.

Yes. If they do behave that way, you'll have had this right.

Okay, so let's give them a chance. But I still want to stress the difference between Bernie's stance and political strategy, which I see as logically coherent over the long term, and some of his on-and-off supporters here, who in my view prefer some aspects of his strategy to others. They like his disruptive side more than his constructive side for short.

But he only disrupts in order to construct something else.

And to develop and introduce new things, you need allies. So a successful change agent -- such as I think he wants to be -- should be forceful in his critique of the status quo but not to the point of destroying his relationship with key potential allies needed to change it.

Defeatism, laced with childlike faith that Warren can somehow do better what you say Sanders can't do. I have said repeatedly that if Sanders gets in it will mark the true beginning of the war, not the end. But centrists keep saying it can't happen at all or it can only be done by the same failed methods used by the Democratic party ever since Reagan pissed in their stew. In short, it's like they are slavering for an opportunity to crow that the nation can't be swayed to a return to a (modified) New Deal.