Tag Archives: bernie sanders

Sanders endorses Clinton to lead the fight against climate change

by LouisSizer1 Posted on July 12, 2016

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Sanders endorses Clinton to lead the fight against climate change

By on Jul 12, 2016Share

Bernie Sanders officially threw in the towel on Tuesday in New Hampshire by endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. Hitting on the themes his campaign has stressed throughout the primaries, Sanders laid out what this election is really about. One of his themes has been climate change, which featured heavily in his speech:

This election is about climate change, the greatest environmental crisis facing our planet, and the need to leave this world in a way that is healthy and habitable for our kids and future generations.

Hillary Clinton is listening to the scientists who tell us that if we do not act boldly in the very near future there will be more drought, more floods, more acidification of the oceans, more rising sea levels. She understands that we must work with countries around the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy — and that when we do that we can create a whole lot of good paying jobs.

Donald Trump: Well, like most Republicans, he chooses to reject science — something no presidential candidate should do. He believes that climate change is a hoax. In fact, he wants to expand the use of fossil fuel. That would be a disaster for our country and our planet.

The endorsement rally was kicked off by climate activist (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben. “Secretary Clinton, we wish you Godspeed in the fight that now looms,” McKibben said.

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Sanders endorses Clinton to lead the fight against climate change

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Senate passes GMO-labeling bill

by ZCFAlphons Posted on July 6, 2016

Senate passes GMO-labeling bill

By on Jul 6, 2016Share

The Senate just voted to usher in nationwide mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods.

The bill, passed Wednesday with strong Republican support, requires food companies to tell consumers if there are any genetically engineered ingredients in their products. Companies wouldn’t necessarily need to do that by writing “contains GMOs” on the package — they could provide that information with a scannable QR code and small businesses could comply by simply providing a phone number or website. More details here.

Republicans did most of the heavy lifting: 47 voted for the measure along with 18 Democrats, giving it enough votes to withstand a filibuster.

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who brokered the deal to get the bill passed, called it a victory for farmers and consumers. “I worked to ensure that any agreement would recognize the scientific consensus that biotechnology is safe, while also making sure consumers have the right to know what is in their food,” Stabenow said, in a statement. “I also wanted a bill that prevents a confusing patchwork of 50 different rules in each state.”

The bill is a compromise, so of course people from both sides of the debate have attacked it. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) voted against the measure because he believes mandatory labels should be reserved for products that have been shown to harm health. “I fear that this approach puts us on a path that will ultimately hurt Nebraskans by putting a liberal agenda ahead of sound science,” he told the Lincoln Journal Star.

On the other side, Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted that the bill was “confusing, misleading and unenforceable.”

Sanders opposes the bill in part because it would pre-empt a law passed in his home state of Vermont that requires a written label instead of a scannable code.

So, both pro and anti-GMO partisans oppose the bill, but there are a lot of folks in the middle that support it, including everyone from the Organic Trade Association to the generally conservative American Farm Bureau Federation.

The House has already passed a GMO-labeling bill, one that calls for voluntary, rather than mandatory, labeling. The two are different enough that they can’t be reconciled, so that means the House will have to pass yet another bill before this Senate bill could become law.

There’s a pretty good chance that the House will pass a carbon copy of the Senate bill soon. I expect the majority of representatives will eventually come around to the compromise, because the alternative — having labeling rules that vary from state to state — would cause trouble for companies selling food across state lines.

Some companies have already decided not to sell in Vermont, and others have slapped GMO-labels on their products no matter where they are sold. The Vermont law went into effect July 1, but the state won’t begin enforcing it until the end of the year.

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Senate passes GMO-labeling bill

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Here’s the Best News We’ve Gotten All Year

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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No joke. This may be boring as hell, but it really and truly is great news:

Federal Reserve officials strongly signaled they will toughen big-bank capital requirements even more than they have since the 2008 crisis, a move that will add to the pressure on the largest U.S. banks to consider shrinking. Fed governors Daniel Tarullo and Jerome Powell, in separate public comments on Thursday, said the Fed would require eight of the largest U.S. banks to maintain more equity to pass the central bank’s annual “stress tests.”

“Effectively, this will be a significant increase in capital,” Mr. Tarullo said on Bloomberg television….Mr. Powell said at a banking conference that the Fed’s move would make big banks “fully internalize the risk” they pose to the economy.

“I have not reached any conclusion that a particular bank needs to be broken up or anything like that,” he said. The point is to “raise capital requirements to the point at which it becomes a question that banks have to ask themselves.”

Bernie Sanders has campaigned heavily on the idea of breaking up big banks. But that shouldn’t be our goal. Our goal should be to make banks safer and to reduce the likelihood that they need to be bailed out in the future. That’s what higher capital requirements do: they force banks to carry a bigger buffer against losses, which makes them less likely to fail in any future downturn.

As it happens, new regulations put in place since the financial meltdown of 2008 have already increased capital requirements, but big banks still have an unfair advantage in the market: their funding costs are lower because investors figure they’ll be bailed out if they ever implode in the future. To make up for this, big banks should, as Tarullo said, “fully internalize the risk” they pose to the economy. In other words, if big banks have an automatic advantage simply because taxpayers have little choice but to rescue them in case they fail, they should be required to pay higher insurance premiums against failure. That’s essentially what higher capital requirements do.

This is fair. However, higher capital requirements also make big banks less profitable, which in turn gives them a strong incentive to downsize all on their own. And that’s how it should be. There’s no reason for the Fed or anyone else to pick and choose banks to break up. We just need to make sure they’re reasonably safe and are operating on a level playing field. If we do this, we’re providing an organic incentive to downsize. The banks themselves get to decide whether and how to do it.

The only bad news here is that the Fed is unlikely to raise capital requirements enough to suit me. Nonetheless, this is very much another step in the right direction.

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Here’s the Best News We’ve Gotten All Year

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No, Hillary Clinton Isn’t Being Attacked for Being "Not Qualified"

by AidenBenes01 Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, Janell Ross interviewed a couple of experts in gender and politics to get their take on whether Hillary Clinton is held to a different standard than male candidates. Julie Dolan, a professor of political science at Macalester College in Minnesota, had this to say:

Clinton is the most experienced candidate in the field, but campaign rivals Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are leveling attacks against her that she’s not qualified for the job. In doing so, they’re playing into a long-standing narrative that women lack what it takes to succeed in the male-dominated world of politics. The fact that two less-experienced male candidates are leveling this attack against her is telling. Neither Trump nor Sanders feels compelled to shore up their own credentials or justify their own relative lack of experience because they don’t need to; they benefit from a gendered double standard where men are automatically presumed qualified for public office and women are not.

This illustrates the problem of viewing politics through too narrow a lens. For starters, Hillary Clinton isn’t the most experienced candidate in the field. Bernie Sanders has served in Congress since 1991. That’s more experience than Hillary even if you count her years as First Lady. And while Trump has no political experience, he’s running on his business background—just as lots of other candidates have. This year alone Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson joined Trump in the Republican primary as candidates with no political experience at all.

Nor is it true that Hillary’s opponents have been slamming her for being unqualified—aside from the usual sense in which political candidates always claim to be better qualified than their opponents. There was a single incident in April where Hillary tiptoed a bit around the question of whether Bernie was qualified, which led to a misleading Washington Post headline (“Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president”), which in turn led to Bernie losing his temper and kinda sorta saying she’s not qualified if she’s taking lots of money from Wall Street. But even there, Bernie was pretty obviously using “unqualified” in the sense of “bad policies,” not in the sense of having too little experience.

As for Trump, again, there was a single incident a couple of weeks ago in which Hillary called him unqualified, and he naturally hit back in his usual nanner-nanner way: calling her judgment bad and saying she’s the one not qualified to be president. Just the usual Trump bluster.

Hillary Clinton simply isn’t the target of an unusual number of attacks on her experience and qualification. She’s rather famously running on the fact that she has more of those qualities than anyone else in the race, and no one has really disputed that. Quite the contrary: this year, having a lot of experience is something of a problem, one that both Sanders and Trump have capitalized on. If Hillary Clinton is being slammed for anything, it’s for being too qualified, not the opposite.

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No, Hillary Clinton Isn’t Being Attacked for Being "Not Qualified"

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Bernie Sanders Officially Admits He Lost

by AmparoTrn382087 Posted on May 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders gets tossed a bone today:

Top Bernie Sanders supporters Dr. Cornel West and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) will be among those on the Democratic Party’s important Platform Drafting Committee after the Vermont senator won a key concession as he looks to leave his mark on the party’s platform. The roster of the drafting committee, released by the Democratic National Committee on Monday, reflects the party’s agreement that Sanders would have five supporters on the committee, compared to six for Hillary Clinton.

First off: If Bernie has officially agreed to accept five out of 11 members on the Platform Committee, isn’t that a tacit admission that he’s already lost the nomination?

But also: Does anyone care about the platform? Seriously. I know it’s a big fight every four years, but does either party platform ever have any effect at all on the election?

And as long as we’re talking about Bernie, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels write today that his supporters don’t actually support his lefty politics:

In a survey conducted for the American National Election Studies in late January, supporters of Mr. Sanders…were less likely than Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to favor concrete policies that Mr. Sanders has offered…including a higher minimum wage, increasing government spending on health care and an expansion of government services financed by higher taxes.

….Mr. Sanders has drawn enthusiastic support from young people, a common pattern for outsider candidates. But here, too…the generational difference in ideology seems not to have translated into more liberal positions on concrete policy issues — even on the specific issues championed by Mr. Sanders. For example, young Democrats were less likely than older Democrats to support increased government funding of health care, substantially less likely to favor a higher minimum wage and less likely to support expanding government services. Their distinctive liberalism is mostly a matter of adopting campaign labels, not policy preferences.

That’s interesting, if not especially surprising. We’re all basically tribalists at our cores. Except for you and me, of course.

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Bernie Sanders Officially Admits He Lost

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Sanders Wins West Virginia, Keeping the Pressure on Clinton

by UNNKent506 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders won the West Virginia Democratic primary on Tuesday, once again demonstrating that his campaign retains ardent support despite Hillary Clinton’s significant lead in the delegate count.

West Virginia fits the profile of a Sanders-friendly state. It’s a small and overwhelmingly white—in fact, at 93 percent white, it’s the third-whitest state in the country, according to FiveThirtyEight. Independents were permitted to vote in the Democratic primary, and Sanders has done well in contests open to independents, whereas Clinton has won most primaries restricted to Democrats.

Recent polls showed Sanders leading by an average of six points in the state. The major networks called the race with a quarter of the votes counted.

But Sanders’ win is not enough to make up ground in the delegate count. West Virginia has only 29 delegates, which will be allocated proportionally. Before Tuesday night, Clinton led Sanders by 290 in the pledged delegate count. When super-delegates are included, that lead grows by another 484 delegates. In order for Sanders to overtake Clinton, he will need many of those super-delegates to abandon Clinton and support him instead. And he’ll need to win bigger states than West Virginia, and by bigger margins.

On the Republican side, presumptive nominee Donald Trump won handily in West Virginia. Even before his last two rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, left the race last week, polls in West Virginia showed the real estate mogul with a lead of more than 30 points.

Trump also easily won the Republican primary in Nebraska on Tuesday. Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, recently endorsed Trump, while the state’s junior senator, Republican Ben Sasse, is among the most vocal anti-Trump members of Congress.

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Sanders Wins West Virginia, Keeping the Pressure on Clinton

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Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

by DeenaBumg Posted on May 4, 2016

Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

By on May 4, 2016Share

About 25 percent of all fossil fuels extracted in the United States come from federal lands. That’s a whole lot of coal, oil, and gas that presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are talking about when they debate ending fossil fuel production on public lands.

In a new report, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) forecasts the kinds of cuts in fossil fuel production the country would need to make to be consistent with a 2 degrees Celsius warming scenario:

Stockholm Environment Institute

The first thing that’s clear from this chart is ending fossil fuel development on federal lands still isn’t enough to stop climate change at 2 degrees. Even the dream scenario, in which we stop drilling and mining on all public lands tomorrow, doesn’t cut it.

And nobody’s even really proposing the dream scenario. Sanders’ proposed Keep It in the Ground Act to ban fossil fuel development on public lands only ends new federal leases — the blue chunk in the chart above. It says nothing about the land already leased and under production.

Even with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan in place, SEI expects fossil fuel production to rise by 11 percent by 2040 — unless we get serious about passing new climate legislation. To line up with a 2-degree goal, the country would need to slice its production by 40–60 percent.

Getting to 2 degrees doesn’t just depend on what the president can do; it requires the entire U.S. economy to shift toward clean energy — along with the rest of the world.

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Even Sanders’ plan to curb fossil fuel production isn’t ambitious enough

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This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

by LinEagarwvz Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton’s lead in delegates over rival Bernie Sanders is now almost insurmountable as they move toward the conclusion of the Democratic presidential primary contest. But Clinton has not called on him to drop out of the race, for one simple reason: the example her own campaign set in 2008.

Eight years ago this month, Clinton was trailing hopelessly behind then-Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. On May 1, 2008, Clinton loaned her bankrupt campaign $1 million (following at least $10 million in earlier loans). Before the end of that week, pundits were calling the contest for Obama, whose May 6 win in the North Carolina primary, by 14 points, had made his delegate lead essentially insurmountable. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” Tim Russert said on MSNBC after the results came in. Less than a week later, Obama surpassed Clinton in the super-delegate count, signaling that the party establishment was shifting behind the presumptive nominee.

But Clinton was determined to fight until the last votes had been cast. She would go on to win contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, and South Dakota before the primary ended on June 3, even though there was no way for her to make up her deficit in the delegate count.

Along the way, the Clinton campaign put forward every conceivable argument to justify staying in the race. It used wins in states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky to claim that Obama was losing support among white working-class voters and that she would be the stronger general election candidate. On May 5, it began to argue about the delegate math, making the case that the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination was actually 2,209, not 2,025, the figure that had been cited up until then—and that if neither campaign reached that new number, Clinton was prepared for a floor fight at the party’s convention. On May 23, Clinton justified her continued White House bid by noting that in 1968, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June, after winning the California primary. And lurking in the background in these final weeks was the rumor that Republican operatives had gotten hold of a tape of Michelle Obama disparaging “whitey.”

Eight years later, Clinton knows she cannot turn around and tell Sanders it’s time to leave the race, even though her current lead over Sanders, at about 300 delegates, is larger than the nearly 160-delegate lead Obama had over her after the North Carolina primary in 2008. The Sanders campaign had $17 million on hand as of the latest public filings at the end of March, giving it far more fighting power than the broke Clinton effort had at the same point in 2008.

So the Clinton team has been careful not to say Sanders should drop out. After her victory in New York, Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, told reporters that the campaign expected Clinton to be the nominee but that Sanders had a right to continue to fight. Instead of focusing on Clinton’s refusal to bow out in 2008, her campaign is talking up her unequivocal support of Obama after the primary was over—suggesting that that is the example Sanders should follow. In late May 2008, she said she and Obama “do see eye-to-eye when it comes to uniting our party to elect a Democratic president in the fall.” And when she announced her withdrawal from the race on June 7, she forcefully threw her support behind Obama and urged her fans to do the same.

“I think she set a gold standard for how people who don’t end up with the nomination, who lose in that effort, should come together and help the party,” Palmieri said on the night of the New York primary last month.

What Clinton isn’t mentioning is that before she tried to unify the party, she was questioning Obama’s appeal to white voters, hoping that a bombshell video would surface and help take down her rival, and entertaining a convention floor fight. Despite her team’s claims of magnanimity, at this point eight years ago, Clinton was five weeks and a few attacks shy of giving into the inevitable and uniting the party.

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This Is Why Hillary Clinton Can’t Tell Bernie Sanders to Drop Out

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Here Are Obama’s Best Jokes From the Sizzling White House Correspondents’ Dinner

by FranWinton46664 Posted on May 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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At his final White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night, President Barack Obama walked onstage to Anna Kendrick’s song “You’re Going to Miss Me When I’m Gone,” and smirked as he told the audience, “You know it’s true.”

He mused about what he’ll do once he becomes “couch commander” after his presidency and received both boos and applause when he hinted at who may take the stage as president at next year’s Correspondents’ Dinner. “It’s anyone’s guess who she will be,” he said.

See the video below. Obama’s remarks start at 2:35:00.

The president complimented Bernie Sanders’ “Feel the Bern” movement, and he teased Hillary Clinton’s struggle to attract young voters. He compared her tactics to a “relative who just signed up for Facebook.”

Republicans got the worst of the roast, of course. Obama couldn’t resist poking fun at Ted Cruz’s “basketball ring” mishap in Indiana, and he dismissed candidates who “didn’t poll high enough to earn a joke.”

Toward the end of the speech, Obama faked out the audience by wrapping things up without talking about Donald Trump. But later he took swings at the GOP front-runner’s previous ties with Miss Universe, and he said Trump may have an advantage in closing Guantanamo Bay because of Trump’s experience “running waterfront properties into the ground.”

Obama left the stage with two words: “Obama out.” Then he appropriately dropped the mic.

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Here Are Obama’s Best Jokes From the Sizzling White House Correspondents’ Dinner

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Bernie Sanders earned $205,000 in 2014

by DomingoTorreggi Posted on April 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I noted that someone who earns $200,000 pays an average federal income tax rate of 15 percent. Well, it turns out that Bernie Sanders is really, really average. He released his 2014 tax return tonight, and it reports that he had an adjusted gross income of $205,617 and total taxes due of $27,653. That’s 13 percent of his income.

Oddly, his return shows total wages of $156,441, even though US senators earn a minimum of $174,000. I’m not sure what the explanation for this is. He also shows charitable contributions of $8,350, which is 4 percent of his income. He’ll get some flak for that, I suppose, but I find all the showiness of politicians about their charitable donations to be tiresome. Whatever it is, it’s fine.

I just want to know why his reported wages were less than his official salary. Does the Senate pay less if you collect Social Security benefits?

UPDATE: In comments, machev suggests that Bernie contributes $17,500 to the federal equivalent of a 401(k). So his reportable income is $174K – $17.5K = $156.5K

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Bernie Sanders earned $205,000 in 2014

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