Medicare For All takes shape

The idea of Medicare For All as a way of creating a pathway to a single-payer universal health care system, that was deemed to be wildly socialistic and unrealistic when first proposed by Bernie Sanders, has now become a platform that any Democratic candidate for president has to pay at least lip service to, because the idea has been embraced by majorities of people.

Now the next step has been reached because actual legislation has been proposed to implement it and this will force people to take an actual stand on it. The crafting of the legislation is led by new congresswoman Premila Jayapal, part of the new breed of progressives who was elected to congress in the 2016 elections. She is a Seattle-based activist no stranger to advancing progressive causes, having served on the Mayoral Advisory Committee that negotiated Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. That measure was harshly attacked by conservatives and the business industry as the death of business in the city, as they would pack up and leave and would thus increase unemployment. That did not happen, even though conservatives seized upon a single flawed study that seemed to support their case before it was repudiated.
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The Michael Cohen hearings

I do not follow carefully all the stories about Donald Trump and the Mueller investigation and its many ramifications because the ratio of mindless speculation to facts is way too high. I tend to wait for the comedy shows to give me some idea of what transpired during those events. Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah oblige with these synopses of the nine hours of the Michael Cohen testimony before Congress.

Mass mobilization of the previously ignored is the way forward

The Bernie Sanders campaign has reached an important goal. When he announced his candidacy for the presidency last week, Sanders set as an ambitious goal to recruit one million volunteers. He has now reached that mark. This is important because we need grassroots efforts to really change people’s minds. Top-down campaigns based on TV, newspapers, and the internet are fine but they tend to only target the existing voter pool and ignore all those who have become disenchanted because they think the system does not work for them. Progressives need to go into every nook and corner of the country to get the message out. He has also received $10 million in donations.
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Behold, how the government works!

Nikki Haley has managed to parlay her two-year stint as the ambassador to the United Nations into a lucrative career. She has been invited to join the board of directors of Boeing. Most of us may think of Boeing as your friendly aircraft manufacturer but it is a huge defense contractor and Haley’s relentless warmongering while at the UN must have endeared her to the hearts of the company and they are repaying the favor. Critics have noted the shamelessness of her move and Glenn Greenwald tweeted out that this is a reminder of the mutually beneficial cronyism between government officials and the private sector, where government officials while in office grease the skids to jobs after they leave.
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Reclaiming the word ‘centrist’ from the extremists

One of the most laughable claims made recently is that made by billionaire vanity presidential candidate Howard Schultz that he occupies the center of American politics. Mehdi Hasan writes that it is time to reclaim the label ‘centrist’ and assign it to the people to whom it rightly belongs, those who represent the views of the broad swathe of ordinary people. That means people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and decidedly not to the people that the media describes as such: Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and Howard Schultz.
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Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act on student loan debt

In his latest show last night, he looked at the massive amounts of debt students accrue in the US when they go to college. He says that the government has given the task of recovering the loans to private agencies that do a terrible job by not providing students with advice that would help them and that the Trump administration and the education secretary Betsy De Vos have undermined efforts by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police their activities.

“Oh, isn’t that nice!”

Ivanka Trump was asked for her response to the Green New Deal. The poster child for being born with a silver spoon in her mouth and not having to work for anything because her rich daddy gave her everything, who himself was given everything by his own rich daddy, and whose husband was given everything by his own rich daddy, thinks that most Americans don’t want to have a guaranteed minimum wage or a guarantee of a job.

Bernie Sanders’s response to billionaire Howard Schultz’s comments is perfectly appropriate here too.

Warning: I am going to be using “Oh, isn’t that nice!” quite a lot.

Growing pressure in support of the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal is drawing more support as it becomes better known and is generating activism. Eoin Higgins writes that senator Diane Feinstein is not the only politician feeling the heat from young people who are taking up the cause because they feel that it is their lives that are being sacrificed by politicians who grovel before the fossil fuel industry. They are taking aim at the rationale being offered by timid Democratic politicians like Feinstein for not signing on.

The main rhetorical device that Democratic skeptics of the Green New Deal have been employing begins with a confident assertion that they believe in climate science and that the crisis must be taken seriously, and they admire the ambition of the Green New Deal. But, they add, the resolution just can’t pass a Republican Senate or be signed by President Donald Trump.
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By asserting their support of the broad principles undergirding the policies while rejecting the actual nuts and bolts of the legislation, Democrats are trying to have it both ways: keeping rhetorically in tune with the desires of the base but protecting the interests of the party’s powerful establishment donor class in their actions.

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