Donkees
Donkees's JournalSanders Calls for a National Right to Housing
Excerpts:
Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced his plan to eradicate homelessness, reel in the housing market, and provide a homes guarantee that lives up to Roosevelt's dream, and the dream put forth by grassroots groups like People’s Action (we both worked on the policy team that helped develop their homes guarantee plan).
The plan calls for the National Housing Trust Fund - a small program which Sanders himself introduced during the last recession - to be massively scaled up to deal with the nation’s sizable shortage of affordable housing. 7.4 million units of permanently affordable housing would be built, acquired or preserved through the expansion of this program; as would 2 million additional new units of mixed-income social housing. These units would be permanently off the speculative private market, guaranteeing stable housing to millions of households. Further, new housing will improve economic security for the communities more broadly by securing local prevailing wages under the Davis-Bacon Act.
Adding to this, the Sanders plan would invest in other transformative interventions in the housing market, including a $50 billion fund to support the expansion of community land trusts - a model for democratic control of land ownership that can create affordable limited-equity homeownership opportunities. Permanent supportive housing would be provided to help end homelessness in America - not by locking them up, as Trump has recently proposed, but by providing homes as well as voluntary support and treatment for those that seek it.
...to date there is only one plan which places a floor in the housing market, and under people’s feet, through creating a massive publicly-funded housing production and preservation program while also creating a universal right to rent stabilization; and which invests a large sum of money in protecting over a million households who are already being failed by disinvestment in public housing. The housing market is failing tenants, and like Sen. Sanders says, we need a homes guarantee to ensure that nobody is made homeless or forced to spend over half their income on rent.
In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we should be fighting to guarantee homes to everyone.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/washingtonbytes/2019/09/18/sanders-calls-for-a-national-right-to-housing/#4217fd494e76
Housing for All - Read the Plan
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1174338147909558272
Bernie Sanders speaks to the @PhillyAFLCIO
https://twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/1174072942851837952Bernie Sanders Wants to Alleviate Senior Loneliness
BY
MEAGAN DAY
Here’s another crazy socialist idea: seniors deserve to feel cared for and socially connected. Bernie Sanders has a plan for that.
Excerpt:
Senior loneliness is a public health issue, which means it’s a political problem. Bernie Sanders is treating it like one, and proposing a political solution: create a new office within the Administration for Community Living to address social isolation among seniors.
One thing the proposed office would be tasked with, according to the Sanders campaign’s website, is studying the extent of social isolation among American seniors and its impact on their health and wellbeing. But while studies are needed in the United States to match those that have been conducted in the UK, research alone won’t cut it. Sanders also proposes to address the problem by providing tax-funded grants to municipalities and organizations that want to experiment with new ways of addressing the issue.
Most promisingly, Sanders wants to “expand and modernize senior centers around the country to provide older adults with places to not only enjoy healthy meals together, but also provide space for exercise classes, book clubs, health screenings, routine health care services, and more.” Here, Sanders is likely looking to successful models such as Japan’s.
It appears from Sanders’s proposal that he has the creation of a network like Japan’s in mind. Putting public money toward a robust network of senior centers is a good way to connect seniors to each other, to activities that can improve their physical health and stimulate their curiosity and creativity, and to vital services that might otherwise be hard to come by.
Addressing social isolation directly is only one part of Sanders’s plan for seniors. In the United States, 6.9 million seniors live in poverty and nine million experience food insecurity. “Since 2001,” Sanders’s campaign says, “senior hunger has increased by 45 percent.” Therefore Sanders proposes to expand Social Security, protect pensions, and quadruple the funding for the Older Americans Act, which provides home meals and other critical services.
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/senior-loneliness-sanders-healthcare
Only a Global Green New Deal Can Save the Planet And Bernie Sanders has a plan for that.
By Tom AthanasiouTODAY 7:30 AM
Excerpts:
What makes the Sanders plan special is that he accepts the hard scientific truth that steep emissions cuts are essential but he makes such cuts feasible by refusing to limit his vision on how to achieve them. Rather, he adds another hard truth: If humanity is to stabilize the global climate system, rich nations must do their fair share by going beyond domestic action and providing support for emissions reductions in poorer countries. Sanders is the first major American political figure to face the reality and scale of this necessity. His Green New Deal would be a defining act of international solidarity. It would reanimate the Paris Agreement, which is struggling, and cue up a second breakthrough, the flow of financial aid to poor countries that is necessary to ward off climate catastrophe.
Defining a given nation’s fair share of emissions reductions is not a trivial enterprise, and while Sanders’s 161 percent number is not definitive, political and ethical judgments inform it. I know this because the figure is based on an analysis by the Civil Society Equity Coalition, which is supported by the modeling of the Climate Equity Reference Project, which I help to coordinate (though I played no role in designing Sanders’s plan). His 2030 domestic reduction target of 71 percent is based on the work of many experts in many fields, including engineering, economics, and policy. Neither number is beyond criticism, but both are in the right ballpark. And when it’s time to review the details, the climate nerds from the Sanders team will, I’m sure, be happy to show their work.
Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal is a potential breakthrough in climate politics. It would reinvigorate the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius, a goal that the agreement’s signatories (195 nations have signed on) will revisit at a UN climate summit on September 23. Indeed, the Sanders plan and the Paris Agreement go together very well, for they meld the twin imperatives of domestic and international climate justice. Combine the two and you get a Global Green New Deal, an idea that The Nation advanced 20 years ago and that today is needed more urgently than ever.
https://www.thenation.com/article/green-new-deal-sanders/
New digital ad today from @berniesanders, the first in West Virginia from a 2020 candidate
https://twitter.com/BNeidhardt/status/1173948670179459072https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1173947423221329920
''I believe every American has a fundamental right to safe, decent and affordable housing.''
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1173741604659769344Bernie Sanders Gets Stuff Done - 5 Amazing Victories
Published on Sep 14, 2019
Bernie Sanders has an incredible record of accomplishing the impossible. Here are 5 of Bernie Sanders amazing victories for everyday Americans.
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