bluewater
bluewater's Journal'One Woman, and Millions of People to Back Her Up.'
How Elizabeth Warren Made Fighting Corruption A Feminist Rallying Cry
By Charlotte Alter
If winning the Democratic nomination requires wooing the party’s progressive wing and harnessing the power of activist women, then Senator Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that.
At a rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park on Monday evening, just hours after she beat Senator Bernie Sanders for the coveted endorsement of the Working Families Party, Warren laid out a far-reaching anti-corruption plan that rooted her campaign in a long history of women reformers.
But the speech also served as a road map for her path to the nomination, positioning Warren as the only candidate in the race who can knit together the women voters and progressive activists who propelled the Democrats to midterm victories in 2018.
Standing before a huge crowd just steps from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building, Warren outlined a plan to curb the influence of corporate money in Washington. She proposed a lifetime ban on lobbying for ex-Presidents, Senators and Members of Congress; a ban on hiring corporate lobbyists on federal government staff; a ban on lobbying on behalf of foreign governments; a ban on corporate lobbyists “bundling” campaign donations; a ban on secret meetings between public officials and lobbyists; a ban on elected officials owning businesses or trading individual stocks.
“Enough is enough,” Warren said. “We will take down the ‘for sale’ signs hanging outside of every federal building in Washington.”
It came as no surprise that Warren, who has been railing against corruption since her time as a Harvard Law School professor, seized on the theme. But if the policy was familiar, the narrative was new. Warren used the speech to situate her campaign in a long history of women reformers and labor organizers who have taken on big corporate interests and won.
https://time.com/5678605/one-woman-and-millions-of-people-to-back-her-up-how-elizabeth-warren-made-fighting-corruption-a-feminist-rallying-cry/
Joe Biden's sister dismisses calls for Justice Kavanaugh's impeachment
In an interview with CBS News, Valerie Biden Owens — former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign co-chair and younger sister — dismissed calls to impeach Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"I don't think you'd call for impeachment proceedings because of a story in The New York Times," Biden Owens said.
After The New York Times' report of Kavanaugh was published, Biden released a statement saying "we need to get to the bottom" of Kavanaugh's confirmation process.
"This weekend's report in the New York Times raises again profoundly troubling questions about the integrity of the confirmation process that put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in the first place," the statement said.
"We need to get to the bottom of whether the Trump Administration and Senate Republicans pressured the FBI to ignore evidence or prevented them from following up on leads relating to Justice Kavanaugh's background investigation, subsequent allegations that arose, and the truthfulness of his testimony to the Senate."
At least five other candidates — including Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren — have called for Congress to move to impeach Kavanaugh, following a new report detailing allegations of sexual misconduct from his time in college.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-bidens-sister-dismisses-calls-for-justice-kavanaughs-impeachment/
Why doesn't the USA have universal health care? one word: Race
https://twitter.com/jcgreenfield/status/1173622724108808192In 1945, when President Truman called on Congress to expand the nation’s hospital system as part of a larger health care plan, Southern Democrats obtained key concessions that shaped the American medical landscape for decades to come. The Hill-Burton Act provided federal grants for hospital construction to communities in need, giving funding priority to rural areas (many of them in the South). But it also ensured that states controlled the disbursement of funds and could segregate resulting facilities.
Professional societies like the American Medical Association barred black doctors; medical schools excluded black students, and most hospitals and health clinics segregated black patients. Federal health care policy was designed, both implicitly and explicitly, to exclude black Americans. As a result, they faced an array of inequities — including statistically shorter, sicker lives than their white counterparts. What’s more, access to good medical care was predicated on a system of employer-based insurance that was inherently difficult for black Americans to get. “They were denied most of the jobs that offered coverage,” says David Barton Smith, an emeritus historian of health care policy at Temple University. “And even when some of them got health insurance, as the Pullman porters did, they couldn’t make use of white facilities.”
In the shadows of this exclusion, black communities created their own health systems. Lay black women began a national community health care movement that included fund-raising for black health facilities; campaigns to educate black communities about nutrition, sanitation and disease prevention; and programs like National Negro Health Week that drew national attention to racial health disparities. Black doctors and nurses — most of them trained at one of two black medical colleges, Meharry and Howard — established their own professional organizations and began a concerted war against medical apartheid. By the 1950s, they were pushing for a federal health care system for all citizens.
That fight put the National Medical Association (the leading black medical society) into direct conflict with the A.M.A., which was opposed to any nationalized health plan. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, the group helped defeat two such proposals with a vitriolic campaign that informs present-day debates: They called the idea socialist and un-American and warned of government intervention in the doctor-patient relationship. The group used the same arguments in the mid-’60s, when proponents of national health insurance introduced Medicare. This time, the N.M.A. developed a countermessage: Health care was a basic human right.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/universal-health-care-racism.html
As our candidates discuss Medicare for All in the primary debates, this article seemed especially pertinent. I wish Warren or Sanders, as supporters of Medicare for All, would raise this point explicitly in the next debate -- systemic racism has greatly affected the healthcare system in America. Heck, I wish all the candidates would raise this point.
Bidencare... honoring or usurping Obama's healthcare legacy?
https://twitter.com/jeneps/status/1173376222455373826Hmmm.
One person responded:
https://twitter.com/aury91/status/1173381578090790914
I dunno… to be honest I don't think it will go over well.
There is something just a little bit self aggrandizing for Biden himself to try and start labeling it "Bidencare".
Obamacare got it's name when the rThugs branded the ACA that in an attempt to slur President Obama. President Obama turned the tables by embracing the term and it remains popular today.
If I were Biden, I'd drop the "Bidencare" self promotion. He sorta has ruined that as a brand name by self promoting it.
David Axelrod: Hilarious cartoon!
https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod/status/1173231783162331141ABC's debate moderators don't understand what universal healthcare is
Corporate news media has turned universal health care into a wedge issue to protect their Big Pharma paymasters
Omitted entirely from Thursday's Democratic Presidential debate segment on the American healthcare system was any real discussion of how sick and inhumane of a system it really is, and what a high price we pay for it — not merely in terms of exorbitant costs, but in the preventable pain and suffering of millions.
For a while now, the corporate news media, whose profits are increasingly reliant on ad revenue from the predatory pharmaceutical industry, have done their best as debate moderators to frighten Americans into believing that the universal health care model proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is a threat to them and all they hold dear.
In the last debate, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulus set up former Vice President Joe Biden nicely to slam this “menace” from the left by framing the health care question on what Americans stood to lose with the boogie monster of radical reform.
“Both Senators Warren and Sanders want to replace Obamacare with Medicare for All,” he said. “You want to build on Obamacare, not scrap it. They propose spending far more than you to combat climate change and tackle student loan debt. And they would raise more in taxes than you to pay for their programs.”
He continued the softball windup: “Are Senators Warren and Sanders pushing too far beyond where Democrats want to go and where the country needs to go?”
Stephanopoulos played Biden’s wing man, by reducing the terms of the health care debate to money, raising the specter of tax hikes — playing into a strategy the right often uses to ward off social welfare programs.
[snip]
There was absolutely no reference to what Americans are actually getting, or not getting, for the $3.5 trillion we spend annually (which comes out to $10,739 per capita).
What a different course the debate might have wound had Stephanopoulus opened by asking the candidates to comment on how American life expectancy has declined over the last three years — something that has not happened since World War I.
What does that say about the American health care system?
https://www.salon.com/2019/09/14/abcs-debate-moderators-dont-understand-what-universal-healthcare-is/
538: Who Won The Third Democratic Debate?
To better understand which candidates did well or poorly Thursday night, we plotted how favorably respondents rated the candidates before the debate vs. how debate-watchers rated their performance. Warren was one of the better-liked candidates going into the debate, but her performance was still rated higher than we’d expect based on her favorability alone. The same was true of Booker, Buttigieg and (especially) O’Rourke. Interestingly, Klobuchar didn’t get a great debate rating, but it’s not bad considering her pre-debate favorability, which was pretty neutral. Biden (who’s very popular among Democrats) and Castro stand out for performing worse than expected given their pre-debate favorability.
[snip]
In terms of raw debate grades — respondents graded on a four-point scale (higher scores are better — Warren, Buttigieg and O’Rourke did best. Booker, Sanders, Biden and Harris did fine. Again, the person who stands out most is Castro, who got the worst marks (perhaps for his memorable attacks on Biden).
[snip]
There wasn’t much movement in respondents’ average estimates of how likely each candidate would be to defeat Trump in the general election. Most candidates saw their average likelihood increase, but only marginally. Klobuchar saw the largest bump, 2.6 percentage points, followed by Warren and Yang.
[snip]
We asked likely Democratic primary voters how favorably they felt about each candidate both before and after the debate. As you can see, among the polling front-runners, Biden and Sanders’s favorability ratings remained relatively unchanged, while Warren’s net favorability jumped 7 points. In fact, only O’Rourke faired better than Warren; his net favorability rating jumped nearly 9 points. But not all candidates made a positive impression. Castro’s net favorability, for instance, dropped by nearly 7 points this time, after getting a big boost in the first debate.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/democratic-debate-september-poll/
So, according to the reults in this 538 article, Warren was the clear winner overall.
Today's Social Security benefits are too small to give retirees financial stability
https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1172220154547265541
Elizabeth Warren, once again, gets right to the heart of the matter.
Elizabeth Warren's Plan for Social Security Looks Smart
The elderly have also suffered from extreme inequality.
By David Leonhardt
When I was a teenager, my mom showed me a statement that she had received in the mail from the Social Security Administration. It included an annual history of her earnings, which showed a big string of zero’s covering the years when she was in her late 20s and early 30s. “That’s you and your sister,” she explained, laughing.
My mom is doing just fine these days, but anyone who spends years as a stay-at-home parent — or an unpaid caregiver of any kind — faces a financial penalty when it comes time to retire. Our Social Security system doesn’t recognize parenting as the socially and economically valuable job that it is.
That’s not the system’s only inequity, either. It also punishes teachers, police officers, firefighters and other government employees. Their Social Security benefits are cut if their pension is large enough, unlike private-sector workers, who can keep their full Social Security benefit regardless of the size of their private pension.
True, the economy has been kinder to older Americans than younger Americans in recent years (as Warren is well aware). Over all, I’d like to see federal spending become more focused on children and younger workers. But it’s also true that our high-inequality economy hasn’t been easy on most people over the age of 65. Many deserve help.
And as I’m sure you are aware, people over 65 tend to vote at very high rates.
Related: “Americans are pessimistic about the financial health of older Americans,” Kim Parker, Rich Morin and Juliana Menasce Horowitz of the Pew Research Center recently wrote. “Most say that, 30 years from now, those ages 65 and older will be less prepared for retirement than their counterparts today.”
My colleague Paul Krugman has written over the years about both the long-term finances and the politics of Social Security. “America’s overall retirement system is in big trouble,” Paul wrote in 2013. “There’s just one part of that system that’s working well: Social Security. And this suggests that we should make that program stronger, not weaker.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/elizabeth-warren-social-security.html
Buttigieg SURGES in new Iowa Corn Poll
https://twitter.com/DemsGuthrie/status/1167967386865025024In all seriousness, Pete Buttigieg is poised to do very well in the Iowa caucus thanks to his personal appeal, policies and strong ground game.
I would not be surprised to see Pete in the top three finishers.
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